SOLID STATE DRIVES or SSDs are one of the hottest topics and add-ons that you can get for your PC now, although there's still a lot of confusion going on with regards to what to get, as there are vast differences between the various models and the cost per GB is fairly high.

CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.

IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.

POKING AROUND CEBIT has it's benefits, especially if you know what to look for. At the SuperTalent booth, it looks like we found a prototype SATA2 CF/CFast card.

SUPERTALENT IS SHOWING a line of storage and memory products that range from consumer toys to serious enterprise level kit. The best one is the last missing piece of the storage puzzle, an affordable USB3 memory stick.

SAPPHIRE HAS STARTED to branch out from GPUs, but that doesn't mean it didn't have a large selection of high end GPUs to show off. New to the boys in blue this year are micro-projectors, netbooks and micro-ITX boards.

THE MAKING OF computer chips is a complicated business, not only for the chip designers but also for the foundries. TSMC’s senior VP of R&D, Shang-Yi Chiang has announced that the company is getting ready for 22nm trial runs towards the end of 2012.

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.

WHEN DDR3 MEMORY was launched it was hailed not only as offering much better performance than DDR2, but also as a much more power efficient type of memory. However, Samsung latest 30nm DDR3 offering has managed to improve upon the original specification to bring us even lower power requirements.

NVIDIA'S GF100 ARCHITECTURE is falling into the same trap that G200 did, shooting for the moon at the cost of the parts that pay the bills. Let's take a look at the architecture and how it stacks up in the market once again.

ONE OF THE worst kept secrets of the year, all 14 days of it, is that the ATI 56xx Redwood parts are coming out today. They are more than half of a Juniper 57xx series and have all the goodies that those chips do.

EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.

GLOBAL FOUNDRIES has been way ahead of the curve with process tech when compared to any other foundry on the market. Today, it somewhat accidentally cemented that lead by publicly displaying an unlabeled 28nm wafer.

Lexar Media, the guys who make the Crucial line of memory, will have the Crucial Real SSD C300 coming out very soon and they expect it to claim the crown of the fastest solid state drive out there

YOU MAY KNOW about Eye-Fi, the company that makes SD cards with an 802.11 radio in them. It has a new generation of parts called the X2 line about to ship.

AMD WAS SHOWING off two new platforms today at CES, Danube and Dorado. Danube is the mobile quad-core and Dorado is the 8xx next generation DX11 IGP.

GLOBAL FOUNDRIES JUST announced a major win by signing Qualcomm to a fab contract. If anyone was waiting to see if Global Foundries had what it took to compete for the best, they now have their answer.

IF YOU ARE sick and tired of slogging along with your wimpy 4-core Nehalem laptop, Ace Computer has a solution for you, the 8-core Xeon 5500 (Beckton) based Ace Raptor 5 Server Workstation AC-Raptor55V. Yes, some insane company just put an Intel 8-core Becton server chip in a laptop, let's hear it for wretched excess.

USB3 IS JUST starting to come into its own, with 17 new devices including some nice motherboards and external HDs to show off the power. As devices get smaller, it is time to introduce the new micro-USB3 connector and cables.

WE DON’T HAVE any specific details as to what speed these new water cooled DDR3 HyperX memory modules from Kingston will run at, but judging by the picture posted on twitpic, Kingston will offer them in triple channel kits for the X58 platform. Unlike similar products from its competitors, it seems like Kingston has come up with a very low profile design for its water cooled modules.

NVIDIA IS TRYING to make Ion2, its next generation 'chipset' seem like something it is not, but the specs say otherwise. It is just a warmed over G218 integrated graphics chip with a few ports added on.

NVIDIA'S RENAMING SCAM has another name to add to the list. The G215 is now called the GTS360M. Consumers aren't warned that they are getting old tech with a new name, but Nvidia will proudly tell you that it is 120 more of something than the GT240 that was in desktop form, and the S and M are added bonuses.

IT LOOKS LIKE we were right about Fermi being too big, too hot, and too late, Nvidia just castrated it to 448SPs. Even at that, it is a 225 Watt part, slipping into the future.

Updated: Nvidia declines to respond

KOREAN MEMORY MANUFACTURER Hynix has announced that it has started to produce 2Gb GDDR5 memory chips using a 40nm manufacturing process. The significance of this is that Hynix will be able to get more memory chips per wafer, but apparently this isn’t the only benefit from shrinking the fab process.

INTEL IS ABOUT to launch its first 32nm processors in early January, with 22nm next on its roadmaps, but it seems like Intel has been beaten to 16nm by the Taiwan National Nano Device Laboratories (NDL). However, NDL is a research and development outfit rather than a profit seeking enterprise and as such is looking for partners in Taiwan to take its research forward.

REMEMBER THE TRIUMPHANT WIN for Fermi at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that Nvidia heavily touted at its GDC conference keynote? The supercomputer project was just killed for power reasons. Fermi power reasons. Whoops.

Update: Nvidia doesn't respond.

WE'VE COME ACROSS an interesting bit of information that we’re fairly certain that no SSD maker would want you to know about. With the current push of SSD drives into every sector of the computer market, no-one seems to have stopped to take a closer look at the drives themselves, but instead everyone’s raving about the performance.

