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
Earlier this year Samsung had announced that by the end of 2008 it would start producing 256GB SSDs essentially quadrupling the capacity in just a year. These new drives are also much faster than their predcessors featuring sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second and sequential write rates of 200 megabytes per second. This brings the speeds of both write and read closer together which had been very asymetrical with previous SSDs. There was no mention of the random write speeds which has been a problem for all SSDs so far. The speed for this SSD is derived from its single-platform design which consists of a chip controller, 40 nm NAND flash, and Samsung’s proprietary firmware. The drive consumes 1.1 watts of power which is less than the 2+ traditional harddrives consume and it weighs in at 81 grams. Pricing for this drive has not been released yet no has any availability date for retail.
Full Article: CNet
After releasing a 128GB SSD and prepping to begin mass production on the 256GB model, Samsung has started to go after low-cost netbooks by releasing 8, 16, and 32GB SSDs that are only 30% the size of normal 2.5 inch SSDs. The speeds on these MLC based drives are a respectable 70-90 MB/sec. There is no official word on the price of these SSDs, just that they will start mass production next month and the latest netbooks soon after.
Perhaps since Dell knew about these SSDs ahead of time since they still have not released their netbooks, Dell 910, even having many rumors pin the release date sometime in August and it is almost over. Maybe they were waiting for these so that they could beef up their offerings. Only time will tell.
Full Article: Business Wire
Well, it looks as if Samsung is still keeping its goal of delvering 256 GB SSDs by the end of the year. The latest for the Korean company is that they are producing 128 GB SSDs in mass due to increased demand and popularity of the drives. The SSDs will have a write speed of 70MB/s and a read speed of 90MB/s with an estimated 20 time longer lifespan than standard hard drives. Now that the SSDs are getting into the more usage storage range, the definitely have increased their potential of being in my next laptop purchase.
Full Article: Softpedia
Samsung has finally announced their 256 GB SSD that will launch in September. The drive is 2.4 times faster than traditional hard drives featuring read speeds of up to 200 MB/sec and write speeds of up to 160 MB/sec. There hasn’t been a priced released for this drive yet, but I will keep checking.
In a previous post, I noted that Samsung planned on having this drive available by December or early 2009, so it is good to see them ahead of schedule. This has been a big week for SSDs with Intel announcing their SSDs will be paired with the Montevina platform next month. Perhaps the introduction of Intel into the SSD market pushed Samsung to get this drive out ahead of schedule. While there is no price listed yet, I would not expect it to be outrageous, probably in the range of the current high end 64 GB SSDs which are currently $1000 retail or less if you get them from a manufacturer in a new notebook purchase.
Source: Engadget
The prototype display has a massive 82” size and features a resolution of 3820×2160 pixels, which results in a total screen resolution of 8.3 megapixels. Current 1080p TVs run at 1920×1080 pixels or 2.1 megapixels. According to the manufacturer, the TV integrates a red/green/blue LED backlight, which raises the color saturation to 150%. The image refresh rate is 120 Hz.
What makes this screen especially interesting is the fact that Sang Soo Kim, executive vice president of the LCD Technology Center at Samsung Electronics, called it the “optimal display for future TVs.” Quad HDTVs have been available before, but were exclusively marketed to markets that have a need for high resolution image display – such as the oil and gas industries.
Samsung said that it will have a few other products to show at its SID show booth, including an 82” e-board with a “multi-touchscreen” that could replace whiteboards and beam projectors, the company believes, as well as its previously announced 15” blue-phase LCD and a foldable 2.3” e-paper display.
Full Article: TG Daily
Even from the picture, you can tell that this TV is simply amazing. It almost looks as if you are looking through a window. The article mentions that a similar resolution TV at 52″ runs about $40,000, so this TV isn’t meant for home use even for home theatre junkies. The other products they are demoing sound intriguing as well, such as the foldable display. It will be interesting to see what products make their way to the market in the coming years.
Intel doesn’t enter markets gently. Its new high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) are expected to jolt a market currently dominated by Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk.
At the moment, Intel offers small-capacity chip-level (what are called Thin Small Outline Packages or TSOPs) technology that provides end-product sizes ranging up to 16GB. But this modest line of products will get a big boost in the second quarter when Intel offers 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs ranging from 80GB to 160GB in capacity, said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel. Intel’s new SSDs will compete with Samsung, for example, which is slated to bring out a 128GB SSD in the third quarter.
With new competition, drive speeds will jump. Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. “What I can tell you is ours is much better than that,” Winslow said. Hard drives typically read data at about half this speed.
“We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA offering,” he said. Serial ATA, or SATA, is an interface used in high-performance hard disk drives. Intel’s products will be based on the SATA II specification that offers speeds of 3 gigabits (Gb) per second. Samsung is now shipping 64GB SSDs to Dell using the same technology.
Full Article: CNet
This is some exciting news for those of us who are waiting for SSD prices to drop and storage to increase. I know Samsung has committed to delivering a 256 GB SSD by the end of the year, so this news should help keep them honest. If expectations are met, then the capacity will have quadrupled in a year which is incredible. SSDs are definitely the wave of the future in storage, just depends on when they become mainstream. Hopefully with this news they will arrive sooner than later.