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Intel and Micron have announced being the first to offer Flash NAND MLC engraved with a size inferior to 40nm. These 4 GB chips produced in 34nm by IM Flash Technologies, a subsidiary shared by the two giants, will enable them to create SSDs with a capacity equal or superior to 256 GB while still keeping the 1.8" format.
 Thanks to this particularly advanced process, the surface of a chip will not surpass 172mm², which enables a total density of 1.6 TB on 300mm wafers. While it may seem a bit surprising to see IM Flash Technologies start to use 34nm when the Penryn "only" is at 45nm, we should keep in mind that a Flash or memory chip is generally much less complex than a CPU. Moreover, it was with SRAM that Intel has attacked the 32nm process on 300mm wafers. |
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 The GeForce 7xx0 - nForce 6x0i aka MCP73 launched at the end of September didn’t inspire much excitement, notably due to the pure and simple absence of PureVideo. Moreover, Nvidia seems to be having problems perfecting its successor, the MCP79/7A.
According to OCWorkbench, all the bugs found in stepping A1 were not satisfactorily remedied in the B1 revision and motherboard manufacturers prefer to wait for the B2. If all goes well, this mGPU destined to second Intel and VIA processors will offer support of DirectX 10, Hybrid SLI, PureVideo HD and PCI-Express 2.0.
According to recent drivers which were leaked this week, the integrated graphic core will be called the GeForce 9400, and curiously the G98, an entirely different GPU destined to very low level graphic cards, will become the GeForce 9300 or even the GeForce 8400 in some cases. |
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A few weeks from the launch of the GeForce GTX 200 and Radeon HD 4800, S3 has officially announced its Chrome 440 GTX.
 S3’s graphic subsidiary is unfortunately not too generous with details, but the card was presented as being similar to the Chrome 430 GT. We can therefore assume that its bigger sibling will differ only with higher frequencies. Its GPU is moreover set at 725 MHz or 100 MHz more than the 430 GT. It’s engraved in 65nm by Fujitsu, supports Shader Model 4.1, DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 2.1, PCI-Express 2.0 and has ChromotionHD which supports the H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, WMV-HD and AVS standards. The memory bus has a width of 64 bits but the GDDR2 500 MHz is replaced by GDDR3 set at 700 MHz. The card will soon be offered by GStore for $69.95 and it should also be available in Europe. |
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 Seagate’s CEO, Bill Watkins, has reaffirmed the relative interest that his company has added to SSDs in spite of the fact that the hard drive giant wagered more on hybrids, the lawsuit filed against STEC and warnings to other SSDs manufacturers.
A first model destined to the professional segment will be offered in 2009. As for more common versions, Mr. Watkins estimates that consumers aren’t willing to pay more for this type of technology and we will have to wait a couple of years for production costs to decrease until Seagate offers SSDs on this market.
For Seagate, the cost of the SSD, which is $3.58 per GB according to iSuppli, is too high and it’s of little importance that speeds are superior and power consumption is significantly less. However, it is undeniable that prices are decreasing and that there is a much bigger market than just the professional segment given the number of companies that have launched into the SSD sector.
And this is exactly why the biggest hard drive manufacturer may be so frigid. They probably have no interest in supporting a new market which is susceptible to overshadow another and older one upon which it has much influence and where the competition can be counted on one hand. An even bigger reason is that the new arrivals, which are expected to pay royalties, seem to be a length ahead. Of course, it can also just be a series of coincidences...
Otherwise, Seagate has announced the release of a hard drive with a capacity of 2 TB starting in 2009 without revealing any other details. |
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 The version 2.0 of Gelato, rendering software that is accelerated by Nvidia’s GPU, has already been available free of charge and now there is Gelato Pro 2.2 for the 3D design, animation, and postproduction communities. The Pro version differs amongst other things by the presence of Sorbetto (a tool for working with and optimizing lighting shaders), network parallel rendering, multi threading, and native 64-bit support. Like its smaller sibling, it is only supported in Windows XP and Linux.
The reason for this gift valued at $1500 to owners of the Quadro FX is that the company with the green chameleon is weary of Italian ice cream and it is therefore the last version. Nvidia announces that in the future, its rendering teams and those of Mental Images, which it acquired in mid-December, will concentrate on the development of mental ray which was up until recently 3D rendering engine software. |
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 After the Xeon "Harpertown" and "Wolfdale-DP", E3110 as well as the Core 2 Duo E8400 and E8500, it’s now the Core 2 Quad Q9550 and Xeon "Yorkfield" X3350 and 3360 which will adopt stepping E0.
The S-Spec goes from SLAWQ to SLB8V for the Q9550, from SLAX2 to SLB8Y for the X3350, and from SLAWZ to SLB8X for the X3360. As they previously used the C1 revision of the Penryn core, the CPUID changes from 0x10677 to 0x1067A. Other modifications are classic: the Power Status Indicator (PSI) is now supported (if the motherboard allows it) and there is ACNT2, which enables the P-state (Performance state) to be more efficient.
There were also modifications to the PECI (Platform Environmental Control Interface), XSAVE/XRSTOR instructions were added, and the CPU package no longer contains halides. Note that the Xeon X3320 is also concerned, but it goes from stepping M1 to R0 as it only has 6 MB of L2 cache versus 12 MB for the two other models. Its S-Spec goes from SLAWF to SLB69. |
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According to Fudzilla, Albatron will present GeForce 8s with a PCI connector next week at the Computex.
 The photos of the two cards below are the GeForce 8500 GT and 8600 GT equipped with GDDR3 and an 8400 GS should also be released. A PCI-E to PCI bridge made by Pericom is of course present (on the back of the card). While Nvidia has given up AGP with its DirectX 10 GPUs, obviously the question is being asked concerning the interest that such cards represent. However, we should keep in mind that a number of motherboards in mini-ITX format do not have PCI-E ports and that in the case of the Nettop Atom, drastic limitations were imposed by Intel. The most recent PCI graphic card up until now and produced in significant volume has been the Radeon 9200 which has somewhat aged. Otherwise, in terms of 3D performances, we can hardly expect any miracles. A few years ago, some manufacturers took the risk of offering motherboards equipped with a PCI-E x16 port in addition to an AGP port interfaced on the PCI bus (suffering from the same limitations), which at the time already represented a major bottle neck. We can only guess what it will be with recent GPUs. The only thing is that they support a large number of interesting functions contrary to the aging 945GC... |
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