GLOBAL FOUNDRIES KICKED off their Global Technology Conference, aka GTC, with a bit about the company itself. While there were no big bangs, there were a lot of little things in the slides worth talking about.
NOT SATISFIED WITH showing off a Llano wafer, AMD showed off the next generation part, Orochi, at the GloFo GTC summit today. While there was no silicon to pass around, pictures are much better than test.
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about Bulldozer, the upcoming new desktop and server core. It is the largest architectural jump in standard x86 cores in a long long time.
MICRON AND INTEL has announced that they're the first to sample 25nm three bits per cell NAND Flash memory today, also known as TLC NAND Flash. The companies are getting ready to enter mass production later this year, for what the two are claiming is the industries smallest and highest capacity NAND Flash memory.
DDR3 MEMORY ALREADY has three years on its neck and it's finally starting to replace DDR2 as the mainstream memory technology. JEDEC and the memory manufacturers are already planning the next generation of memory technology set to succeed DDR3 with the obvious name of DDR4 which was set to make its first appearance in 2012, but it seems like things have been pushed back until 2015 now.
HYNIX HAS FOLLOWED in Samsung's footsteps by starting mass production of "20nm class" NAND Flash memory. However, it seems like Hynix is first with 64Gbit NAND Flash using sub 32nm manufacturing technology.
IS NVIDIA UP to it's old renaming games, or is it about to launch the second hottest GPU in the world? In any case, the Nvidia GT 425M GPU is turning up all over the place.
WATERCOOLING, THE CHOICE of, well at least some overclockers, but it seems to be mostly used as a marketing tool these days without any real market penetration. Kingston has just announced three sets of HyperX H2O memory modules (which we spied back at CES), all of which feature support for water cooling. We just can't quite figure out who is going to buy these new modules.
NVIDIA HAS A curious take on the causes of their latest financial meltdown, one that doesn't seem to mirror what is happening in the rest of the industry. The almost 20% drop in expected revenue announced at the last minute seems to be a largely self-inflicted wound.
IS THAT 32GB SSD getting a bit on the small side? Not to worry, Super Talent has announced that it's getting ready to ship its new UltraDrive MX range which tops out at no less than 480GB. That should be enough space to compete with most notebook hard drives at least, but the real question is, can you afford one?
INTEL IS TALKING about Silicon Photonics again, the real advances are masked behind a breathless press release about lasers replacing electronics. The advances announced today are nothing nearly as spectacular nor as breathless, it is simply a speed bump and a connector.
Grab a fifth or your favorite 70 proof or higher beverage and read on
Recently hard drives and the storage industry in general has been a tough thing to write about, because frankly, nobody really cares! It’s much more fun and exciting to get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest multi-core CPUs running at orgasmic clock speeds, or exotic video cards that need their own power reactors but have enough FLOPs under the hood to calculate the single precision meaning of life. In fact the only time we give our trusty storage things a second thought (and exhaust our dictionaries of naughty words) is when they die and take our data along with them. Well, to help remedy this journalistic conundrum, we've developed a drinking game to aid in your consumption of this article. Every time you see a storage related suffix (MB, GB, TB, etc.) you take a shot. Ready? Good, because you’re up to three already.
Seagate just reported its best annual results ever, with $2.66 billion in revenues and $387 million in net profits and if you exclude stock repurchases, the company would have generated $1.4 billion in cash after repaying creditors. Seagate has now more than $2 billion in cash and only a small portion of its debt is in the short term, everything else is long term. With such a bright picture why is the market hitting so hard their stock after showing those numbers?
DDR3 IS SLOWLY but surely starting to take over from DDR2 as the mainstream memory type and this means that the memory manufacturers are shifting more and more of their production to DDR3. Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of its new 32nm DDR3 memory in capacities of up to 2Gbit, or 256MB per chip.
Editors Note:From time to time, SemiAccurate will be republishing some older articles by its authors, some with additional commentary, updates and information. We are mainly reprinting some of the oft referenced articles that originally appeared on the Inquirer. Some will have added content, but all will be re-edited from the originals as per contractual obligations. You may see some slight differences between the two versions.
This article has had some of the original links removed, and was published on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 7:47PM.
