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Seagate's new 2TB Barracuda XT boasts 6Gbps support

Steve Dougherty | Storage | Sep 21, 2009 2:32 AM CDT

Much like Western Digital with its energy-efficient Green series, mainstream Blue series and high-performance/enthusiast oriented Black series desktop HDDs, Seagate now has a three-tier arrangement in place with their latest high-performance XT series of drives shipping to distributors as of today. Seagate also has the existing Barracuda LP series drives for low-power users and of course the standard Barracuda 7200 series for mainstream.

Only one drive is known in the new XT series thus far, this being a 2TB model packed with 500GB platters, spinning at a rate of 7,200RPM. The cache system comprises a whopping 64MB and the drive carries a lengthy 5 year warranty. The best thing about this drive versus Western Digital's Caviar Black 2TB unit is that the XT 2GB from Seagate boasts support for 6Gbps host-to-disk transfer rates, so you'll be next-gen ready if you purchase one of these drives. However, as Tech Report point out, while the interface and amount of cache alone make it possible to use the extra bandwidth, the physical media cannot and Seagate themselves quote a maximum sustained data rate of around 140MB/sec.

As expected, the drive won't be cheap given its capacity and feature-set; an MSRP of around $300 USD, but WD's 2TB Caviar Black carries the same RRP so it will be interesting to see how the two compare. We hope to bring these results to you in the near future once we get hold of a sample.

Continue reading: Seagate's new 2TB Barracuda XT boasts 6Gbps support (full post)

Gulftown Smiles for the Camera

Sean Kalinich | Cameras, Printers & Scanners | Sep 18, 2009 10:53 AM CDT

Although the Intel 32nm, Six-Core Westmere is still a long way away, there have been a few new sightings of the coveted piece of silicon.

The latest is over at PCGames Hardware. Although it is hard to tell exactly what this is, as there are no markings visible on it. It is easy to tell that it is not a Bloomfield by the layout of the underside of the CPU.

Also absent from the sighting are any type of performance testing but we have a feeling that some form of benchmark will be coming out soon. The Gulftown CPU will be the nest evolution of the Nehalem Architecture and will add an extra two cores (4 threads) to the already formidable processing power found in the current Core i7 9xx CPUs.

Continue reading: Gulftown Smiles for the Camera (full post)

Graphine could be used to make better CPUs and Solar Cells

Sean Kalinich | CPUs, Chipsets & SoCs | Sep 18, 2009 10:02 AM CDT

Graphine and Carbon NanoTubes (CNT) are going to be all the rage in the next 5 years; simply everyone will be wearing them. Well maybe not wearing them but many many people are going to be working with them in the very near future.

The biggest place that Graphine and Nanotubes will be of benefit is in making smaller and more efficient transistors. This will benefit CPUs and other Integrated Circuits that are currently made in silicon. For those that do not know what Graphine is, it is a single layer of carbon molecules in effect it is 2 dimensional. This means smaller and less "leaky" CPU designs can be made in the future.

Intel and AMD are known to be working on them in conjunction with university researchers. Intel estimates that they may have a conventional transistor made from Graphine towards the end of the next decade (about 5-6 years from now).

Continue reading: Graphine could be used to make better CPUs and Solar Cells (full post)

Intel to Show off USB 3.0 at IDF

Sean Kalinich | Connectivity & Cloud | Sep 17, 2009 8:54 PM CDT

Intel is planning to show off some USB 3.0 devices at IDF. There will be everything from a Laptop from Fujitsu to a camera that will run off of the high-speed USB port.

USB 3.0 is the next generation of the Universal Serial Bus standard that was first introduced at the end of the Windows 95 era. USB was touted as the best thing since sliced bread despite not having proper drivers for most of the operating systems out. Windows 95 was the big product from MS and it required the installation of an upgrade (to version b) to get USB support.

Of course things are a little different now with the move to the newer standard. The devices that are being built to run off this are faster and more demanding. For example with the new SuperSpeed USB standard we will see (for the first time) a USB Attached SCSI Protocol. This will allow greatly increased throughput on external drives with reduced latency for better and more consistent transfer of data.

Continue reading: Intel to Show off USB 3.0 at IDF (full post)

Apple's Snow Leopard gets a Third-Party OpenCL GCD boost

Sean Kalinich | Software & Apps | Sep 17, 2009 8:13 PM CDT

Yesterday Apple announced that they were opening up the Grand Central Dispatch code. So, of course today we see the first of the "third-party" applications developed for it.

Interestingly it is a video encoding application that makes use of the OpenCL libraries found in Snow Leopard. The name of the application is called movie gate. It was developed by Christophe Ducommun and shows roughly a 50% performance increase over non-OpenCL performance. When I read this news I started to have flash backs to when NVIDIA released their Cuda API. At the time they called it WhoopAss, a rather goofy name for a bundle of demo applications and a single Video encoding app that was not much faster than CPU encoding (back then).

