Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a leading designer of hard disk drives, on Thursday unveiled the world’s first hard disk drive (HDDs) for enterprises with 15000rpm spindle speed and 450GB capacity. Hitachi believes that the new Ultrastar 15K450 drive also offers unprecedented performance.
Hitachi Ultrastar 15K450 with 450GB capacity, 16MB cache and 15K rpm spindle speed is based on four 112.5GB platters and declares average seek time of 3.6ms as well as average latency time of 2ms. The new drive will ship with either 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces.
(Full article ‘Hitachi Unveils World’s Largest Enterprise-Class Hard Disk Drive’)
Super Talent Technology Corp., one of the leading suppliers of advanced memory products, this week announced what it claims to be the world’s tiniest USB flash drive that can store 8GB of data. A good news for consumers is that the tiny drive of record capacity is hardly expensive.
The new tiny 8GB USB flash drives belong to Super Talent Pico family of products that includes three different types of enclosures: water-resistant Pico-A with a swivel lid (38.7mm x 12.4mm x 3.9mm), retractable Pico-B (31.8mm x 18.8mm x 4.4mm) and miniature rugged water-resistant Pico-C (C: 31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm). All the drives are available in capacities of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB.
(Full article ‘Super Talent Unveils “World’s Tiniest” 8GB Flash Drive’)
Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest maker of software, late last week sent another letter to Yahoo!’s board of directors in a final attempt to persuade them to sell the Internet company to Microsoft. But while Microsoft gave a rather clear ultimatum to Yahoo!’s board of directors, the Internet giant was quick to deny the possibilities to become part of the software giant.
“[…] We believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies […]. If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo!
(Full article ‘Microsoft Gives Yahoo Ultimatum, Yahoo! Says “No”‘)
Intel has launched its second-generation Classmate PC at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai.
The new notebook, launched on Thursday, shares its basic hardware design with the first generation Classmate as well as a focus on the developing-world education markets. However, Intel said it was responding to interest elsewhere: “We will be expanding into the mature markets, including Europe and the US,” said Lila Ibrahim, general manager of Intel’s emerging market platform’s group.
Upgrades to the Classmate PC platform include a 9-inch LCD, integrated camera and a user-replaceable battery. This can be four- or six-cell, giving three or five hours’ operation. The upgraded system can also have an optional 30GB hard disk instead of 1GB, 2GB or 4GB flash drives, and the 802.11b/g wireless networking now has a mesh mode to connect Classmates where there’s no wireless infrastructure.
(Full article ‘Intel launches next-generation Classmate PC’)
Workstation graphics from AMD appear to have an edge over its green rivals pretty much since the FireGL team in Germany came out with a next-gen driver for R600-based cards. The strategy to offer more memory and better OpenGL performance at a lower cost has started to bear fruits.
Today, ATI (sorry, AMD) introduced another FireGL part, this time based on the RV670, a chip the world knows as the Radeon HD 3800 series. The new FireGL V7700 integrates the ATI RV670GL GPU with 512 MB of SamsungВ’s GDDR4 memory and two features we are sure AMDВ’s marketing staff is proud to talk about: PCI Express Gen2 and DisplayPort.
Performance-wise, this new card is going against NvidiaВ’s Quadro FX 3700 and 4600. (Full article ‘AMD launches first FireGL graphics card with DisplayPort’)