Beef patties, pickles, lettuce and seasame seed buns optional
The year was 2000. Will Smith's horrid "Will 2K" jam was finally fading from the radio waves and the scarred minds of millions across the globe. In March, CPU underdog AMD dropped the gigahertz bomb on us, sending shockwaves throughout the tech community, and lighting a fire under Intel's ass so intense, the heat wasn't fully dissipated until the last Prescott chip rolled off the assembly lines. AMD had (inadvertently or not) ignited what we all came to know as the GHz war, with Intel fighting for consumer mindshare by turning the GHz dial up to 11 (well, 3.8 anyway), while AMD desperately tried to keep up by ratcheting up their own clock speeds, and slapping on performance rating numbers to show the average Joe that they could still play with the big boys.
TIS THE WEEK for cloud products, and AMD is not one to miss the opportunity to attach lots of new Opteron 4100s to the cloud. The chip itself is half of a Magny-Cours/Opteron 6100, but the cloud is where AMD thinks they will sell the most units.
Our heroes go over how to thread an engine for beginners
IN THE LATEST chunk of the GDC chat with Tim Sweeney of Epic and Andrew Richards of Codeplay, the topics are Cell and the cost of threading. If you want to know what the coders and engine guys think of many cores, here you are.
THE SD ASSOCIATION has announced new high-speed symbols for SDHC and SDXC cards which are once again meant to make our lives easier. The old Class 2, 4, 6 and 10 ratings will be kept for older memory cards that don't meet the new UHS or Ultra High Speed SD card standard. The new UHS speed classifications as plenty of room to grow, especially as we've only hit the first generation of SDXC cards.
SUPERTALENT JUST RELEASED something that the server world has been waiting for since the dawn of SSDs, a SAS SSD. The 2.5" ShuttleCraft SAS SSD is the first affordable drive that is going to change how servers use storage.
TILERA MAKES CPUS that have lots of cores and a fairly unique multi-mesh interconnect fabric that live happily in embedded devices from AV equipment to Deep Packet Inspection (boo hiss) devices. Today, the company is entering a market that I never expected to see them in, cloud compute servers.
WITH THE INTRODUCTION of SATA 6Gbp, SSD drives got a much needed, faster interface, but it appears that we've hit another "wall" when it comes to performance of SSD drives, at least higher density drives. SSDs with more than 16 NAND Flash memory chips on them will have power issues in the near future which prevent them from reaching optimal write speeds. The good news is that Toshiba is already working to solve this problem with the help of a Japanese research group headed by Ken Takeuchi.
THE HOT CHIPS 22 conference has released their lineup of talks this year, and it once again looks really good. If you haven't been to one yet, it is one of the best conferences about chip architecture out there, and well worth attending.
A LOT OF people are talking about Nvidia's new GPUs, the GF104, GF106, and GF108, but very few people understand why the parts are going to underwhelm. The reason is simple, the architecture is broken, and hasn't been changed much.
THE NEXT BIG thing appears to be hybrid drives, although Seagate's new Momentus XT failed to impress most reviewers, despite offering some clear advantages over a traditional hard drive. The downside here of course is that we're talking about a 2.5-inch notebook drive, but what if you want a hybrid drive for your desktop PC? Well, Marvell might very well have the solution to this problem with its upcoming “free” HyperHDD solution.
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES KICKED off their Global Technology Conference, aka GTC, with a bit about the company itself. While there were no big bangs, there were a lot of little things in the slides worth talking about.
NOT SATISFIED WITH showing off a Llano wafer, AMD showed off the next generation part, Orochi, at the GloFo GTC summit today. While there was no silicon to pass around, pictures are much better than test.
MICRON AND INTEL has announced that they're the first to sample 25nm three bits per cell NAND Flash memory today, also known as TLC NAND Flash. The companies are getting ready to enter mass production later this year, for what the two are claiming is the industries smallest and highest capacity NAND Flash memory.
DDR3 MEMORY ALREADY has three years on its neck and it's finally starting to replace DDR2 as the mainstream memory technology. JEDEC and the memory manufacturers are already planning the next generation of memory technology set to succeed DDR3 with the obvious name of DDR4 which was set to make its first appearance in 2012, but it seems like things have been pushed back until 2015 now.
HYNIX HAS FOLLOWED in Samsung's footsteps by starting mass production of "20nm class" NAND Flash memory. However, it seems like Hynix is first with 64Gbit NAND Flash using sub 32nm manufacturing technology.