SISOFT SANDRA 2010 was just released, and the big news is that it now has OpenCL based GPGPU benchmarks. They look to be a fairly well rounded and test both compute capabilities and I/O.

WITH SEVERAL REALLY useful new standards on the horizon, wouldn't it be nice if there was a board or two that did both, USB3.0 and SATA3, and did them well? If you have been waiting for such a beast, the '333 Series' Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and X58 Extreme 2 are the boards for you.

Updated: Name changes

G.SKILL'S LATEST AND GREATEST memory kit, the F3-17600CL7D-4GBPIS, comes specified at an impressive 2200Mhz CAS7, and even more impressive is that it only needs 1.65V to get there.

OFFICIAL WORD FROM NVIDIA is that gaming is now a footnote for the formerly leading graphics company, its latest and greatest Fermi chip won't see the light of day until at least Q1 of 2010, and Fermi's clock speeds so far are massively off what the firm had hoped for. Yup, it is a mess, just like we told you.

HP ANNOUNCED that it will buy 3Com for $2.7 billion the other day, and with one swipe of pen on checkbook validated Cisco's strategy. HP also showed that it won't be able to compete in the converged network arena for years to come.

THREE VERY INTERESTING tidbits snuck out in the Q&A session at the AMD analyst day today. It seems that Fusion and the new cores have taped out and are at the fabs.

AT ANALYST DAY, Chekib Akrout of AMD spilled the beans on the chip company's two new CPU cores, and Fusion. AMD's Bulldozer and Bobcat processors plus its memory controller that is called Fusion were all outed.

SUPERTALENT IS THE FIRST out of the gate with a USB 3.0 RAID memory stick it calls RAIDDrive. This thing is said to hit 320MBps when it's plugged into a USB 3.0 port.

Updated

ONE OF THE more interesting conferences of the year is AMD's TFE, or Technical Forum and Exposition. If you have never heard of TFE, that is likely because this conference on near future thermal and power management technology is by invitation only.

WHEN DIRECTX10 came along it wowed gamers with its features, but underwhelmed with the performance hit you took. So now, Windows 7 is just around the corner and Vista is pretty much toast. Now DirectX11 is stepping and some major gaming titles are about to get upgraded to benefit from the new API. Here's a preview.

NVIDIA IS KILLING the GTX260, GTX275, and GTX285 with the GTX295 almost assured to follow as it abandons the high and mid range graphics card market. Due to a massive series of engineering failures, nearly all of the company's product line is financially under water, and mismanagement seems to be killing the company.

WHAT DO YOU DO when you have nothing, and are facing quarters of buying markeshare and have no competitive products on the horizon? If you are Nvidia, you spin, and use the F, fear, U, uncertainty, and D, doubt, in FUD to pretend there are shortages.

SUPERMICRO WAS AT IDF showing off the usual server and workstation toys. Because it had a bunch of new products at Computex, and there haven't subsequently been any really new Intel chips, the boards on display were evolutionary, not revolutionary.

LSI AND REDHAT were showing off the next step in hardware virtualization, IOV or I/O Virtualization, during IDF. The idea is simple, make SAS or SATA cards aware of virtual spaces, speeding up I/O for VMs many times.

AMD OFFICIALLY BROKE SILENCE on the Fiorana and Kroner platforms, right on top of IDF. Most of the specifications are already known, but there are a few interesting things left to tell you about.

WHEN CISCO JUMPED into the blade server market with its first Project California blades, that was big news, but the hardware was a yawner. The new 'Ventura' blades we were shown at IDF are going to change the game, radically.

WHEN I FIRST saw a Umid MBook M1 MID at CES, it stood out from a very crowded field of marginally differentiated devices. The M1, and the upcoming M2, are probably the best mobile PC or netbook out there.

SEAN MALONEY GOT all the good toys to show off at IDF this year, with Larrabee, Jasper, Gulftown and much more. There is a lot of good silicon in the pipeline.

EVERYONE KNOWS that Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are based on flash memory chip technology and have no moving parts, which makes them faster and more reliable than hard-disk drives (HDDs). SSDs can also be manufactured in physical formats that are much smaller and thinner than their old-fashioned HDD counterparts. Nevertheless, the shape of the connectors that SSDs use to interface with devices has remained the size and shape of the traditional HDD form-factors.

WORD HAS REACHED our tender ears that Braidwood, the Intel flash on mobo hard drive cache has been postponed. It won't be coming out with the upcoming Westmere based CPUs, but it may slide in before Sandy Bridge with a platform refresh.

AMD JUST BROKE an important psychological barrier with a sub-$100 quad core CPU, one of five released today. Between this part and a 785G chipset, you can make a tolerable desktop PC for under $300, plus case and PSU.

Update: X2s are not new, just the X4s.

WE HAVE A TREAT for you today. Everyone likes a bit of softcore geek porn with smart looking babes talking in foreign accents and reading a second meaning into every other word they say. It seems Asus might have accidentally struck gold when hiring these chaps to introduce its O!Play HD Media Player.

ONE OF THE MOST recognizable and influential Intel executives, Pat Gelsinger, is no longer with the company. His rather sudden departure means a massive reshuffling that reaches just about every corner of Intel.

AS WE SAID a few days ago, Intel is launching the new Lynnfield CPUs and the P55 chipset that goes with them. The CPU comes in three desktop flavors and six server variants.