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Samsung on Wednesday night said it has begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives. This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.

Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.

The new 256GB drives are faster too, the company claims, more than doubling the performance rate of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs.

The drives combine sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second, with sequential write rates of 200MBps. "This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 (percent) and 70 percent for other SSDs," the company said.

Samsung did not mention random write performance, however. Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles' heel of solid-state drives.

Getting this 256GB SSD in a notebook "is analogous to having a 15,000-(revolutions-per-minute) drive, without all of its size, noise, power, and heating drawbacks," Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, said in a statement.

The 256GB SSD boosts data transfer when large multimedia files are simultaneously read and stored. "It can store 25 high-definition movies in just 21 minutes, a significant advancement over a 7,200rpm hard disk drive (HDD), which takes about 70 minutes," the company said in a statement.

The drive's performance is derived from a new single-platform design consisting of a chip controller, NAND flash, and special drive firmware developed by Samsung. "This single platform is designed to easily adapt to Samsung's 40-(nanometer) class NAND flash memory," according to the company.

It consumes 1.1 watts of power, versus 2 or more watts for a comparable HDD. Similar in weight to a 128GB SSD, at 81 grams, the 2.5-inch multilevel cell 256GB SSD has the same 9.5-millimeter drive thickness.

Samsung's 256GB SSD is also available with optional proprietary encryption programming that provides full-disk encryption, a key feature for some corporate users.

Pricing was not immediately available.

A clash is brewing as PC and cell phone chip suppliers vie for new designs that fall outside traditional product categories, an analyst said in a research note Wednesday.

Asus 10-inch Eee PC 1000

(Credit: Asus)

Doug Freedman, a chip analyst at AmTech Research, said the "line between cell phones and PCs is clearly blurring" and that consequently "PC and cell phone food chains will battle for market share in these new classes of devices." He calls this the "big bang between PCs and handsets."

This will happen as more tweener products emerge. "New product categories such as Netbooks, MIDs (mobile Internet devices), and smartphones all lie in the spectrum between the traditional PC and handset product categories," he wrote. "Cell phones are increasing in screen sizes, computational power and capabilities, while PCs are seeing declines in screen sizes and increases in connectivity."

This may present problems for chip suppliers as they rush to build inventory for these newfangled devices, resulting in an oversupply for device categories that don't succeed. "It's a safe bet that we'll end up with losers," he said in an interview. Moreover, there will be lower-than-expected gross margins (a crucial indicator of profitability) for some of the chips that go into these products, according to Freedman.

While the Netbook is considered a successful tweener product, it exemplifies a category that may be facing a reality check as the novelty wears off, resulting in an oversupply problem, he said. Intel says it has seen strong demand for the Atom processor on the back of the popularity of Netbooks but there are signs that demand has started to ebb, according to Freedman. This has resulted in cancellations from device makers for chips that go into Netbooks, Freedman said.

Netbooks have been popular because of their novel design--what is essentially a very small, very-low-cost (below $500) laptop, a category that hasn't existed to date. Ultra-small laptops (such as the MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege) have traditionally commanded a very stiff premium, typically going for more than $1,500.

Contrary to what Intel has been saying, Freedman wrote in the research note that the "initial generation Netbook solutions may not succeed in emerging/low income markets as users find feature and performance sacrifice in Netbooks (i.e. 5- to 8-inch screens) unacceptable for a networked family."

He added that Intel will also continue to be challenged by cannibalization of Netbooks: that is, Netbooks will take market share from traditional notebooks.

Down the road, Freedman writes, "we do not expect the PC and handset to converge into a single 'holy grail' device." PC and cell phone makers will continue to build devices that try to bridge the gap. Apple's iPhone is an example of a device at one end of the spectrum, while the 10-inch Asus Eee PC Netbook addresses the other end.

"We expect most users to continue to require two devices: one large form factor device and one small form factor device," he said in the note.

Correction, 10:46 a.m. PST: This story misstated the day the SIA made its announcement. It is Wednesday.

The Semiconductor Industry Association said Wednesday it is projecting the first decline in global chip sales since 2001.