IS NVIDIA UP to it's old renaming games, or is it about to launch the second hottest GPU in the world? In any case, the Nvidia GT 425M GPU is turning up all over the place.
WATERCOOLING, THE CHOICE of, well at least some overclockers, but it seems to be mostly used as a marketing tool these days without any real market penetration. Kingston has just announced three sets of HyperX H2O memory modules (which we spied back at CES), all of which feature support for water cooling. We just can't quite figure out who is going to buy these new modules.
IS THAT 32GB SSD getting a bit on the small side? Not to worry, Super Talent has announced that it's getting ready to ship its new UltraDrive MX range which tops out at no less than 480GB. That should be enough space to compete with most notebook hard drives at least, but the real question is, can you afford one?
INTEL IS TALKING about Silicon Photonics again, the real advances are masked behind a breathless press release about lasers replacing electronics. The advances announced today are nothing nearly as spectacular nor as breathless, it is simply a speed bump and a connector.
Recently hard drives and the storage industry in general has been a tough thing to write about, because frankly, nobody really cares! It’s much more fun and exciting to get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest multi-core CPUs running at orgasmic clock speeds, or exotic video cards that need their own power reactors but have enough FLOPs under the hood to calculate the single precision meaning of life. In fact the only time we give our trusty storage things a second thought (and exhaust our dictionaries of naughty words) is when they die and take our data along with them. Well, to help remedy this journalistic conundrum, we've developed a drinking game to aid in your consumption of this article. Every time you see a storage related suffix (MB, GB, TB, etc.) you take a shot. Ready? Good, because you’re up to three already.
Seagate just reported its best annual results ever, with $2.66 billion in revenues and $387 million in net profits and if you exclude stock repurchases, the company would have generated $1.4 billion in cash after repaying creditors. Seagate has now more than $2 billion in cash and only a small portion of its debt is in the short term, everything else is long term. With such a bright picture why is the market hitting so hard their stock after showing those numbers?
DDR3 IS SLOWLY but surely starting to take over from DDR2 as the mainstream memory type and this means that the memory manufacturers are shifting more and more of their production to DDR3. Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of its new 32nm DDR3 memory in capacities of up to 2Gbit, or 256MB per chip.
TIS THE WEEK for cloud products, and AMD is not one to miss the opportunity to attach lots of new Opteron 4100s to the cloud. The chip itself is half of a Magny-Cours/Opteron 6100, but the cloud is where AMD thinks they will sell the most units.
IN THE LATEST chunk of the GDC chat with Tim Sweeney of Epic and Andrew Richards of Codeplay, the topics are Cell and the cost of threading. If you want to know what the coders and engine guys think of many cores, here you are.
THE SD ASSOCIATION has announced new high-speed symbols for SDHC and SDXC cards which are once again meant to make our lives easier. The old Class 2, 4, 6 and 10 ratings will be kept for older memory cards that don't meet the new UHS or Ultra High Speed SD card standard. The new UHS speed classifications as plenty of room to grow, especially as we've only hit the first generation of SDXC cards.
TILERA MAKES CPUS that have lots of cores and a fairly unique multi-mesh interconnect fabric that live happily in embedded devices from AV equipment to Deep Packet Inspection (boo hiss) devices. Today, the company is entering a market that I never expected to see them in, cloud compute servers.
WITH THE INTRODUCTION of SATA 6Gbp, SSD drives got a much needed, faster interface, but it appears that we've hit another "wall" when it comes to performance of SSD drives, at least higher density drives. SSDs with more than 16 NAND Flash memory chips on them will have power issues in the near future which prevent them from reaching optimal write speeds. The good news is that Toshiba is already working to solve this problem with the help of a Japanese research group headed by Ken Takeuchi.
THE HOT CHIPS 22 conference has released their lineup of talks this year, and it once again looks really good. If you haven't been to one yet, it is one of the best conferences about chip architecture out there, and well worth attending.
THE NEXT BIG thing appears to be hybrid drives, although Seagate's new Momentus XT failed to impress most reviewers, despite offering some clear advantages over a traditional hard drive. The downside here of course is that we're talking about a 2.5-inch notebook drive, but what if you want a hybrid drive for your desktop PC? Well, Marvell might very well have the solution to this problem with its upcoming “free” HyperHDD solution.