DailyTech

"Today the SSD market is not that big. Many consumers aren't willing to spend the significant price premium over a standard hard drive to get the benefits of an SSD. Some businesses, however, realize the potential of the SSD in an enterprise computing environment.

Expreview reports that it has an Intel roadmap that shows that three new SSDs are going to be unveiled by Intel. The SSDs will be in the X-series and are said to have a read speed of 240MB per second and write speed of 170MB per second. The SSDs will come in 2.5-inch (X25) and 1.8-inch (X18) form factors and will come in two models -- E and M. The E model is reported to be the top-of-the-line product with the highest performance, while the M model is configured for power savings.

Expreview reports that the X18-M will only consume 0.25 W of power in active mode. Capacities for the X25-E model are reported to be 32GB, 64GB, and 160GB with availability in the last quarter of 2008. An 80GB X25-M and an 80GB X18-M are reported to be launching in Q3 2008. A 160GB version of the X18-M is expected to hit the market around Q1 2009.

Micron and Intel have been working together to develop what the companies say will be the world's fastest NAND flash memory. DailyTech reported in early August that Micron had unleashed its own SSDs that offered read speeds even faster than what the Intel roadmap is claiming. Micron's SSDs claim to reach a read speed of 250MB per second.

DailyTech reported in April that Intel's SSD prototypes were going through in-house testing; odds are these are the same SSDs that are now showing up on the roadmap."

DailyTech

"Intel launched its G45 chipset featuring its latest integrated graphics only a few weeks ago. So far, the response to the chipset and motherboards using the chipset has been a mixed bag by Intel's own admission.

Aaron Brezenski wrote a blog entry this week on the Intel Software Network that was titled, "Welcome to G45! Better (but still imperfect…)." In the blog, Brezenski wrote that Intel's competition -- AMD -- put together a demo booth stating that HP laptops using Intel's G45 did not accelerate Blu-ray playback. AMD maintains that its integrated graphics were able to playback Blu-ray without issue.

Brezenski points out the fact that AMD fails to offer any specifications as far as the CPUs used in the systems and Intel maintains it was not an apples to apples comparison. Despite that fact, Brezenski acknowledge that the demo showed Intel's CPU to be 100% utilized -- a clear indication that Blu-ray acceleration was not taking place.

Brezenski also talked a bit about review ExtremeTech did of an Intel DG45ID motherboard, which also found that Blu-ray acceleration didn't work. Even after an update to the review, the Intel system was still only able to score 30 out a possible 100 on the HD HQV test performed.

Brezenski says that his sources -- presumably within Intel -- have told him that the low HD HQV test scores were the result of a software player issue. Brezenski says that properly configured advanced de-interlacing would raise scores 20 points higher, and while he admits those scores are still not perfect, he says they are workable. Brezenski hopes driver tweaks will help improve performance even more in the future."

Digitimes

"VIA Technologies has noted that it is planning to launch a new form factor – Mobile-ITX – between the end of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. The form factor's size will be only half that of Pico-ITX, the company's smallest form factor currently, which measures 100×72mm.

Mobile-ITX will be able to support VIA Eden, C-7 and Nano processor-based platforms.

In other news, VIA recently showcased several robots using its Pico-ITX platform as controllers at the Taipei International Robot Show. The company noted that its low-power CPU and small form factor technologies could be effectively applied to robotics."

More from CNet

"Intel has released a specification revision for next-generation USB 3.0 technology that resolves a dispute with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, which had threatened to develop their own USB 3.0 standard. USB 3.0--also known as SuperSpeed USB--is a next-generation high-speed connection standard due in 2009. It is significant not only because all future PCs and devices will use connectors based on the standard but because it will offer 10 times the speed of USB 2.0--used in virtually all PCs introduced in the last few years--or roughly 5 gigabits per second.

On Wednesday, Intel released what it calls the Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture. The draft specification provides a standardized method for USB 3.0 hardware to communicate with USB 3.0-specific software.

"Interoperability among devices from multiple manufacturers is important for consumer adoption of SuperSpeed USB products," Intel said in a statement. The draft specification revision will make it easier to develop software support for the industry, according to Intel. The updated specification is being made available under royalty free licensing terms to all USB 3.0 Promoter Group and contributor companies "that sign an xHCI contributor agreement," Intel said.

A statement from Advanced Micro Devices was included in the announcement: "USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform. AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification."

Nvidia and AMD had claimed previously that Intel was not giving the specification to companies that compete with Intel in the processor and chipset business and both companies had threatened to develop their own USB 3.0 specification. "

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HardOCP

"MSI brings us their K9N2 based on NVIDIA’s 780a chipset. Does being able to turn off that power hungry video card get your attention? On paper this board has a lot to offer but how does it work in the real world?

