Despite of the fact that Toshiba Corp. has no plans to develop and manufacture HD DVD hardware after March ’08, the company also has no plans to become part of the Blu-ray disc (BD) Association (BDA) and start making BD players.

Thanks to the fact that HD DVD emerged on the market in its final version, unlike the Blu-ray, it has been adopted by end-users a little slowly, but surely. Thanks to relatively low prices, standalone HD DVD players proved to be comparatively popular among end-users and thanks to good attach rates of movies major HD DVD backers were confident in the future of the format. However, the announcement by Time Warner-owned studios to release new movies exclusively in rivaling Blu-ray disc format caused substantial problems for HD DVD, Toshiba admitted at its press conference in Tokyo, Japan.

“From an objective, fair point of view, we were clearly in a good place until last December and January.

(Full article ‘Toshiba Has No Plans to Make Blu-Ray Players’)

GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE, San Francisco, Feb. 19, 2008. Intel today officially announced its Skulltrail Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform, based on a dual socketed D5400XS desktop motherboard that supports two Intel quad core processors, the most current of which is the Core 2 Extreme QX9775 Compare Prices on Core 2 Extreme Processors. The D5400XS supports either ATI Crossfire or Nvidia SLI multi-card graphics solutions.

“For the team creating world-class games here at id, time is one of our most valuable assets,” said Robert A.

(Full article ‘Intel: Skulltrail Supports Crossfire & SLI’)

Only a few days ago we looked at the performance of Intel’s new Core 2 dual core processors, the Core 2 Duo E8000 series, aka Wolfdale. While a 45 nm quad core Extreme edition processor (Yorkfield) has been available since early winter, the dual-core processors for the mainstream had not been released until recently. As the first Wolfdale review made clear, the new dual core processors provide a nice performance boost when compared to the 65 nm Core 2 Duo E6000 generation. This time we want to look at the overclocking potential and the power requirements of the new Wolfdale-based 45 nm Core 2 E8000 processors, as the enthusiast crowd has very high expectations since 65 nm Core 2 Duo Conroe already is an amazing overclocker. Core 2 processors have served the overclocking community well since their debut. (Full article ‘Overclocking Intel’s Wolfdale E8000′)

No, we’re not turning into a review site for notebook hard drives, but a couple of products have launched that deserve a look after we visited the topic a few weeks ago. We then introduced Samsung’s Spinpoint M6, which was the world’s first 320-GB notebook hard drive. The hard drive still is one of the bottleneck components in every system, as it still takes a noticeable amount of time to launch complex applications, to store huge files or to start or shutdown Windows. The faster your hard drive, the quicker the entire system will run. Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital were among the first OEMs to offer laptops with 320-GB hard drives, but it was the Samsung Spinpoint M6 that made it to our test lab first. But since the publication of our review on the Spinpoint M6, we received two other contenders: the Toshiba MK3252GSX and Western Digital’s Scorpio WD3200BEVT. (Full article ‘WD and Toshiba Join the 320 GB 2.5″ HDD Club’)

The launch of quad-core microprocessors by Advanced Micro Devices was not an easy one, but there could be more thorns on the path to the stars: an analyst believes that AMD’s next-generation mobile platform code-named Puma will also have certain problems with its launch. But AMD is sure: nothing negative will happen as Puma has no design flaws AMD is aware of.

AMD’s Puma mobile platform will be based on AMD’s code-named Griffin processor, AMD M780 or AMD M780G mobile chipsets, which support PCI Express 2.0 bus, HyperTransport 3.0 bus, flash-cache for boosting hard drive performance and comes with or without built-in DirectX 10-compliant ATI Radeon graphics core that also features hardware-assisted decoding of high-definition content from Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.

(Full article ‘AMD Denies Any Problems with “Puma” as Analyst Predicts Issues with AMD’s Next-Generation Mobile Platform’)