Intel Reveals Solid State Value Drives

Intel enters the storage market with a solid offering

Intel Corporation announced today its entry into solid state drives with the Intel Z-U130. Aimed at delivering performance and value, the drives are based on NAND flash memory with standard USB 2.0/1.1 interfaces. Intel says that the advantages of its Z-U130 over hard disk drives and removable USB storage devices are faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access and low-power storage alternatives.

Solid state drives enjoy several advantages over traditional hard disk drives, such as faster start up, faster read times, lower seek times, less power consumption, silent operation and lower weight. Solid state drives should also be more reliable as there are no moving parts involved in the device’s operation. On the flip side, magnetic-based drives may endure better after a great number of read/write cycles and faster write times. For the foreseeable future, traditional hard disk drives will also enjoy the cost advantage at large capacities.

“Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability,” said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager of Intel’s NAND Products Group. “The Intel solid state drive technology provides robust performance, while offering Intel’s industry leading quality, validation and reliability for a wide variety of embedded applications.”more

AMD Hopes Quad-Core Server Chip Is Answer to Woes

Chipmaker will try to beat Intel with high performance instead of low prices.
Ben Ames, IDG News Service

Struggling to rebound from a $574 million loss in fourth-quarter earnings that it reported earlier this week, Advanced Micro Devices is pinning its hopes for recovery in 2007 to its planned "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip.

Since it launched in November, Intel's competing "Clovertown" quad-core Xeon chip has been adopted mainly for high-end research server platforms; Clovertown has been hobbled in part by a lack of multithreaded software capable of taking full advantage of the new chip technology. But AMD hopes to sell its Barcelona chip to users ranging from managers of high-performance computing centers to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).
Revenue Increase Hopes

AMD expects a bounce in revenue when Barcelona launches the processor by the middle of 2007, since many customers have delayed buying new systems until the chip comes out. The company hopes that Barcelona will, at long last, enable AMD to break into the low-end server segment, which includes one-chip and two-chip computers and tower PCs, and rack-mounted servers.

"We're not yet in the SMB segment; it represents for us a great volume opportunity since we have so little market share now," said Kevin Knox, vice president of AMD's commercial business, on Wednesday.view site

Intel Pitches Plan to Beat Chip Glut

Intel hopes to stay profitable by producing new chip designs faster than its competitors, according to the company's president.

Facing a market glut of microprocessors and weak corporate demand for PCs running Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows Vista OS, Intel Corp. hopes to stay profitable by producing new chip designs faster than its competitors, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said Monday.

"There's clearly more capacity to build microprocessors than there is demand in 2007, and probably in 2008," Otellini told financial analysts at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco.

To decrease the impact of a head-to-head processor pricing war with rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), Intel must return to the quick development habits it used when producing its Pentium family of chips, Otellini said. Intel backed off that pace after producing the Pentium 4, and soon began to lose market share when Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) launched the Opteron chip in 2003.view site

Samsung Mass Producing 1Gb DDR DRAM at 60nm

Memory shrink to 60nm can double production efficiency.

amsung Electronics has announced that it has begun mass producing the industry’s first 1Gigabit DDR2 DRAM using 60 nanometer process technology. In its press release, Samsung estimates efficiency gains of the 60nm process are 40 percent over the 80nm, and twice the productivity of 90nm general process technology.

Samsung’s line up of 60nm 1Gb DRAM-based modules includes 512MB, 1GB and 2GB densities supporting either 667Mbps or 800Mbps speeds. Samsung anticipates such a high degree of receptivity to the 60nm process that it should drive greater demand for 1Gb DRAM chips in the near future over today’s mainstream density of 512Mb.

Samsung’s migration below 90nm has relied heavily on the use of three-dimensional transistor technologies to build increasingly smaller chips, a fundamentally unique approach toward finer circuit designs and higher yields. The use of metal-insulator metal (MIM) for its capacitors provides enhanced data storage in sub-70nm designs. Furthermore, the use of a recently-announced selective epitaxial growth (SEG) technology provides for a broader electron channel, and optimizes the speed of each chip’s electrons to reduce power consumption and enable higher performance. These key technologies are expected to enable DRAM fabrication to 50nm and lower.more