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 More active on the SSD market in terms of communiqués than products, Sandisk has put forward two propositions that look to standardize somewhat the situation with respect to SSDs.
The LDE, standing for Longterm Data Endurance, aims to stanardize figures in terms of SSD lifespans. Based on a standard usage of the SSD, it will be expressed in terabytes and will represent the amount of data that can be written on an SSD over its lifespan. Sandisk has offered the LDE to JEDEC, but the concept still has not been adopted, what is considered to be a standard load is still to be defined and the programme needed to reproduce such a load so as to measure the LDE, still has to be written. There is no guarantee, then, that Sandisk will manage to get the industry to accept the LDE, though without any doubt it would be a positive point if it does.
As for vRPM, standing for Virtual RPM, it is a measurement supposed to give us all a means of comparing SSD performance to hard disk performance, Sandisk working on the principal that it is this that is used to compare HDDs one to another. This is true, but comparing HDDs by comparing RPM has never been very accurate and to continue along this road does not seem a particularly clever idea.
Anyway, to calculate this vRPM, you have to calculate, for a usage constituting 50% reads and 50% writes, the average number of I/Os per second. This figure is then multiplied by 50, and hey presto, you get your vRPM. Using the same concept, we learn that our Western Caviar SE 16 640 GB has a vRPM of 4145 without NCQ, 8330 with, and that the VelociRaptor is at 7530 without, and 17790 with. C’est magnifique! |
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 While Windows 7 is supposed to bring an improved management of SSDs and the UBISF file system designed for Flash hardware has already been integrated into the most recent versions of the Linux kernel, Sandisk has today announced ExtremeFFS, a supposedly revolutionary file system to come out in 2009.
Sandisk is announcing levels of performance up to 100 times existing systems for random write speeds, as well as an uncoupling of physical and logical processes to better place data. In addition, ExtremeFFS should be able to analyse how the SSD is used so as to organize the data for maximum acces speed.
This may all seem pretty on paper, but in fact ExtremeFFS does no more no less than current SSDs with high performance controlers, but does it using software rather than hardware. Placing the system upstream does of course have advantages in terms of cost, in particular for systems requiring a high degree of integration, but in terms of our PCs, the solution is likely to be of very limited interest. |
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A month ago, an Asian site reported that NVIDIA was intending to launch a new card under the name GeForce 9600 GSO, based on a chip quite a bit less powerful than the original model. This was refuted the following day by NVIDIA France, but the report did indeed turn out to be accurate!
ZOTAC is the first to announce such cards, in three versions: 512 MB, 1 GB and 512 MB overclocked (AMP! Edition). The first two are clocked at 650/900 MHz, against 700/1000 MHz for the last.
 Until now the GeForce 9600 GSO was based on a G92, a chip with 754 million transistors engraved at 65nm, a chip which is also used in the GeForce 8800/9800. It was of course castrated, as it was in the GeForce 8800 GS. On the GeForce 9800 GTX, then, the G92 is clocked at 675 MHz with 128 calculation units, 64 texturing/filtering units and 16 ROPs, all accompanied by a 1.1 GHz 256 bit memory. On the 9600 GSO, the G92 is at 550 MHz, with only 3/4 of the units active, the same as for the 192 bit memory bus. Now, the new GeForce 9600 GSO will be based on a G94, a chip with 505 million transistors engraved at 65nm and even at 55nm in a more recent revision. On the 9600 GT, this chip is clocked at 650 MHz and has 64 calculation units, 32 texturing/filtering units and 16 ROPs, with a 256 bit 900 MHz memory on top. On the new GeForce 9600 GSO, there is still a 256 bit memory bus, a good thing in comparison with the current model then, with a bandwidth over 9%. Only 3/4 will however be activated … such that in the end the old 9600 GSO has a 69% higher processing, filtering and texturing power! There can be little doubt then that the new GeForce 9600 GSO performs less well than the old model. True, NVIDIA could not match the Radeon HD 4650/4670 with a chip such as the G92 and needed a less costly solution that nevertheless offered a significant gain in performance on the GeForce 9500 GT, which is not competitive. But keeping the same name as a better performing old card is simply not honest. |
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