SIA projects that 2009 sales will decline by 5.6 percent to $246.7 billion before resuming growth in 2010.

The forecast projects sales this year of $261.2 billion, a 2.2 percent increase from sales of $255.6 billion last year. But sales in the fourth quarter, historically a strong time period for the microelectronics industry, are expected to decline by 5.9 percent from the previous quarter, the SIA said.

The near-term prospects reflect comments from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)--the largest contract chip manufacturer--at the end of last month and a fourth-quarter warning last week from Intel.

TSMC said that it expects to see a 20 percent drop in revenue in the fourth quarter as the "supply chain"--the myriad companies that order chips from TSMC--reduces "inventory very aggressively."

Intel said revenue will come in "significantly weaker" than expected across all its market segments.

"The current global economic turmoil is clearly having a significant impact on semiconductor sales," said SIA President George Scalise in a statement. "The fortunes of the semiconductor industry are increasingly tied to consumer spending on electronic products. Consumer purchases now drive well over half of worldwide semiconductor sales."

The SIA statement Wednesday cited a recent Deutsche Bank report that estimates personal computer unit sales will decline by 5 percent and cell phone unit sales will decline by 6.4 percent in 2009, with declining sales across all geographic regions. PCs and cell phones together account for approximately 60 percent of worldwide semiconductor consumption.

The semiconductor industry has enjoyed six years of uninterrupted growth since the dot-com collapse in 2001, according to the SIA. "There are few similarities between 2001 and the current conditions," said Scalise.

"The collapse of semiconductor sales in 2001 was driven primarily by the implosion of 'dot.com' industries which resulted in an enormous inventory overhang," he said. "Excess inventory is not an issue today, and the industry is well positioned to resume growth quickly once the current worldwide economic uncertainty subsides," Scalise said.

Sales will grow by 7.4 percent in 2010 to $264.9 billion and by 7.5 percent in 2011 to $284.7 billion, the SIA said.

A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.

Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.

Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.

The trend of packing more compute power into small supercomputing enclosures "is really driven by what's going on in microprocessors. The x86 revolution continues. You see more and more cores. Increased performance. But also without more power required," he said, speaking during the keynote.

Dell slide shown Tuesday at SC08

(Credit: Dell Computer)

In various venues, Intel has spelled out its intention to bring out many-core processors including its upcoming Larrabee graphics chip and future server processors that may reach 32 cores. Currently, Intel's Dunnington processor gets the prize (at Intel) for the most cores: six. Sun Microsystem's "Rock" processor will have 16 cores.

The 'Stallion' Visualization Cluster.

(Credit: Dell)

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"Literally these are gaming systems. We just leverage what was going on the commodity technology market," said Kelly Gaither, associate director at TACC, speaking as part of Dell's keynote address.

Dell is also looking to Nvidia to democratize supercomputing and bring it down to the desktop. "Advances in graphics technology are actually creating some new opportunities in supercomputing," Dell said. "We announced today that we're extending our partnership with Nvidia to advance their CUDA architecture in Dell's precision workstations," he said.

"So this really is the supercomputer on your desk. Adding one (Nvidia) Tesla card to Dell Precision workstations delivers a theoretical performance of 1 teraflop," he said. "That's seven times higher than (a high-end) Thinking Machines (supercomputer) back in 1993." (A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second.)

Dell also announced Tuesday that it has teamed up with Intel and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to build the Hyperion hyperscale computing environment at LLNL. The National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program at the facility expects Hyperion to speed the development and reduce the cost of powerful high-performance computing clusters vital to U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration missions, including climate change, and other global challenges.

"Hyperion is a test bed that will share those breakthroughs with the entire open-source community," Dell said.

Dell Precision workstation becomes supercomputer with Nvidia Telsa technology

(Credit: Dell)

But Dell's big message was how mass-market and standard commercial computing technologies have invaded the supercomputing space. "429 of the top 500 supercomputers are based on the x86 architecture," Dell said, referring to the computing architecture being used in laptops and desktops today. "What you see here is some of the things from the commercial world in managing large data centers really penetrating very heavily (into high-performance computing)."

