New Buffalo Hard Drives Boost Speed

Buffalo Technology has announced a range of portable hard drives using a new technology claimed to significantly boost performance compared to ordinary USB 2.0 products.

Aimed at small businesses, the new MiniStation product uses the company’s proprietary ‘TurboUSB’ technology to reduce file transfer overhead, thus improving speed. The technology, which works using an optimized driver and controller chip combination, is in the process of being rolled out across all of the company’s portable and stand-alone drives.

In every other respect, the MiniStation is just another well-designed and fairly cheap USB drive based around a standard 2.5 inch disk drive. Coming in several capacities of 80GB up to 300GB, the unit features a clever wrap-around USB cable, and a shock-resistant case. Prices range from #55 (US$100) including VAT, for the 80GB drive, and up to #173 for the 300GB version.

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Intel preps quad-core, 45nm mobile chips for 2008

It’s no secret that Intel has a slew of 45nm mobile processors lined up for its upcoming Santa Rosa Refresh and Montevina platforms next year. Rumors have pointed to Montevina-bound dual-core chips clocked at speeds of up to 3.06GHz with 1066MHz front-side bus speeds and 6MB of cache. Those processors should be more than fast enough to rival the best dual-core offerings out today, but according to a report by the folks at HKEPC, Intel is also cooking up some 45nm quad-core processors for the Montevina platform.

An Intel slide nabbed by the Hong Kong-based site suggests quad-core “Penryn QC” mobile processors will roll out in the second half of 2008. They’ll come in a 35mm x 35mm Socket P multi-chip package with a maximum power rating of 45W—10W above that of current mobile Core 2 Duos—and an idle rating of 3-4W. The slide doesn’t mention clock speeds, but it says the upcoming CPUs will pack 12MB of cache and a 1066MHz front-side bus.

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RAM Cache Speeds New Hybrid Hard Drive

A new hard drive from Japanese company DTS has added 1GB of DRAM cache to a 2.5-inch serial ATA disk. The performance ramp from the M-Cell Hyper-Drive speeds up disk I/O, it is claimed, by between ten and 100 times, providing near solid-state disk performance at an affordable price.

M- or Memory-Cell is a 3.5-inch enclosure containing a 2.5-inch, 5400rpm, 120GB SATA drive, 1GB of write-through DDR2 DRAM cache, a CPU chip, a real-time operating system, plus the associated electronics.

It is claimed that data access times are faster than those seen on a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm drive. DTS said that users should throughput of 110MB/sec in random read tests for data sizes of 64KB to 512MB. When the data being accessed is larger than the cache then throughput will slow. It says a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm SATA disk will only deliver 60MB/sec.

Existing hybrid drives used slower, and cheaper, NAND flash memory as a cache. Samsung has a hybrid drive line with 256MB or 512MB of flash memory and disk capacities of 80, 120 or 160GB. These are intended for notebook PC use and will work with Vista’s ReadyDrive feature to speed disk I/O. Samsung has prototyped a drive with 4GB of flash cache.

Seagate offers its Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid drive with a 5,400rpm 2.5-inch SATA drive and 256GB of flash memory. It has a SATA 1 interface operating at a maximum of 150MB/sec. This speed will not be seen in real-life conditions.

Hybrid drives are becoming popular because they provide disk-based capacity with flash-based performance. The MCell DRAM cache-based drive will provide even more of a performance boost.

DTS also supplies C4 application acceleration software. Its MCell technology has previously been used as a cache for RAID arrays. Now it is being used for single drives.

DRAM is volatile, meaning contents are lost if power is switched off or fails, unlike nonvolatile flash memory. However, according to eStorage: “There are built-in capacitors and an intelligent UPS to ensure data in memory is written to nonvolatile disk in the case of power failure.”

M-Cell is available in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities. The 80GB product costs about US$136.

AGP is back from the dead. Again.

Thought AGP was dead? Well apparently not. In something not far estranged from a zombie B-movie where you just can’t kill the bugger, it seems the life of the antiquated interface is to be drawn out yet again by both AMD and Nvidia. Both companies plan to release cards on AGP in the coming months.

AMD is planning to release AGP versions of its Radeon HD2600 and HD2400 GPUs but has reportedly encountered driver instability issues with DirectX 10 and HDMI. It was noted that these problems should be alleviated by the end of the month, however in typical release-date-speculation-fashion, we won’t hold our breath.

Nvidia is currently having to redesign its bridge chip for the G8x series, with the A05 silicon said to be currently working with the GeForce 8600 and 8400 GPUs as well as upcoming G92 and G98 products that will arrive later in the year.