... The MSI K9N2 Diamond uses NVIDIA’s 780a SLI chipset. On the surface the 780a SLI chipset is the same thing as the 780i SLI chipset for the Intel side feature-wise. The real differences are technical. The 780a SLI chipset doesn’t have a memory controller as those are integrated into AMD’s CPUs. On the Intel side there is an MCP and SPP. On the 780a all the features of both are combined into one chipset. In this case the 780a SLI MCP. Like the 780i SLI chipset the 780a doesn’t natively support PCI-Express 2.0. So additional PCI-Express lanes and PCI-Express 2.0 support come from the nForce 200 series MCP and aren’t native to the 780a MCP or SPP. The need for the nForce 200 series chip isn’t ideal but its’ worked well enough in the past on the 780i SLI chipset based boards. "

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Tweaktown

"A single HD 4870 X2 thrown into a heavily overclocked P45 board is going to run like an absolute dream. 3.5GHz + isn’t really all that uncommon these days and here we really get to see the HD 4870 X2 shine, even more so than before.

Compared against the HD 4870 Crossfire solution on the P45 board, we see the HD 4870 X2 either performing similar, like we saw in our older P45 vs. X48 testing, or it manages to get a good 10% jump on the setup.

You would really have to be a bit on the side of crazy to purchase a pair of HD 4870s over a single HD 4870 X2 when looking for some real GPU power. We can see under intensive load situations, the lack of bandwidth going to the Crossfire configuration does have an impact on performance.

Before we finish off, though, let’s have a quick look at some of the results we obtained out of the Smooth Creation 3.9GHz system against our 3GHz testbed. With the HD 4870 X2, we saw our Vantage performance score move up from 12496 to 14996. "

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Digitimes

"With AMD officially announcing its ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 GPU, the company has noted that its ATI Radeon HD 4800-series has boosted the company's discrete graphics card market share from 30% to 40%, and it expects to achieve a 50% market share by the end of 2008, and will surpass Nvidia in 2009.

AMD also noted that it expects its discrete graphics card to IGP ratio in notebook shipments will be 35:65 in 2009.

Nvidia rebuked AMD's comments saying it has the performance lead with its GeForce 200-series graphics products, while AMD claimed its Radeon HD 4800-series were clearly the more advanced."

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Dailytech

BBC

"Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free. The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online.

The court has now said conditions of an agreement called the Artistic Licence were enforceable under copyright law. "For non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important but this is huge," said Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig.

"In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licences set conditions on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the licence disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. "This is a very important victory."

According to details outlined in the ruling, Robert Jacobsen had written and then released code under an Artistic Licence. This meant anyone using that free code had to attribute the author, highlight the original source of the files and explain how the code had been modified.

Mr Jacobsen, who manages open source software group Java Model Railroad Interface, accused commercial software developer Matthew Katzer and his company of ignoring the terms of the Artistic Licence when they took his code and used it to develop commercial software products for trains. "

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CNet

"Microsoft is launching its Windows 7 blog, but it still doesn't have much to say. On the plus side, Windows engineering boss Steven Sinofsky did at least put a date to when he would share some more details.

"The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on October 27 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) the following week both represent the first venues where we will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7," Sinofsky and Windows Core operating system head Jon Devaan wrote in a posting on Thursday. "This blog will provide context over the next 2+ months with regular posts about the behind the scenes development of the release and continue through the release of the product."

Microsoft had already said that Windows 7 would be on the PDC docket in some manner. Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft continues to say less than many people would like, but repeated his standard line that the company doesn't want to share details until they have reached a certain level of concreteness.

In an interview with CNET News in May, Sinofsky did disclose a few details--namely that it would use the same driver model and basic kernel approach as Windows Vista and that the company wanted the whole thing on the market by January 2010, three years after the mainstream release of Windows Vista. Microsoft also showed in May a glimpse at a new multi-touch interface that will be part of Windows 7. "

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More details on AMD's upcoming budget card, the Radeon HD 4670, have appeared. The card will be based on the RV730 GPU and be produced on 55nm.

The RV730 is based on it's bigger brother the RV770 but instead of 800 stream processor, it will only have 320 and the bus size will go from 256bit to 128bit. As for video memory the card will probably have 512MB GDDR3 clocked at 1800Mhz, while the core will be clocked around 700 to 900Mhz.

On the 2 photo's from Xtreview you'll be able to see that the card is quite compact, won't need another PCI-E power cable, has 2 Crossfire connections and 1 DVI + 2 HDMI ports.

Xtreview

"We deal here with Radeon HD 4670 - this video accelerator is  based on RV730 GPU , produced on  55 nm  technical process and which has 320 stream processors. It is expected that this video card class will obtain 512 Mbytes GDDR3  video memory, access will be limited to the 128- bit bus.

Precise frequencies are not known, but associate indicate that the memory will work at approximately 1800 MHz, and the graphic chip frequency will lie in the range from 700 to 900 MHz. The  Radeon HD 4670 is  the desktop analog of the recently announced  firePro 5700."

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