"Three years ago, using our blade chassis, we put 240 cores in a full-size 42U rack with 2.8GHz CPUs, and that was 1.3 teraflops of theoretical peak performance per rack. Today, we get 512 cores in a 42U rack with 3.3GHz CPUs, and that's 6.82 teraflops per rack," Dell said. ("U" is a unit of measure that describes the height of equipment used in a rack computer. Typically, 1U equals 1.75 inches.)

More addressable memory space--critical for high performance computing--will come with Intel's Nehalem processor, he said. Nehalem will support memory spaces of up to 1 terabyte (trillion bytes) of system memory, Dell said. Most PCs today support 4 gigabytes (billions of bytes).

In related news, Nvidia announced that Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) will use Nvidia Tesla GPUs to boost the computational horsepower of Tokyo Tech's Tsubame supercomputer.

Through the addition of 170 Tesla S1070 1U systems, the supercomputer now delivers nearly 170 teraflops of theoretical peak performance, placing it among the world's Top 500 Supercomputers.

"Tokyo Tech is constantly investigating future computing platforms and it had become clear to us that to make the next major leap in performance, Tsubame had to adopt GPU computing technologies," said Satoshi Matsuoka, division director of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at Tokyo Tech in a statement.

Intel's next-generation microarchitecture has arrived. Officially.

Intel made the debut of the Core i7 processor official on Monday afternoon, launching the processor at an event in San Francisco. PC makers, including Dell and Gateway, quickly followed suit with announcements.

(Credit: Intel)

"The Core i7 processor speeds video editing (and) immersive games...by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption," the Intel said in a statement.

Combining the i7 with super-fast solid state drives will lead to significant jumps in performance, according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "When you couple what is Intel's biggest leap in chip design with other incredible innovations like Intel's solid state drives, the Core i7 processor has redefined the computer of tomorrow," he said in a statement.

The i7 also packs a technology called Turbo Boost that accelerates performance to match a computer user's needs and workloads. Through an on-chip power control unit, Turbo Boost automatically adjusts the clock speed of one or more of the four individual processing cores without increasing power consumption, Intel said.

The new chip also has the latest Intel power-saving technologies, allowing desktops to go into sleep states formerly reserved for Intel-based notebooks.

And it ushers in the age of the "monolithic die" for Intel. (AMD has been doing this for over a year now.) The core i7 is one of Intel's first processors to put four cores on one piece of silicon, referred to as a monolithic die. Previous Intel quad-core chips cobbled together two dual-core die.

Other features include QuickPath, which doubles the memory bandwidth of previous Intel "Extreme" platforms, and Hyper-Threading Technology, which allows multiple computing threads to run simultaneously, effectively enabling the chip to do two things at once.

Each Core i7 processor features an 8 MB level 3 cache and three channels of DDR3 1066 memory.

Dell, Gateway, and Alienware (a Dell subsidiary) have all announced systems using the new chip.

Spansion and Kodak slammed Samsung with two separate patent infringement lawsuits Monday.

Spansion, one of the world's largest suppliers of flash memory chips, on Monday announced it has filed two patent infringement complaints against Samsung with the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Spansion is seeking the exclusion from the U.S. market of more than 100 million MP3 players, cell phones, digital cameras, and other consumer electronics devices containing Samsung's allegedly infringing flash memory components.

The complaint also seeks an injunction and treble damages for alleged patent violations relating to Samsung flash memory that Spansion says has accounted for more than $30 billion in Samsung's global revenues since 2003.

Flash memory is found in virtually all electronic devices and is one of the largest segments of the semiconductor industry, with nearly $130 billion in total revenues since 2000.

The Spansion patents named in the lawsuits are fundamental to floating gate technology, "which is the foundation for approximately 90 percent of the flash memory market," according to Spansion.

The chipmaker is also targeting MirrorBit, a "charge-trapping technology" that represents a growing share of the flash memory market and is expected to replace floating gate technology in the future. Flash memory companies including Samsung have publicly announced their plans to transition to charge-trapping type technologies for their future generation products, according to Spansion.

