System Diary Technology News Blog

It is likely that Samsung has become the first company to launch mass-produced notebook with a transparent display.

At CES in January, the manufacturer has already demonstrated a 14-inch transparent AMOLED-display. By all indications, is now being tested laptop based on it, and the finished product must tread in the stores within 12 months.

Transparent AMOLED’y already been used in smaller devices – media players IceTouch with 2-inch touch screen. Previously, the production of displays of this type was uneconomical, but today’s technology allows them to use, in any case, displays a small size. But the cost of the player IceTouch be around $ 378, it is quite a lot.

Advantages AMOLED-display to LCD obvious: a small thickness, accurate color, no backlight, reducing energy consumption.

Manufacturers of hard drives are able to gradually increase the volume of produced models, a move to platters with higher density recording. In hard disks size 3.5 “is used platters volume of 500 GB that allows you to create storage capacity of 2 TB on the basis of four of these plates. History knows examples of hard disk drives with five platters, so the amount in two terabytes – not the limit for today’s hard drives.

As stated in the updated roadmap of the company TDK, platters volume of 640 GB will appear in the “desktop” segment is literally in the next month, and by November they will get serial hard drives in a standard size 3.5 “. This will allow manufacturers to create models of a 2.5 TB hard drives based on four platters, or infringe upon the conquest of foreign countries 3 TB when using five platters.

Hard drive size 2.5″ will go to use the platter capacity of 375 GB by October this year. During this period the market may appear hard disks size 2.5″ 750 GB, suitable for use in laptops. Admittedly, TDK had to revise its forecasts for the rate of increase in areal density on platters – even six months ago, the company promised that discussed above areal density will be achieved by May 2010.

Seagate was the first major hard disk manufacturers have offered models of hard drives with interface SATA-600. Tests have shown, however, that in terms of speed of the new interface is a classic hard drives nothing, the transition to the use of SATA-600 is more relevant for solid state drives.

In any case, southbridges AMD will offer support SATA-600 in March this year, Intel will catch up early next year, and sell hard disks without SATA-600 interface will soon be bad manners. Well aware of this, the company Western Digital has quietly released on its website description of the Winchester family WD1002FAEX Black Caviar 1 TB capacity, endowed with SATA-600 interface and 64 MB buffer.

Spindle speed for this drive is 7200 rpm, used magnetic plate volume of 500 GB. Last property allows to produce in this series and hard disk capacity of 2 terabytes, but such a model with interface SATA-600 has not yet proposed.

Regular readers will recall that in the platform AMD Leo will not only six-core processor Phenom II X6 (Thuban), but the chipset 890FX and 890GX, complemented by a new south bridge SB850. Until some time in respect of the south bridge, there are many uncertainties – in question remained interfaces support SATA-600 and USB 3.0. We can already say with certainty that support SATA-600 in quantities of six ports of the same name south bridge SB850 will provide, but to implement support for USB 3.0 motherboard manufacturers will have old-fashioned way – at the expense of discrete controllers, third-party developers.

Company Biostar yesterday rather surprisingly published on its website some details about the forthcoming announcement of the motherboard TA890GXE based flagship integrated chipset AMD 890GX. Were are the main differences from the chipset AMD 790GX: added support for DirectX 10.1 and UVD 2.0, six ports SATA-600 with the function of FIS-based switching, the number of USB ports increased from 12 to 14 pieces. The frequency of the integrated graphics core is still equal to 700 MHz, the needs of video core motherboard unsoldered 128 MB memory DDR-3. South bridge SB850 and SB810 will also have a built-in clock oscillator and a Gigabit LAN controller. Biostar mentions support for some “asymmetric CrossFire”. Obviously, we are talking about the possibility to combine in one system, two video cards of different models – to a larger board size micro-ATX can not claim. AMD offers similar combinations for CrossFire in the past.

Motherboard Biostar TA890GXE will be compatible with six-core processor Phenom II X6 performed Socket AM3, but this property is inherent to all other cards with this type of processor socket if updating the BIOS. According to available data, the announcement of the motherboard Biostar TA890GXE held in early March, the recommended retail price in Russia is $ 115. Further details on the motherboard TA890GXE can be found on the manufacturer’s website.

The eldest of the dual-core 32 nm processors Clarkdale named Core i5-670 is already entrenched at a frequency of 7 GHz overclock, which allowed him to set world records in SuperPI – benchmark heavily dependent on processor performance. Last time we reported on the result of SuperPI 1M, equal to 5.991 seconds, which was achieved at a frequency of 7034 MHz processor.

