2.5 TB drives late A “Turbo Mode” for the Phenom II X6?

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2.5 TB drives late   Posted on 08/02/2010 at 11:55 by Benoit - source: TechConnect

	TDK has updated its roadmap with respect to the hard drive heads it's working on for hard drive manufacturers. When you compare with what was announced in August, you can see that 3.5 inch 640 GB platters are running late. Initially announced for November, they won’t actually be ready until March! This 4-month delay is also delaying the arrival of 2.5 TB hard drives. In terms of the 2.5 inch models, TDK has announced that it began production of heads for 375 GB platters this month. This will allow 2.5 inch drives to have two platters, which makes for the 750 GB limit. The higher platter density allows both higher storage capacities and higher speeds. After having quickly broken the 1 TB and then 2 TB limits following the arrival of perpendicular recording, capacities seem now to be reaching their limit. More than a technical limitation, it would seem that resources are now being channeled into research and development for SSDs.

A “Turbo Mode” for the Phenom II X6?   Posted on 08/02/2010 at 11:41 by Benoit - source: Xbit Labs

	While AMD Phenom IIs represent good value in terms of their performance/price ratio, they’re still dominated by Intel’s Core i7s. The next development likely to challenge the current status quo is known under the name “Thuban” and planned for release in May: these are six core versions of the Phenom IIs. They are however also likely to bring some small changes at chip level, some of which could improve performance and energy efficiency. There has been no official word from AMD on the subject yet, so it’s best to not to count our chickens, however Xbit Labs have put forward an interesting hypothesis. The rumours go that like Intel with its Turbo Mode, AMD could be implementing a technology that automatically varies clocks and active cores. When an application doesn’t use all six cores of the CPU (and these applications are numerous), the Thuban may purely and simply be able to disactivate cores that aren’t being used and increase the clocks of any active cores. Once again, nothing is confirmed here. These are merely hypotheses built on rumours. The concept does however seem credible and technically possible. While room for manoeuvre in terms of automatic overclocking is limited for the Phenom II X4s, the relatively low base clocks on the X6s should give considerably more potential.