Samsung Flash HDD test AMD's plans for the end of the year

Septembre 2006 L M M J V S D 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 You can read previous news using our archives. [ Print all news of this day ]

<< Previous day's news September 21, 2006

Next day of news >> September 25, 2006

Samsung Flash HDD test   Posted on 22/09/2006 at 16:16 by Marc

	If performances of "affordable" flash hard drives are not as high as we wish they would be, the arrival of several manufacturers on the market including Samsung is rather promising considering that transfer rates announced are interesting (57 MB /s reading and 32 MB /s writing). After the demonstration of this hard drive at the last CeBIT, our colleagues from Tom’s Hardware received one and tested it. In practice, access time is 0.2ms; it only weights 49g and needs 0.05 watts in stand by and 0.9 watts in use. Transfer rates are relatively close to the specifications announced by Samsung: 49.6 MB /s reading and 29 MB /s sequential reading. The drive also obtains 18.1 MB /s for the PCMark05 Windows XP Startup test. This figure has to be compared to the 7.3 MB /s of the fastest current 2"1/2 drives (Momentus 7200.1 and Hitachi5K160). With IOmeter File Server and a single access, performances are two times higher. The gap however reduces with the number of concurrent access increase. The reorganisation command bear fruit for classic hard drives. These results are encouraging even if we have to keep in mind the main downside of flash hard drives: the limited number of writing in a same area. The other problem, the price, is not really important for now as Samsung hasn't given a price for this 32 GB version.

AMD's plans for the end of the year   Posted on 22/09/2006 at 13:24 by Nicolas - source: Tweakers.net

	Tweakers.net published some information concerning AMD's plans for the end of the year: The AM2 Athlon 64 X2 will continue to evolve. In November, AMD will introduce three 90 nm models, the X2 5400+ and 5600+ clocked at 2.8 GHz and the X2 6000+ clocked at 3.0 GHz. The 5600+ is equivalent to the current FX-62, but the TDP is reduced from 125W to 89W. The transition to 65 nm will be progressive with the release in December of models clocked at 2.6 GHz max. This let us believe that like with the change to 90nm, AMD will initially have some trouble with high frequencies. The TDP will be of 65 W as compared to 98 W for the equivalent 90nm standard version and 65 W for the Energy Efficient version. To finish, it seems that the 4x4 platform (Quad Father) will change its name from Opteron to Athlon 64 FX since it won't be available with AM2 but with Socket 1207. If this information is verified, this platform will be even less interesting because it won't be possible for Athlon64 X2 / FX processors owners to buy a motherboard and only one CPU to use it. Anyway, according to Tweakers.net, Athlon 64 FX Socket F processor would only be sold by pair.