Despite this flash back I was actually impressed when I read further down in the article. You see although I dislike Apple as a company the one thing that I will always give them for is their Video Editing/ Authoring Applications. I still use FinalCut and DVD Studio for my authoring and NLE Editing. So with this new development I am starting to wonder if it is time to build me a hackintosh complete with some third-party OpenCL plugins.

Continue reading: Apple's Snow Leopard gets a Third-Party OpenCL GCD boost (full post)

AMD Six-Core CPU could show up in 2010

Sean Kalinich | CPU, APU & Chipsets | Sep 17, 2009 2:56 PM CDT

AMD is working on a six core desktop CPU. This is supposed to be an answer to Intel's Gulftown and, if current CPU marketing is any indication, should also be for future mid-range and low end CPUs.

There is a problem with this new hope for AMD; while the idea of a six core desktop based off of the Istanbul core is nice, AMD is not ready to compete with Intel's just yet.

The first is issue process. Intel will offer Gulftown at 32nm while the new AMD Desktop will be 45nm. As both companies want to stay inside a 130-140 Watt TDP, Intel will have an easier time and be able to clock higher within the same envelope. The advantage here will go to Intel unless AMD can make their CPU more efficient like they did in the Athlon 64 days.

Continue reading: AMD Six-Core CPU could show up in 2010 (full post)

Apple's iPhone OS 3.1 causing issues

Sean Kalinich | Mobile Devices | Sep 17, 2009 12:33 PM CDT

So, Apple released its latest version of the iPhone OS version 3.1 recently. At first glance the new software looks like it has a number of improvements. However, it has come to our attention that many people are very unhappy with this new release and not just the jailbreaking/unlocking crowd.

Reports are popping up that OS 3.1 has a negative impact on battery life, SMS/MMS performance, random shutdowns, mobile Safari crashes and breaks exchange support on older generation iPhone's.

The problem has sparked an increasingly response from iPhone 2G and 3G owners on the Apple support forums. This latest issue flies in the face of the current statements by Apple that OS 3.1 is a major improvement over previous ones.

Continue reading: Apple's iPhone OS 3.1 causing issues (full post)

AMD finally gets back to Physics on the GPU

Sean Kalinich | Video Cards & GPUs | Sep 17, 2009 9:08 AM CDT

Back in the days of the X19xx series Radeon GPUs, AMD and ATI were talking about using the GPU to process in game physics. This was in contrast to anything that was being thought about over at NVIDIA and, at the time, was even denounced by NVIDIA as a bad idea.

Unfortunately, AMD and ATI did not put much effort into moving physics onto the GPU and NVIDIA did. NVIDIA even went so far as to buy Agiea, so that they would own the complete PhysX library. This left AMD out in the cold as yet another AMD idea was openly taken and implemented by another company.

Well now, a few years later, AMD is getting back to physics on the GPU. They have partnered up with Pixelux and Bullet to bring an Open Physics library to not only the Radeon GPU, but to pretty much any GPU. This move should help to bring a more standardized physics library to developers.

Continue reading: AMD finally gets back to Physics on the GPU (full post)

VIA launches new Product Category called "NetNote"

Sean Kalinich | Laptops | Sep 16, 2009 2:19 PM CDT

Hot on the heels of the new HP ION based netbook, we see VIA is launching what it is calling a "NetNote". Besides the ridiculous sounding name, this new product category is noteworthy for the fact that it is capable of playing back 1080p HD video.

This is the same high-end resolution that the NVIDIA ION platform is shooting for. Now while this is very impressive, what I did not see in the press release was any indication that the associated netbooks were able to display this on its tiny little 10.1 - 12-inch displays. If they cannot playback 1080p natively in the display, it does reduce the impact of having this feature available in the first place. They might manage 720p in a 10-incher, but I doubt 1080p is going to happen. I would think that if this was the case, we would see it bandied about in the text of the PR. Instead we only see VIA working hard to create a new category in the mobile world exactly where we do not need a new category.

VIA is getting this performance from its VX855 media processor combined with its Chrome9 HCM IGP. The company is also dropping in an HDMI port to turn your NetNote(Book) into a mobile HD media center.

Continue reading: VIA launches new Product Category called "NetNote" (full post)

AMD into third version of Fusion Idea

Sean Kalinich | CPU, APU & Chipsets | Sep 16, 2009 1:28 PM CDT

AMD just pushed out a nicely priced quad-core CPU. This is the Athlon II X4 and you can get one of these for just under $100 US. Now this is all great, but there are some things going on behind this new launch that are a cause for concern.

You see, back when Hector Ruiz was planning the financial fiasco that would be the ATI acquisition, AMD and ATI were talking about a CPU with a native GPU built into a single die. This new product had the label of Fusion.

Well, AMD is now onto its third version (the last two were cancelled) while Intel in their typical fashion has its own version of this idea ready to launch by the end of the year. This is the same issue we saw with the first quad-core CPUs. AMD expounded on the virtues of having a "native" quad-core CPU, while Intel simply bolted two dual-cores together.

Continue reading: AMD into third version of Fusion Idea (full post)

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