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AMD, Qimonda in joint chip simulation project

Microprocessor manufacturer AMD and memory chip vendor Qimonda have launched a joint chip simulation project for 32nm CMOS and beyond.

The program, dubbed SIMKON, aims at simulation at a very early stage in the design cycle. Thus, the companies which both maintain production sites and mask making facilities in Dresden, Germany, hope to achieve significant benefits in terms of design time and cost during the design and test cycles of new chip generations. The simulation program includes modeling and simulation at the physical level and refers to materials, architectures and manufacturing processes.

With the simulations, the companies intend to define and optimize nanometer production processes in advance. AMD will use the simulation results to optimize its CMOS transistor architectures for the 32nm node and beyond. Qimonda is working in a similar direction and plans to achieve extremely planar wafer surfaces as a precondition for the manufacturing of DRAM chips with these extremely small geometries.

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Division over next-generation DVDs deepening

Hollywood studios are becoming deeply divided over which high-definition technology will replace the DVD, increasing prospects that it will be years before next-generation players become standard equipment in U.S. households.

Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc signed exclusivity deals to distribute their next-generation discs on Toshiba Corp’s HD DVD format for the next 18 months, a move that evened a contest where Sony Corp’s Blu-Ray Disc appeared to be pulling ahead.

Paramount expected the lower-priced HD DVD players, which start at $299 compared with $499 for Blu-Ray, to tempt consumers more this holiday season when summer box office blockbusters are released on high-definition DVD.

“We are in a very nascent stage in the world of high definition packaged media,” said Kelley Avery, president of Paramount Home Entertainment. “Our approach is taking a look at what will motivate the consumer.”

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DRAM Finds Home in Cell Phones

Dynamic RAM is enjoying a boost in mobile devices, which are hungry for small, cool, power-efficient chips. The rapid uptake of smartphones around the world has ensured the future of DRAM (dynamic RAM) in mobile handsets, where the chips are used in every unit shipped.

Although it’s not exactly like the version of DRAM used in PCs, it works in much the same way, and the differences are mainly in size, heat, and power consumption — all key considerations in mobile phones, said Mueez Deen, director of Mobile DRAM and graphics memory, Samsung Semiconductor Inc.

For years, DRAM makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Hynix Semiconductor Inc. have hoped to see the uptake of DRAM in mobile phones in order to win orders for the massive volume of the chips required by handsets. But standard DRAM made for computers uses too much power for mobile phones, so companies developed Mobile DRAM to take on the increasing computing power of today’s smart handsets.

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Introducing the Google Phone

The Internet is buzzing about it, but only a privileged few know what it looks like, what it will do, or when it will hit the streets.

Cambridge has a chocolate factory, and a Willy Wonka. The chocolate factory is Google’s local research lab, located on the seventh floor of a Kendall Square office tower, and the resident Wonka is Rich Miner, a Google executive sometimes described as the company’s vice president of wireless but officially a “technical staff member,” according to a Google spokesman.

The golden ticket is a chance to see a prototype of Google’s new mobile phone, which Miner has shown to a handful of Boston entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, some of whom have signed nondisclosure agreements and some of whom haven’t.

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Battle of the stats: Blu-ray beats HD DVD

Another month, another consumer electronics show, and once again the backers of the rival HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats come to attempt to persuade us their favoured format is winning the war. The IFA show in Berlin last week was no exception – so how is battle faring now?

The BD boys were up first, pointing to their format’s lead in US for the 12-month period from 12 August 2006. According to Nielsen VideoScan sales stats, HD DVD outsold BD until around Christmas, but since then BD has been ahead – though it’s come very close to falling behind on a couple of occasions.

Over 2m BDs have been sold in the US up to 12 August 2007, 1.71m of them in 2007 alone. Ignoring sales before 1 January 2007, some 66.3 per cent of next-gen discs sales were BDs. That figure rises to 70 per cent in Europe, according to numbers from market watcher GfK, whose stats were used by the Blu-ray camp to claim BD has been outselling HD DVD here by a factor of 3:1 since the PS3 arrived in Europe in March.

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Faster Wi-Fi in works to transfer data

With a wave of his hand over a homemade receiver, Georgia Tech professor Joy Laskar shows how easily – and quickly – large data files could someday be transferred from a portable media player to a TV.

Poof! “You just moved a movie onto your device,” Laskar says.

While Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have emerged as efficient ways to zap small amounts of data between gadgets, neither is well suited for quickly transferring high-definition video, large audio libraries and other massive files.

Laskar and other scientists at the Georgia Electronic Design Center have turned to extremely high radio frequencies to transfer huge data files over short distances.

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