Archive for category Hardware
Next gen Atom coming after October
Posted by The Right Guy in Hardware, Intel on June 10th, 2009
Atom N450
According to a Digitimes report, Intel is planning to launch a new Atom CPU no earlier than October.
Dubbed Atom N450, the new processor will replace the N270 used in most netbooks today. Unlike the N270, the N450 has some built-in northbridge functions, and the entire platform will consist of only two chips, unlike the current platform which has three. The new 45nm CPU will be coupled with the Tiger Point chipset, designated NM10.
Obviously the new two-chip design will be less power hungry, and due to its compact size it will allow manufacturers to come up with thinner, lighter netbooks, and possible even some new form factors. However, we still don’t know the clocks and don’t have any performance details.
Digitimes claims Intel will issue a last order notice for the N270 in Q1 2010, and it will cease production sometime in 1H 2010. It is still a unclear what will happen to Silverthorne and Poulsbo, or should we say Z-series Atoms and the US15W chipset.
More here.
AMD plans to take on Intel’s Atom
Posted by The Right Guy in AMD, Hardware on June 8th, 2009
Well, sort of
AMD CEO Dirk Meyer says the company is working on a new low-power mobile platform which could take on Intel’s Atom. Samples should ship sometime in 2010.
However, Meyer, who believes netbooks will fade away as a separate product category, says the new chips will be used for notebooks, not netbooks. The important thing to point out is that AMD expects the new platform to end up cheaper than the Atom, and in this ultra-cheap market segment, even a slight price difference could mean a lot. Another thing AMD has going for it is its prowess in IGP design.
Meyer also said AMD is developing a new platform for thin and light notebooks, which will be positioned between Congo and Yukon. He also believes ARM-based netbooks will have a tough time penetrating the netbook market, as they lack proper software support, i.e. Microsoft won’t port Windows for such devices.
Also, AMD will soon launch a new mainstream mobile platform, codenamed Tigris.
More here.
Adobe Flash to be accelerated on netbooks
Nvidia and Broadcom promise
Since Flash obviously isn’t easy on the CPU which of course reflects on netbooks’ battery life, Nvidia and Broadcom announced full hardware Flash acceleration by upgrading Adobe’s plugin resulting in smooth playback of HD flash video and lower CPU usage.
Unfortunately, these improvements will initially run only on Nvidia’s Tegra solutions or Atom netbooks with Broadcom’s Crystal HD video acceleration add-on. This means that it’ll take a while before we see this in action and even longer before it becomes a mainstream feature.
We’re likely to see some other Flash acceleration announcements as well, but until we see this feature in action we can’t say more.
More here.
SATA 3.0 is now official
Posted by The Right Guy in Hard Drive, Hardware on May 28th, 2009
The 6Gbps transfer rate
The Serial ATA International Organization has finally made the third-generation SATA interface official. It provides maximum transfer speed of 6 Gb/s and comes with many other enhancements as well.
The new SATA 3.0 is backwards compatible with all the previous standards. The new enhancements or features, if you like to call them like that, include a new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command for isochronous data transfers, NCQ Management that optimizes performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands, improved power management capabilities, a small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for 1.8-inch drives, a connector for 7mm optical disk drives for thin and light notebooks, and alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard.
We already saw some draft versions of the standard, and we are quite sure that some manufacturers will show their first SATA 6Gbps devices at Computex.