Low shipments of DDR2 DRAM Memory chip price cuts 4x DVD+R/-R discs price cut Pentium M 710 Gigabyte also releases SLI motherboards

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Low shipments of DDR2 DRAM   Posted on 25/11/2004 at 19:37 by Marc

	According to DigiTimes, shipments by chipmakers of DDR2 DRAM to PC OEMs are still low because the yield rates at 0.11-micron process technology are still too low to provide a consistent chip supply. With high reject rates, the DDR2 remains clearly more expensive than the DDR. However as DDR2 currently doesn’t provide important performances gains compared to the DDR, this price issue isn’t really such a big deal…

Memory chip price cuts   Posted on 25/11/2004 at 19:11 by Marc

	Early November we announced that memory prices have been reduced after a 16.7% increase from mid-September to early October. This price reduction continues in November, 32 MB DDR400 chip prices have been reduced by 10.3% from $4.48 in the beginning of November to $4.02 today. We are back to the lowest price ever recorded for this type of chip: it was one year ago in November.

4x DVD+R/-R discs price cut   Posted on 25/11/2004 at 19:01 by Marc

	According to our colleagues from DigiTimes, OEM price of 4x DVD+/-R discs for OEMs have been reduced to US$0.15, instead of US$0.30 during the first semester. The new price, initiated by Chinese manufacturers, is now lower than current average production costs of US$0.16-0.17 in Taiwan. Taiwanese and Japanese manufacturers have now shifted their production focus to 8x and 16x DVD+R/-R discs. The market price for 8x and 16x DVD+R/-R discs has however also been reduced from 0.8 to 1$ in the beginning of the third quarter to 0.4-0.5$ today.

Pentium M 710   Posted on 25/11/2004 at 18:54 by Marc

	Intel has discreetly released a new Pentium M, the 710. This processor has a 90 nm fabrication process and is equipped with 2 MB of cache like all Pentium M based on the Dothan core. The 710 is clocked at 1.4 GHz and hasn’t been officially announced yet. What is the difference between this processor and the Celeron M 360 1.4 GHz? Except for the cache L2, 2 Mb instead of 1MB, these processors are identical and even performances are similar in practice. But with this product, laptop manufactures are able to offer an even cheaper Pentium M. The Celeron M has a disadvantage because of its name even if the performance gap between the Pentium M and the Celeron M is not equivalent to the performance gap between the desktop Pentium 4 and Celeron.

Gigabyte also releases SLI motherboards   Posted on 25/11/2004 at 18:24 by Marc

	After ASUSTeK and MSI, Gigabyte releases an nForce4 SLI motherboard. The GA-K8NXP-SLI will include several functionalities: -Socket 939 -2 PCI Express x16 slots for SLI -2 PCI Express x1 slots -2 PCI slots -4 DIMM 184 pins for DDR400 -4 Serial ATA managed by the nForce4 -4 Serial ATA managed by the Silicon Image 3114 -3 FireWire IEEE1394b managed by a TI chip -8 audio channels managed by a CODEC Realtek -1 Lan Gigabit managed by the nForce4 + PHY Speed -1 Lan Gigabit managed by a Marvell PCI-E chip -Double bios -Double processor power supply The counterpart of all these functionalities? There isn’t much space on the PCB. With two graphic cards it is only possible to use one PCI Express x1 slot and one standard PCI slot. The GA-K8NXP-SLI should be release in December. We don’t know the price yet