SO FAR THERE has only been a single USB 3.0 host controller in the market, but this is about to change once the Fresco Logic FL1000 arrives. The new host controller is already being implemented on an upcoming motherboard from ASRock and we’ve got the first exclusive pictures of this new board and controller.
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THE MERGER BETWEEN NEC Electronics and Renesas Technology culminated today with the start of Renesas Electronics, which is the name of the new company. Renesas Technology was a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer, while NEC Electronics was a separate division of NEC that focused on semiconductor products. The new company is Japan’s largest and the world’s third largest semiconductor manufacturer.
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IT’S PRETTY INTERESTING what you can find out at the various events you attend as a tech journalist and today we found out about another reason why we’re not seeing USB 3.0 support built into chipsets. From our understanding it has nothing to do with cost or technology problems, as it all comes down to one thing – Intel isn’t ready to move away from the draft USB 3.0 xHCI specification.
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YOU MIGHT HAVE noticed a little USB logo on most, if not all of your USB devices that tells you what kind it is, be it bog standard USB, Hi-Speed or now SuperSpeed USB. During today’s USB-IF developer’s conference we put forward the question to the USB-IF, which is the organization behind these logos that certify that your device is USB compliant, with regards to performance testing and what the requirements are.
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IF THERE’S ONE inherent problem the USB interface suffers from, including the latest 3.0 iteration, it’s the lack of power. At 5V and 500mA or 900mA, you can barely run an external hard drive off a USB port. But from what we were told today, the USB Implementors Forum (USB-IF) is looking at changing this in the future and has just started a research group that will look at how to drive more power over the USB interface.
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HERE’S AN ODD one for you, it seems like Buffalo has noticed that there’s a problem fitting certain SSD’s into notebooks due to the shape. Hence the company came up with a solution, an SSD that mimics a traditional hard drive in terms of shape. It really sounds stranger than it is, but it’ll all make sense once you see the picture of the new SSD past the break.
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A COUPLE OF weeks ago a slide of Gigabyte’s upcoming mini-ITX motherboard leaked on a Taiwanese website, but we can now share with you the exclusive first pictures of the H55N-USB3 motherboard. This is Gigabyte’s first consumer focused mini-ITX board and it’s also the first mini-ITX board to feature USB 3.0 support.
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COMPUTEX IS ONE of the big three trade shows every year and this year Computex is celebrating its 30th anniversary and along with it comes a new, up to date logo among many other things. TAITRA, or the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, held its annual pre-Computex press conference today and it is expecting a much better show this year than last year.
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EARLIER TODAY WE had the opportunity to visit MSI and got a sneak peek at its upcoming all-in-one PC system. We’re seeing more and more all-in-one type systems, although we’re still not convinced that these types of machines are set to replace the humble desktop PC. But it’s possible that MSI is heading in the right direction with its new system as an overall entertainment solution.
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IT LOOKS LIKE the GPU roadmaps are being torn up and plan B’s are coming out of the woodwork left and right. The current problem? TSMC’s 28nm process, or lack thereof.
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APPLE HAS RELEASED its latest update for Snow Leopard and its users are hoping it will solve a lot of the glitches that have been plaguing Apple’s most recent incarnation of OS X. The update is said to fix a wide range of issues ranging from problems with Wi-Fi to software bugs in both 32 and 64-bit mode, all the way to better Windows compatibility.
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LAST MAY, we said that GTX480, then called GT300, was going to be hot, slow, big, underperforming, hard to manufacture, and most of all late. Almost a year later, Nvidia can’t even launch PR quantities at the promised spec of 512 shaders.
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CONSIDERING THE COST of Nvidia’s new flagship graphics cards, there’s no wonder that its partners are already looking at ways of reducing the manufacturing costs. Inno3D is the first one to release details of a modified GTX470 PCB and it comes in green rather than black, which is the colour of the first retail cards, although this doesn’t appear to be cost-down version, quite the opposite.
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WE HAD THEM a month ago, now they are cropping up all over. If you know how sites number their pages, you can dig them out with a fair bit of ease.
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WE WERE SLIGHTLY worried that AMD wasn’t too interested in getting OpenGL 4.0 support ready for its cards after the fairly non-descript statement about support from AMD in the Khronos group press release that announced OpenGL 4.0.
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