The acquisition of Saifun appears to be one of the driving forces behind these lawsuits. "The acquisition of Saifun Semiconductor earlier this year expanded Spansion's IP portfolio and was a key milestone in Spansion's strategy to create a major licensing business, and generate new streams of significant revenue with very high margins," the company said.

Spansion also listed the "manufacturers of downstream products" containing Samsung's infringing devices in its ITC complaint. Companies named in the ITC case include: Samsung, Apple, Asus, Kingston, Lenovo, PNY, RIM, Sony, Sony-Ericsson, and Transcend.

The Kodak actions allege that both Samsung and LG camera phones infringe Kodak digital camera patents. The patents in question cover technology related to image capture, compression, and data storage and a method for previewing motion images, Kodak said.

Kodak on Monday filed suit against Samsung and LG in the United States District Court for the Western District of New York, as well as in the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Kodak's District Court complaints request compensation for damages resulting from the companies' infringement, and both the District Court and ITC actions seek injunctions prohibiting Samsung and LG from further importation and sale of products cited in the complaints. Kodak did not disclose the amount of damages it is pursuing.

Kodak has licensed its imaging patents to several leading technology companies including: MEI/Panasonic, Motorola, Nokia, Olympus, Sanyo, Sharp, Sony, Sony Ericsson, and others.

25GB in 70 seconds. That's the torrid transfer rate consumers can expect with devices based on the USB 3.0 specification, which debuted Monday.

USB 3.0 SuperSpeed logo as shown at WinHEC 2008.

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

As reported previously, the USB Promoter Group finalized the "SuperSpeed" USB 3.0 specification today and is doing a "comprehensive review" of the technology at a conference in San Jose, Calif.

Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and NEC are the leading players in the group.

Among the initial devices, external solid-state (flash) drives and hard drives are expected to be popular. "The first SuperSpeed USB devices will likely include data storage devices such as flash (solid-state drives), external hard drives, digital music players, and digitial cameras," the group said.

Products aren't coming until 2010, however. "It is anticipated that initial SuperSpeed USB discrete controllers will appear in the second half of 2009 and consumer products will appear in 2010," according to the group.

"The USB 3.0 Promoter Group is now accepting adopters of the USB 3.0 specification, which has been finalized at the 1.0 level," the group added.

As its name (SuperSpeed) implies, USB 3.0 is all about speed. About 10 times more speed, to be exact, than the 2.0 specification.

Computerworld reported that "several hundred people crowded stores" that opened around 10 p.m. Saturday. The top-of-the-line 965 chip sold out, according to one retailer.

Sofmap store in Akihabara is selling boxed Core i7 processors

(Credit: Sofmap)

The Core i7 represents the vanguard of Intel's new Nehalem microarchitecture. The i7 is a desktop processor targeted initially at gaming boxes.

(See CNET review of Falcon Northwest Mach V tower system based on Core i7-965 processor.)

Sofmap, a large Japanese computer reseller, is showing Core i7 processors, motherboards, and systems on its Web site.

Sofmap lists the boxed Core i7-920 (2.66GHz) at 32,800 yen or close to $340. The i7-940 (2.93GHz) is listed at 63,800 yen or about $660. The high-end i7-965 (3.20GHZ) goes for 112,800 yen or $1,160.

A series of i7-920 processors bundled with Windows Vista Home Premium "DSP version" are shown ranging in price from 45,800 yen ($470) to 54,800 yen ($565).

Specification details (listed by Sofmap) include: LGA1366 socket, Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) rated at 4.8GT/sec (gigatransfers per second), 8MB L3 cache, and a 130 watt TDP (Thermal Design Power).

The DSP, or Delivery Service Provider, version of Windows Vista is being promoted heavily in Japan and is typically bundled with other components.

Sofmap advertisement for Core i7

(Credit: Sofmap)

Motherboards and systems are also on sale. Motherboards are based on the Intel X58 chipset. DDR3 memory is being promoted along with the i7 too.

