SANDISK WAS SHOWING off a very unique product at CES, a SATA SSD on a chip. No, not a flash chip, but a full flash chip plus SATA interface on a single piece of silicon.
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SOMEWHERE BETWEEN OPENING presents and the post-Christmas eggnog hangover, we had the opportunity to tour the Micron DRAM and Flash memory fabrication facility in Manassas, Virginia. While a fab is a fab and the net result, like anywhere else, is a groovy 300mm platter of chips that you cannot eat, we’ll walk you through Micron’s production process, profile the company, and give you a bit of insight into the challenges it faces and its opportunities in the near future and years to come.
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INTEL’S SANDY BRIDGE is days away from launch, but the big news this week is the massive changes to the next generation Ivy Bridge. If Intel manages to get their drivers in order, it could destroy the entire low end GPU market.
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COMPUTER MEMORY ISN’T the most exciting of product these days, as in broad terms – and the memory manufacturers wouldn’t agree with us of course – it’s much of a muchness. In saying that, Adata has announced two different DDR3L SO-DIMM’s which should prove popular not only in gaming notebooks, but also in mini-ITX boards that only accept SO-DIMMs.
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AMD LAUNCHED IT’S first new GPU architecture in four years last week, Cayman aka the HD6900 series. Lets take a look at the cards themselves, and how they perform, with a lot of emphasis on the new PowerTune feature.
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Much to chagrin of graphics chip Etch-a-Sketcher’s everywhere, Elpida is rolling out its new DRAM chips on a 30nm process. Sampling of certain 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM modules has already begun, and large-scale availability of these minified silicon marvels is expected in Q1 2011. Benefits of this process enhancement are good for everybody as chips will be smaller, cheaper, larger, and faster and consume less power to boot.
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In the spirit of the season, Rambus Inc. is giving out another round of subpoenas to all of its friends in the tech industry. Most interesting among the defendants perhaps is nVidia, who only months ago signed a licensing agreement with Rambus to end an ITC blockade of its products, (virtually their whole portfolio), which infringed on Rambus’s patents. Round 2, or 3, or 400ish… Ding!
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IT LOOKS LIKE the CFast cards we exclusively showed you last spring are actually dead, the CF association didn’t deem 300MBps fast enough. Instead, they went with a newer spec that will hit 500MBps. Unfortunately, it is still a compact flash card, so no one really cares.
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THE PRICE OF DDR3 memory is maybe not in free fall at the moment, but prices are dropping and dropping fast according to the DRAMeXchange. Prices are expected to continue to fall over the next two quarters. This is terrible news for the DRAM and module manufacturers, although it’s possible that we’ll see some artificial means of trying to boost the price of the DRAM chips by reducing production if the price falls by too much.
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IF YOU ARE one of the people craving large amounts of memory in your server but wincing at the DIMM counts for Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer servers, there is hope. That hope comes in the form of an LR-DIMM.
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PHOTOFAST IS ABOUT to release a high capacity and hugely fast PCIe based SSD called the GM-PowerDrive-LSI. If you are thinking it sounds like four RAIDed high speed SSDs coupled to an industrial strength RAID controller, you are on the right track.
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AMD IS THROWING out the code names like you knew they would at the 2010 Analyst Day. Couple that with a bunch of demos, and you have something interesting.
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POWERCOLOR IS DAYS away from launching a custom HD6850 chip, overclocked to over 800MHz. The company also just took a foray into the enthusiast power supply market too. Joy.
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ALBATRON HAS BEEN offering more specialty products, and the latest was more than enough to make us sit up and notice, 16GB DIMMs. The company has several memory products to back that up as well.
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SUPERTALENT HAS ANNOUNCED something a little bit unexpected, no, not the fact that it has a new USB 3.0 flash drive, as this in itself is nothing too special, but what is surprising is the super low price.
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