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South Korean SSD manufacturer Mtronstorage Technology announced today that it has completed the development of a new 1.8-inch ZIF-type SSD (Solid State Drive) for laptops. Mtron’s new SSD with Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash memory supports PATA (ZIF-type) interface and has a maximum reading speed of 120MB/s and writing speed of 100MB/s, which is more than 6 times faster than the current 1.8-inch HDDs. Mtron expects to ship the new SSD in capacity of up to 128GB. Worldwide premiere for these drives is set for April this year.

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.

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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