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In order to meet growing consumer demand for large capacity portable storage solutions, Transcend Information, Inc. (Transcend), a leading manufacturer of flash memory products, today introduced its latest high-capacity USB flash drive – the 32GB JetFlash V60. About the size of an AA battery (61mm x 18.6mm x 9.8mm), the versatile JetFalsh V60 is small and light enough to be taken anywhere. With its enormous 32GB memory capacity, you can easily store all of your personal files, music, digital photos, and even full-length HDTV movies and still have space left for work or school documents. Already known for its eye-catching colors and surprisingly affordable price, Transcend’s JetFalsh V60 is now more attractive than ever.

HP has fixed flaws in a patch-management program bundled with its computers, printers and other hardware that could be used by hackers to ‘brick’ HP or Compaq PCs. In an alert sent to customers who subscribe to its security warning service, HP said users should run Software Update to patch the flaws disclosed last week by a Polish researcher known only by his alias, ‘porkythepig’. A pair of bugs in the update service’s ActiveX control can be used to execute remote code or gain additional access rights, porkythepig said then. He also posted proof-of-concept exploit code that showed how to use one of the vulnerabilities to overwrite and corrupt crucial Windows’ system files, an attack that would leave any affected PC unbootable. That would essentially ‘brick’ the system, since many HP and Compaq PCs do not include a restore CD or DVD, but instead place operating system and application restore files on the hard drive. HP’s advisory on Friday instructed users to run Software Update on any machine that has the application, even if the update service is never used. Running Update presumably disables the flawed ActiveX control by fixing the Windows registry.

Source: PC Advisor

GIGABYTE has launched an overclocking contest open to anyone in the US or Canada with a GIGABYTE Intel X38 or P35 series motherboard. There is a grand prize of $2,500 for the winner, along with a GIGABYTE X48 motherboard, with the runners-up getting cash prizes ranging from $200 to $2,000 as well as goodies such as laptop bags. The contest involves overclocking your processor and uploading your 3Dmark06 score to GIGABYTE, before going head-to-head against other users, with the overclock receiving the most votes becoming the winner. The contest will run until 20th January next year - for more details, check out this page.

Source: X-bit labs

IBM has revealed that it is working on a new 32nm processor manufacturing technique which could make the production of chips more accessible to smaller companies, as well as yielding performance gains. The process works in a similar way to the high-k/metal gate technique that is currently used by both IBM and Intel for their 45nm chips, which replaces some of the silicon in transistors with more efficient materials to pack more components into a single chip. IBM’s new technique uses a modified version of this process known as high-k/gate-first to develop its 32nm chips, which works by focusing on the most advanced components first. Big Blue has already demonstrated a working example of the 32nm technology with prototype static RAM chips, and mass production is expected to begin during the second half of 2009.

Source: MacNN

The lackluster launch of Barcelona earlier this year left us with ambivalent feeling before the launch of Phenom. Up before the launch, numerous rumors of various problems were circulating, and when the launch finally happened and we only had two models to play with, we couldn’t help feeling a bit let down. The performance was good and lived up to what AMD had promised, more or less, but since the frequencies were so low and IPC was more or less the same as Core 2, it was still being outperformed by Intel’s processors. With the recent unveiling of the TLB bug, the crippling BIOS fix and the seized shipments of quad-core processors, the plans for the future has had to be revised. The earlier announced tri-core series is set for arrival in February 2008, and should be available in decent numbers the following month. Two models are currently planned for launch, Phenom 8700 and Phenom 8600 running at 2.4 and 2.3 Ghz respectively. These are disabled quad-core with 512KB L2 cache per core and a shared 2MB L3 cache, not suffering from the TLB errata (B3 stepping).

The new B3 stepping Phenoms are expected to arrive in large numbers in March as well. With the “new” Phenom 9700 model, there will also be a respin of the Phenom 9600 and 9500 models, called 9650 and 9550. Frequencies will remains the same, just less errata. There will also be a Phenom 9900 model in Q2, which together with the 9700 model will use the full HyperTransport 3.0 bandwidth of 4 GHz. Later in 2008, AMD will announce more Phenoms.

Phenom 9600 Black Edition is expected before the end of the year. It runs at the same 2.3 GHz as the regular Phenom 9600, but comes with an unlocked multiplier. The Phenom FX processors have been put on hold, but are not canceled per se, we just won’t see them until AMD get their regular stuff working right.

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Samsung Electronics and Toshiba announced today that they have signed a cross-license deal to produce, market and sell memory with the specifications and trademarks of Samsung’s OneNAND and Toshiba’s LBA-NAND memory chips. The arrangement is expected to result in increased availability of premium-performance OneNAND and LBA-NAND flash devices worldwide. Under the terms of the agreement, Samsung will license product specifications of its integrated OneNAND and Flex-OneNAND “fusion” memory chips to Toshiba, while Toshiba will license product specifications of its single-package LBA-NAND and mobileLBA-NAND flash chips to Samsung. Both companies will develop and market products that are compatible with the respective original-source technology. Samsung and Toshiba each plan to release products next year based on the respectively licensed product specifications, according to the companies.

Samsung Electronics has announced that it has developed the world’s fastest memory, a GDDR5 (series five, graphics double-data-rate memory) chip that can transfer data at six gigabits per second (Gbps). Samsung’s GDDR5, which will be introduced at a density of 512 Mb (16Mb x 32) chips, is capable of transmitting moving images and associated data at 24 gigabytes per second (GBps). The new Samsung graphics memory operates at 1.5 volts, representing an approximate 20% improvement in power consumption over today’s most popular graphics chip, the GDDR3. Samples of Samsung’s new GDDR5 chip have been delivered to major graphic processor companies last month and mass production is expected in the first half of 2008. Samsung expects that GDDR5 memory chips will become standard in the top performing segment of the market by capturing more than 50% of the high-end PC graphics market by 2010.