After AMD and IBM announced they had produced the 50 millionth GPU and CPU for the Wii, it was only a matter of time before Nintendo would announce it had produced the 50 millionth Wii unit. I wonder if they will still claim there is a shortage? Either way, Nintendo has done a great job with their console to prove that they still have it.
Full Article: Joystiq
This is definitely not good news if you are an AMD fan or just someone hoping that AMD can stay competitive with Intel to keep prices down. According to the road-map, it looks like AMD will be riding the 45nm wave for their CPUs through 2010 until these chips featuring its new micro-architecture. This means that AMD will be at least 1.5 years behind Intel in getting 32nm products to the market. However, there are a lot of promises in store for these new chips including a complete redesign which will bring about considerably higher performance and the SSE5 instruction set. I just hope I can wait that long to get some great chips. I’ll take an Istanbul 6 core chip to hold off though!
Full Article: Xbit Labs
As the video says, available in the second half of 2009. I am really liking the progress AMD is making with their server chips. The 4 core 45nm Shanghai processors just came out this past fall and here come newer 6 core chips. While not as exciting as the 8 core Intel Xeon chips, it is still great to see a bit more affordable server processors. These should help drive down the cost of the Shanghai chips as well. I’d love to have 24 cores going!
Link: YouTube
Just as AMD was catching up Intel went ahead and flexed its muscle and showed off a 32nm system. This comes on the same day as Intel announcing that it planning to invest $7 billion in processor fabs for the 32nm processors. The first chips that will be 32nm will be from codename Westmere. Where the tech gets interesting is that the plan on having a mobile chip that integrates a graphics and memory controller in one 45nm chip. There are no dates set in stone for the 32nm CPUs and it won’t be anytime soon as Calpella, the Nahalem mobile version, has just been delayed which was supposed to come out Q3 2009. There were no benchmarks either, today was just a demo. Engadget did a very nice writeup on all of this to help set straight all of the codenames Intel uses as it can get very confusing. There is also a nice video presentation.
Full Article: Engadget
And they are still behind Intel. AMD today released five more chips based on the 45nm manufacturing process including the first ever 3 core CPU at that size. The results are overall pleasing to the reviewers but still leaves a bit to be desired as they are still behind Intel in performance. The upside is that they are good for overclocking and cheaper overall. They could be appealing for budget gamers and those looking for a decent CPU for a nice price. Check out the links below for reviews and the official announcement.
Review: HotHardware
Review: DesktopReview
Official Announcement: AMD
Billed as the first 4-bay Atom based NAS device, the TS-439 Pro Turbo packs an Intel 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB memory, and support for RAID 0/1/5/6/5. The specs say it supports up to 6TB, 4x 1.5TB drives, but it should probably handle four of the latest 2TB drives without a problem for 8TB of space. Not too shabby in a decent sized box. Other built-in functions include FTP, DDNS, MySQL, XDove, and being able to record from up to 4 IP-based cameras. No word on making this into a torrent machine, but I am sure it would be possible.
Official Site: QNAP
Samsung has released 4 gigabit chips and with that news comes the possibility of sticking 32GB on one DDR3 RAM stick. The new chips are based on the 50nm processes and consume 40% less power than previous DDR3 RAM modules. While they haven’t released 32GB sticks yet, they are prepping 16GB sticks for servers and 8GB sticks for desktops and notebooks. Not surprisingly the price hasn’t been released just yet, but expect it to be quite a lot.
Full Article: Information Week
It looks like Intel is getting ready to at least detail the eight core chips at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference next month in San Francisco. However, any further details are hard to come by other than they will discuss an eight core (16 thread) Xeon processor based on the 45nm manufacturing process. The timeline does coincide with the plan to release the Nahalem EP processor which is for dual socket servers and workstations and scheduled for release in early 2009. Added on with the fact that the Xeons are due for a refresh, this could very well become the Nahalem EP refresh we’ve been waiting to see. That being said I would love to have a server with two of these chips in it; just imagine 16 cores of processing power! But I am sure the first eight core processors are going to be reserved for high end servers and very pricey. One can dream though.
Full Article: Macworld
OCZ has made a lot of progress since introducing it’s first SSD in August of 2008 and their latest model continues to improve. While most MLC SSDs using the JMicron controller have been plagued with issues such as stuttering, the OCZ Apex drive takes a unique approach to remedy this. OCZ is not a manufacturer of the SSD chips so they don’t have a lot of control over the logic controller like Intel which SSDs don’t have this problem. But OCZ does have enough leeway to do some engineering and they have come up with a way to avoid the issues by using two controllers in a RAID setup. The result is a larger capacity drive with better performance without many of the issues that plague previous drives. PC Perspective was able to get ahold of this drive and test it out. If you are interested in the benchmarks please check out the links below.
Full Article: PC Perspective
Western Digital apparently wasn’t fooling around with 1.5TB drives and decided to jump to the next level and release 2TB drives. The first drive available in the 2TB format from Western Digital is the Caviar Green model which is the power saving model that runs cooler and use less power than regular hard drives. The Caviar Green drives are usually rated at 5400 RPM, but interestingly these drives seem to be 7200 RPM. The drives right now have only shown up in Australia, but will probably appear in other locations as Tuesday rolls around in their time zone. The drives show up at the price of $377.80 AUD which converts to about $250 USD; so a little higher price per gigabyte than more 1TB drives going right now, but you can replace two drives with just one. It should be interesting to see how the other manufacturers will react to this latest development.
Full Article: Engadget
Available online: Mwave Australia