Tower systems using the Core i7 chip range in price from 179,800 yen ($1,852) to 219,800 yen ($2,264).

Updated at 9:00 p.m. with additional comments on Netbooks at bottom.

In case you missed it, Advanced Micro Devices is passing on Netbooks. At least as Intel and its partners have defined the category.

AMD thinks that ultrathin 13-inch designs such as the MacBook Air address a more viable market than what it calls mininotebooks.

(Credit: Apple)

In fact, a lot of the media outlets missed this point completely, insisting that AMD is going to go head-to-head with Intel on Netbook processors--apparently because it satisfies a journalistic boilerplate that AMD must, just must, have a direct response to Intel's Atom.

Just to set the record straight, here's what AMD Chief Executive Dirk Meyer said Thursday: "We're ignoring the Netbook phenomenon--just thinking about PC form factors above that form factor."

I think that is a pretty unambiguous statement. But if that wasn't clear enough, here's what Bahr Mahony, director of notebook product marketing at AMD said: "We're going to offer the Congo and Yukon platforms as an alternative (to processors and chipsets for Netbooks). There are a fair number of people that are not satisfied with the experience they're getting on these mininotebook platforms." (AMD uses the terms Netbook and mininotebook interchangeably.)

(Note that AMD has also said it will not enter the market for mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, another sign that AMD is pursuing a different course than the one Intel has charted with Atom.)

In an effort to underscore his doubts about Netbooks, Mahony added that the dissatisfaction with Netbooks "has been exhibited by the high return rates that have been seen on these mininotebooks" in Europe.

Asus or Acer may have something to say about that, but at the very least, this offers a fresh perspective on this possibly overhyped category.

And AMD spokesman John Taylor said Thursday that AMD is specifically not targeting Netbook designs. That is, those designs with an 8- to 12-inch screen.

AMD's strategy seems solid, in my opinion. Go for a segment that is bigger and better than Netbooks. The ultraportable category (the MacBook Air being the best example) is full of attractive but expensive designs. Why not work with PC makers to offer an ultrathin, ultralight, full-featured 13-inch notebook that is priced a lot less than $1,800? Why not $600 or $700?

In addition to the conventional criticism of Netbooks (small screens, tiny keyboards), an underrated fact is that many users eventually get the feeling that they're stuck with an underpowered laptop.

And being underpowered often hinges on lackluster graphics. In a conversation Thursday with Pat Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD, he pointed to the graphics capability of AMD's upcoming Conesus CPU, which will use ATI's RS780M graphics: better graphics and better user experience overall.

The MacBook Air offers probably the best proof of this thinking. Apple (which, if you haven't noticed, doesn't offer a netbook), originally went with Intel's integrated graphics in the Air, but due to customer dissatisfaction with graphics performance, it added Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics to its newest models.

Delivering a more powerful dual-core processor (such as AMD's Conesus) for this segment would also turn some heads and offer a more full-featured experience. Intel will be the first one to tell you that Atom is underpowered for many applications.

Are AMD customers clamoring for Netbooks like Intel customers are? "Frankly, I don't get the same answer when I talk to the customer base," AMD's Meyer said Thursday. Time will tell whether the CEO's strategy is right, but it offers a well-thought-out alternative to the Netbook as we know it.

Additional comments:
As a point of clarification. A Netbook is not a thin notebook. AMD has stated it will pursue the latter market. (Whether this pans out or not is another question. Consumer tastes and time will ultimately dictate the form factor.) Thin notebooks are typically full-featured with relatively large 12-, 13- or 14-inch screens. Netbooks, by contast, are tiny in size (just visit a Best Buy: Asus Netbooks are almost invisible next to a standard notebook) and use low-power, low-performance Atom processors. The Netbook category now exists because of the stark difference in form factors (and price). And the market has borne this out. The Netbook category is defined, to a large extent, by the Atom processor, which is architecturally very different than the Yukon and Congo platforms that AMD will launch. That's why CEO Meyer and others at AMD are going out of their way to draw a distinction between Netbooks and the type of design that AMD will pursue.