Flash Memory Summit 2012 - Since we just happened to be in town at the world's only dedicated NAND flash event, we decided a little extracurricular overclocking was in order. Corsair provided us with some of the hottest new technology on the market today, AX1200i, the world's first all digital power supply, eight Neutron GTX SSDs, the world's first Link_A_Media Devices SSDs and two Dominator Platinum 2400C9 kits. Areca tied it all together with a brand new, unreleased ARC-1882ix-12 with 4GB of DDR3 cache, a true PCIe 3.0 RAID controller.

We managed to smash the record with a result of 55,340 PCMarks. PCMark Vantage is the premier storage benchmarking suite used worldwide, so to break the overall record isn't easy.

As per usual when we set out for taking a record there is a large amount of Liquid Nitrogen used, bringing us down to -130C on the processor to allow for much higher CPU clocks. Quite a bit of preparation and test runs went into this adventure, with Mike Guava and Charles Wirth, AKA Fugger, from XtremeSystems taking point.

It's about time that someone went and made a 7990. We've been hearing that AMD has them coming for a long time now, but they have failed to deliver. That is, until today. PowerCooler has announced the world's first dual-Tahiti GPU and is calling it the 7990. Does this mean that we may finally start seeing them from other manufacturers?

For right now, PowerCooler is billing this card as the first and only 7990 in the world. The specifications are pretty beefy and really provide what everyone was expecting. The Devil 13 HD7990 has default settings at 925MHz engine clocks and 1375MHz memory clocks and sports 6GB of GDDR5.

Solidly-Built Design

Earlier on today we were invited to the GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei where we were told we would see the Taiwanese motherboard maker and its in-house professional overclocker HiCookie try to set a new world record for the Intel Core i7 3770K processor.

Overclocking was done on the upcoming GA-Z77X-UP7 motherboard that is due to be released this coming Monday - GIGABYTE at the time of writing were not prepared to comment on pricing as it is yet to be 100% confirmed. However, you can expect the price to be fairly high as this is a board designed for overclockers and it has plenty of top notch features to help overclockers around the world set new performance records. In the video above I mentioned that the Z77X-UP7 is much like a Formula One car in its design theory. Every little tweak has been included and high-end components such as 32 CPU phases are included to help set said new records.

Besides the massive amount of power phases and its all-digital power system, GIGABYTE has included some new handy switches this time around. There are two switches at the southern end of the motherboard. One is to control which BIOS is used (master or backup) since this board like all other GIGABYTE boards support Dual BIOS. The second switch disables the Dual BIOS function as sometimes overclockers get into a kind of loop issue that has the motherboard looping between both BIOSes to figure out which one to use.

Apple and Samsung may be at each others throats in the US courts, but in South Korea, a court has ruled that Samsung didn't violate on Apple's iPhone design. A judge at the Seoul Central District Court said:

There are lots of external design similarities between the iPhone and Galaxy S, such as rounded corners and large screens ... but these similarities had been documented in previous products. Given that it's very limited to make big design changes in touch-screen based mobile products in general ... and the defendant (Samsung) differentiated its products with three buttons in the front and adopted different designs in camera and (on the) side, the two products have a different look.

The judge also cited that it is difficult to say that consumers would confuse the iPhone with the Galaxy, considering they both sport completely different logos on the back of each model. Consumers also factor in operating systems, brand, applications, price and services when buying a smartphone.

FMS 2012 - SMART Storage has been making waves lately in the enterprise SSD space with an entire line of drives for every type of application.

The focus at the Flash Memory Summit was on the Optimus SSD, which sports a dual SAS connection. This allows this SSD to pull off 1GB/s in sequential read speed and 500 MB/s in write speed.

A closer look reveals that the SSD has two SAS connectors connecting into the device, which allows the high power of the SSD to be unleashed. This also allows for several types of enterprise features, such as failover and multipath data access.

FMS 2012 - Marvell has revealed their new DragonFly NVRAM solution for servers at the Flash Memory Summit.

As we can see this card comes in a small package and sports a PCIe Gen2x8 connection to the host.

Getting down under the cover we can see some of the components that allow the DragonFly to reach its impressive specifications of 200K+ IOPS, 3.2GBps and .22us latency. The DragonFly connects to SSDs via a typical SFF connector, and acts as a front end for the attached storage. The data is cached to the DRAM chip that is located towards the top right of the card. The battery near the bottom is used to write the data cached into ram to the NAND, on the rear of the card, in the event of power failure.

This week, Galaxy device maker, Samsung, opened their first retail "experience" store in Sydney, Australia. The design of the store is quite swish, featuring the company's blue look, right down to the t-shirts on its employees backs.

There's a dedicated customer support desk that is run by "Samsung Smart Tutors", that mimics Apple's Genius Bar. There's also a group demonstration bar, displays, and more products than you can find stars in a... galaxy.

Some have said that Samsung's new store looks too much like an Apple Store, but Samsung's corporate color is blue. Last time I checked, Apple haven't got the patent on the color blue. As for the design of the store itself, there's only so many ways a store can be laid out when showing off smart devices, too.

FMS 2012 - HGST today demonstrated their new 12Gb/s SAS Enterprise SSDs. These are the first 12Gb/s SSDs in existence, and they are in an unbranded case.

We can see the performance improvement between a current tech 6Gb/s SSD, which is pulling down 547 MB/s in sequential read, and the 12Gb/s SSD that is providing 995 MB/s from one device! Nearly 1GB/s of sequential speed from a single SSD is simply unheard of with today's interface.

The 6Gb/s, in the foreground, and the 12Gb/s SSD are both of similar size, so the performance increase does not involve a larger device.

Everyone mostly hears about movie and music piracy, thanks in part to the efforts of the RIAA and MPAA to spread awareness. There's not a group of app developers, at least not yet, lobbying the government to attack this problem, so it's rather interesting that the government has taken the initiative to attack app piracy.

The US government, through the use of the FBI and seizure warrants, has smacked down three different app piracy sites in one swoop. The sites in question are applanet.net, appbucket.net and snappzmarket.com and now visiting any of these three sites gives you the message above. It likely also logs your IP address as a potential pirate.

As per the standard operating procedure for sites such as these, the servers were located overseas so this take down required cooperation between the FBI and foreign law enforcement. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breur explains just why this is such a growing problem for the United States:

Facebook has finally updated its aging app to improve its performance. Unfortunately, this update only takes care of iOS users as there has been no announcement regarding Android. However, if you are an iOS user, this update should make you significantly more happy with the Facebook app as it is quite a bit faster.

According to the Facebook post, "Facebook 5.0 for iOS is twice as fast as the previous version when launching the app, scrolling through news feed and opening photos in feed." This speed increase is due to the app being completely rewritten from the ground up. A quick update and you'll be able to see for yourself just how much better it is.

The changes are as follows: