Nvidia Tegra Inside Next-gen Nintendo Portable

As Nvidia starts to change its focus to other areas that don't involve desktop graphics, the rumor mill delivers a juicy rumor.

The story goes like this: Nvidia has an ARM11 based SoC(system on chip) and Nintendo has an ARM based Nintendo DS/DSi. Put the two together int the same room and you have GeForce 6 class graphics features on an handheld device and serious possibilities for retro compatibility with the DS/DSi consoles currently on the market.

Nvidia is expected to announce the Tegra 2 soon, a new SoC upgrade with a CUDA capable GPU core and the ARM Cortex-A9 CPU core. It's still uncertain which one will make it's way to the Nintendo device. Microsoft has chosen not to wait and went with the Tegra for the new Zune HD but since the new console shouldn't be out this year, it might very well feature Tegra's successor.

Gigabyte readies SATA-III, 6Gbit/s motherboards

750MB/s will be a reality this year.

The boards that are in prototype phase are based in the P55 PCH and aimed at Core i5 processors.
Gigabyte employs a chip from Marvell to handle the SATA-III duties, which is also a provider of SATA controllers for hard drives.
These are good news for SSD lovers which are now nearing a bottleneck with SATA-II, at 375MB/s, overheads unaccountable in this figure.

JMicron announces the JMF612 SSD controller

JMicron tries to shake away the bad image of it's JMF602 chips.
The new chip is only SATA-II compliant but targets to fix the major issue that these controllers have, the random write performance, which usually causes the OS to stall for one or two seconds while in heavy loads.
The new chips have support for up to 256MB of cache, which will be enough to solve most of the problems associated with these drives. The previous JMF602 iterations only had a small amount of cache inside the chip itself, there was no support for the external cache.
There's also support for Native Command Queueing(NCQ) and an USB port for firmware upgrades, like the current JMF602 based drives. SATA-III versions are expected in mid-2010.
I eagerly await drives based on these chips, since they are expected to be cheaper than Indilinx based drives, like the OCZ Vertex, and should perform well enough for most people. The current JMF602B based drives are already very fast but the random write performance kills what would be a terrific experience.
I have an OCZ Solid 30GB with me that boots very fast but has these issues while performing writes in the background - even the mouse stalls for more than one second sometimes, let alone the rest of the computer. Installing updates for your OS of choice are also not up to par with current HDDs, due to this issue.

OCZ releases Agitilty SSD drives

New, affordable MLC based SSD drives with 64MB of cache.

The new drives have 64MB of onboard DRAM to serve as cache, come with the cheaper MLC NAND chips and an unknown controller. I have contacted OCZ to clarify which one.

The onboard 64MB of DRAM should help mitigate random write issues that have plagged JMicron 602 based SSD drives.

      Performance numbers below:

• 30GB Max Performance
• Read: Up to 185 MB/s
• Write: Up to 100 MB/s
• Sustained Write: Up to 60 MB/S
• 120GB/60GB Max Performance
• Read: Up to 230 MB/s
• Write: Up to 135 MB/s
• Sustained Write: Up to 80 MB/S

Power consumption is of 2W maximum and 0.5W while in idle.
Early prices in Europe are of 100eur for the 30GB model, 160eur for the 60GB model and around 250eur for the one with 120GB - very close to current prices of the OCZ Solid.

Samsung mini-PCIe SSD

A new SSD that uses the standard mini-PCIe form factor, in a hope to unify an unstandard new market.

After the introduction of the "netbook", there has been a surge in the demand of small SSD drives but this has always had the problem associated with proprietary form factors - ASUS has one, Acer and Dell also do, among others.
Samsung now aims to unify the upcoming lines of netbooks by supplying a SATA II controller + FLASH + CACHE in a single, standard mini-PCIe form factor with the same size as the current WiFi adapters for laptops. This will allow for netbooks and laptops to be sold with only the fast SSD and latter upgrade storage with a 2.5" HDD, or skipping it altogether in favor of lower power consumption and thinner designs.
Samsung will be offering the SSD in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flavours, capable of 200MB/s for sequential reads and 100MB/s for sequential writes.

Power consumption is very low at 0.3W. Prices have not yet been disclosed for any model.

Buffalo's 16GB ''nail'' sized drive

You can't really call such a small thing a thumb, can you?
The new 5mm USB flash drive is available in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB versions - surprising, given it's miniscule size.
The flash chip seems to be lodged on the USB connector itself. There's not much space elsewhere and, as you can see, it has a thicker bottom half.