Just a couple of days later hicookie improved its achievements, to overclock the processor Core i5-670 in the test SuperPI 1M to the frequency of 7098 MHz, which ensured the achievement of a new world record, equal to 5.944 seconds.

Opponent author of the first record on behalf of Nickshih, meanwhile, began to improve results in the varieties of the test SuperPI, requiring more prolonged stable operation of the processor frequency reached. For example, when overclocked to 6732 MHz engineering sample Core i5-670 (3.47 GHz) was able to perform the calculation of pi up to 32 million decimal places in six minutes and seven and a half seconds.

This is a new world record in the category SuperPI 32M. The author of this achievement has announced the beginning of a new round of tests conducted at a higher frequency of bus QPI. Consequently, in the coming days, the records can be updated.

Anyone who is interested in innovations in the segment of mobile electronics, is well known that there are many Chinese counterfeiting, imitating works of famous western manufacturers at a much lower price. Russia thrifty buyer, appreciating the image more ethical, this approach to heart – why pay more if the Chinese masters offer more functionally advanced solutions at a lower price?

For obvious reasons, Apple’s products from the attention of Chinese artisans suffered almost more than others. However, their own copyrights and commercial interests of Chinese manufacturers to give to someone is not collected. According to the Telegraph.co.uk website, with reference to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, a Chinese company The Shenzhen Great Loong Brother openly accuse Apple of copying its Tablet PC P88, released six months ago. The object of attacking the Chinese manufacturer, as you might guess, was the Apple iPad.

Although the Chinese recognize that haunt Apple in the U.S. they would be unlikely, when you try to release Apple iPad in the Chinese market the U.S. company will inevitably face a lawsuit. Interestingly, this Chinese manufacturer at one time was accused of copying the design of Apple iPod, which now compare the iPad. Such accusations manufacturer tablet P88 strongly rejected, except P88 and iPod completely different products.

If the resemblance between P88 and iPad (looking at pictures) can still be found, then by his stuffing and functionality is just “a completely different products.” Tablet PC P88 has a typical type of stuffing for netbook CPU Atom N270, chipset i945GSE, one gigabyte of memory and hard disk capacity of 160 or 250 GB. Touch screen size 10.2 “understands only a single touch, a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. Incidentally, the Chinese clone iPad have a webcam with 1.3 megapixel resolution, three-port USB 2.0, VGA output and a network port, memory card reader – all of this at present no iPad.

Unfortunately, the mass of about 1 kg and battery life for one and half hours to the strengths of the Chinese Tablet PC can not be classified. On the other hand, the device is running Windows XP and the basic version costs about $ 440 – for some people these qualities will be an advantage. From a legal point of view, devices are too different to be able to talk about a good outcome of the trial. Most likely, the Chinese manufacturer wanted to do a little advertising in the wake of increasing interest in the Tablet PC.

A device for e-book reader Amazon Kindle is similar to the Apple iPad in the sense that neither of us are pioneers in the segment, but due to strong advertising and infrastructure are able to achieve phenomenal heights of popularity. Kindle, for example, last year became the best-selling gifts in the history of the American online store Amazon. Accompanying the sale of electronic books for the first time exceeded the volume of sales of traditional paper books. Meanwhile, the most popular device for reading electronic books in the past year was considered a product name Nook, distributed bookstore Barnes & Noble. Undermines the success of the device deficit commodity copies.

Apple, as we have already understood, is betting on the ability to view color publications on the screen iPad with multimedia inserts such as fragments of video. Amazon Kindle uses a monochrome display, made by technology of “electronic paper” and deprived of opportunities to perceive touch. According to the online version of the publication The New York Times, recently acquired by Amazon storefront young company Touchco help the internet giant equip Kindle color touch screen of its own design.

Designed originally from New York University’s technology allows to create color touch screen, costing no more than $ 10 per square foot (0.09 m), which perceive the set of points of contact and are able to distinguish between the force pressing. This screen may perceive touch the hands of several people simultaneously, and also touches distinguish between finger and a hard object like a pen.

A plus screens that use the so-called “electronic ink”, is a low power consumption and low eye fatigue when reading. Traditional touch-sensitive LCD displays can offer full-color picture and the possibility of entering the information directly from the screen. Kindle current generation, for example, for the last problem uses a single tiny keyboard. Perhaps, iPad and Kindle in evolutionary terms would be closer – it depends primarily on the content creators, which targeted both devices.

The relevance of external drives with laptops is quite high, so many users probably depressed by the lack of sufficient market mobile computers with a USB 3.0. Of course, the interface ExpressCard adapters allow graft support USB 3.0 many laptops, but someone that decision does not seem too elegant.

Companies Asus and HP were among the first among major notebook manufacturers, who proposed the original interface support USB 3.0. Actually, HP already sells notebooks Envy Series 15, equipped with a port USB 3.0. Against the background of the total cost of a laptop no less than $ 2000 supplement for the support of USB 3.0 just is dissolved.

As the site System Diary Technology News Blog, the company Asus has recently revealed in China notebook models equipped with port USB 3.0. Shestnadtsatidyuymovym screen boasts the familiar model of Asus N61, a “chetyrnadtsatidyuymovaya” model Asus N82 is a newcomer. Notebooks based on mobile processors, Core i5 and the Core i7, the company will make them discrete graphics solutions on chips from AMD and NVIDIA.

Although the ambitious label on the case next to the USB 3.0 port, said a tenfold advantage in speed compared to USB 2.0, actually the new interface provides only a threefold increase in the rate of information transfer. At least, this is true for laptops Asus. In the new models support USB 3.0 will do in the middle of this month.

Now, when it became clear what constitutes a tablet computer Apple iPad, analysts of all stripes are trying to predict how many devices can be implemented in the coming years, and who will be the main buyer iPad. We have already published excerpts from the forecasts ABI Research, which showed that in the current year, the Tablet PC market will increase to 4 million and by 2015 its capacity could grow to 57 million units. IDC Forecasts say that this year Apple will sell 4 to 5 million copies of the iPad.

His contribution to the construction of forecasts about the future of Apple iPad makes and analyst firm Needham & Company, as the site reports Apple Insider. According to this source, this year Apple will sell no more than 2 million copies of the iPad, with half of buyers will be borrowed from Apple iPod Touch. The next year, Apple may have implemented six million iPad, but this relatively new device for the surge of interest in him looking for a boost. For iPhone it was opening shop applications Apple App Store, for the iPod – the opening music store iTunes Store.

On what kind of content will be based iPad, not yet entirely clear. A new area of business for Apple, of course, will be the dissemination of electronic publications. Contracts with major publishers have already been concluded, analysts are predicting as a manifestation of interest in the iPad by medical and educational institutions. The first tablet is useful for storing information about patients, the second – to work with the electronic versions of textbooks. To win the hearts of business users will be more difficult, but they are interested in novelty.

Little more than a month remains before the announcement of the CPU Core i7-980X Extreme Edition with six cores and a nominal frequency of 3.33 GHz. It is quite logical that Intel has decided to talk about the architectural features of processors Gulftown during the conference at which representatives of the visited sites AnandTech and Tech Report.

We must start with a description of innovation inherent in processors Gulftown. Like all the processors generation Westmere, they support hardware acceleration encryption algorithm AES. In addition, energy saving technology is now gone much further: Processors Gulftown can disable not only the nucleus, but also other functional blocks such as memory controller, QPI bus controller and cache the third level. If you turn off the last critical information is stored in specially provided for this memory type SRAM. The memory controller processor Gulftown not only supports DDR-3 modules with a rated voltage of 1.5 V, and modules with a rated voltage of 1.35 V.

Processor Gulftown contains 1.17 billion transistors on a monolithic chip area of 240 sq. mm He has six cores and 12 MB cache in the third level. More modest in their performance 45 nm processors Bloomfield and Lynnfield have crystal area 263 and 296 sq. mm, respectively, satisfied with four cores. The number of transistors does not exceed 731 million units for Bloomfield and 774 million units for Lynnfield. This clearly illustrates the advantages of 32-nm technology, for which generations of processors will be produced Westmere.

By the way, the mysterious CPU Core i7-970 (3.2 GHz), our foreign colleagues believe quad “younger brother” Gulftown. The basis is formed by six-core crystal, but only four remain active nucleus. The possibility of such a transformation implicitly hinting itself from Intel. To release a “purely quad-core processors in the family Westmere she does not want to, preferring to wait for the transition to the architecture of Sandy Bridge.

Site Tech Report tells about some interesting developments of Intel. In particular, the company managed to create a prototype 47-channel interface in the form of a flexible bridge, allowing the transfer of information between processors at speeds of 470 Gbps. The level of energy consumption of the interface does not exceed 0.7 Tues The interface can be used in multiprocessor systems.

Multi-core future, according to Intel, can have independent frequency and voltage for each core, the need to adjust to the weakest core will disappear. Faster core will be stronger than the work load. If the high frequency and voltage will cause malfunction, the kernel will perform the task repeatedly, if necessary – at a lower frequency.