“The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20 nanometers (nm), to 18nm nodes,” said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for iSuppli. “At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it.”

"The semiconductor industry will be living with historical generations of technology longer than it did before," Jelinek says. "You are not seeing these geometries rise and fall off the way they did before. Rather, they are living on."

And they are living on because chip makers are going to be forced by the high cost of each generation of chip technology to maximize for money generated by a process instead of chip performance and lowering the cost of chips. "Historically, the focus in the semiconductor industry was always how quickly you could move to the next geometry node. Now the question is how to make money by sustaining a specific node."

Since AMD started releasing processors based on the 45nm process at the end of last year, we have only seen quad and triple core chips. Today AMD is launching several new processors, all 45nm and all Socket AM3. The first big processor is the Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition running at 3.1 GHz, and second is the Athlon II X2 250 running at 3.0 GHz.

PROVING THAT it has never been a company to stick to toeing the tedious line of conformity with reference designs, Asus has just shown us a new monster graphics card that it calls the Mars. It features two GeForce GTX 285 GPUs in SLI configuration, and it also looks like it could double-up as a blunt weapon in Cluedo.

In terms of design, it’s not dissimilar to a GeForce GTX 295. There are two PCBs sandwiched together inside one package, although each of these features 16 memory chips making for a total of 4GB of 1.2GHz (2.4GHz effective) GDDR3 memory. In short, this isn’t a card for anyone running a 32-bit operating system. Asus has also designed its own dual-slot cooler for the card, although it works in a similar way to the reference Nvidia GTX 295 cooler, with a single fan cooling both PCBs.

Interestingly, Asus has decided to spurn Nvidia’s own nForce 200 bridge chip to enable the two PCBs to talk to each other in SLI mode, and has instead used an anonymous third-party chip. One of the interesting innovations here is that, despite the new design, the card will still work with standard Nvidia drivers. The card will be recognised as a GeForce GTX 295, but will still be able to access the features of the GTX 285 GPUs.

JMicron seeks redemption with a new chip that could drive mainstream SSD adoption

DailyTech has learned that JMicron will be unveiling a new NAND flash controller for use in Solid State Drives (SSDs) in the near future. The JMF612 chip uses an ARM9 core in a 289-ball TFBGA package, and will support the use of up to 256MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM as an external cache.

The new chip was designed to remedy stuttering problems during random write operations, which has plagued SSDs using the JMF602 flash controller. JMicron rushed out a JMF602B chip to address shortcomings, but was only partially successful. Several firms decided to combine two JMF602B chips and an internal RAID chip from JMicron to boost performance. Although it raised costs significantly, it was still cheaper than controllers from Samsung and Indilinx, which were not yet available at the time. It was for this reason that SSDs like OCZ's Apex and G.Skill's Titan series were born.

The JMF612 chip is designed especially for a new generation of NAND flash chips built using smaller process geometries that will be entering the market soon. The new flash chips will be smaller, faster, and cheaper to manufacture. IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, is already building 34nm NAND, while 32nm NAND from Samsung and Toshiba will soon be entering production. The use of a cheap single-chip controller and new higher density flash chips could cut prices in half by the vital Christmas shopping season.

SSDs using the chip will also be able to support Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which was designed to increase performance of SATA hard disks by allowing the drive to internally optimize the order in which read and write commands are executed. NCQ is used in SSDs when there is latency due to high CPU usage. It also supports 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocols for full disk encryption. This provides data security mandated for classified and/or privileged information in government and corporations.

It's shaping up to be quite the month for Lenovo. Just weeks after it unveiled a refreshed version of its IdeaPad S10 netbook (understandably deemed the S10-2), the company is dropping yet another new rig on the world. Today, the IdeaPad S12 came to light, bringing with it the title of world's first netbook with NVIDIA's Ion technology. How significant will this be in the netbook world? If we had to guess today, we'd say "very."

Today Intel unveiled a few details about its next-generation Atom platform for netbooks and nettops. The current Atom platform for netbooks/nettops is composed of three chips: the Intel Atom processor, Intel’s 945GC GMCH and the ICH7 I/O hub. The UMPC version of the Atom platform is a two chip solution that uses the US15 chipset in addition to the Atom processor.

The CPU in this case is the next version of the Atom core. Still based on Intel’s 45nm process, this new Atom (codenamed Pineview...yes, confusing) brings both the memory controller and GPU core on-die. The current Atom for netbooks/nettops is codenamed Diamondville.

Bringing the graphics core on-die will help significantly reduce thermal output. Intel is expecting many more fanless netbook/nettop designs thanks to the change. Another side effect is that the new Atom platform will be easier to implement using a 4 layer motherboard. Currently many Atom designs use 6-layer motherboards, which are more costly to manufacture.

Of all of the technologies VIA introduced over the years, I never expected a form factor to be its lasting legacy on the PC industry. The most ubiquitous of VIA’s technologies were its chipsets which are all but gone now - used only by VIA for the most part. VIA’s form factor however, lives on.

The form factor is ITX. Originally introduced by VIA to accompany its line of low-power microprocessors, long before Atom, ITX was designed to deliver much smaller computers than what was defined by the micro-ATX spec.

The Intel desktop Atom boards...work just fine but they’re a bit boring. They are reminiscent of Intel’s older motherboards, before it took competition from the tweakable Taiwanese motherboards seriously.

Zotac is the first manufacturer to produce a mini-ITX motherboard based on NVIDIA’s Ion platform. Take Intel’s Atom processor, pair it up with NVIDIA’s Ion chipset (which is basically a GeForce 9300 chipset) and you have the Ion platform.

2.5 years ago, Samsung had already presented a 512 Mbit prototype of a so-called 'phase-change memory chip', abbreviated to PRAM. This memory, -by Samsung branded ' Perfect RAM' because of the advantages the chips have compared to the current NAND- and NOR-flash memory- uses heat to crystallize the chemical mixture chalcogenide from amorphous phase. Bits in an amorphous phase represent a logical '0', while the crystallized bits code '1'. According to the latest reports, Samsung will start mass producing PRAM chips in June.

Is the netbook fad coming to an end? Among all the talk of tightening chip supplies comes a separate report by way of DigiTimes that demand for Atom processors is slowing down.

The industry insiders who make the claim point to falling prices of notebooks based on Intel's ultra-low voltage Core 2 processors - punters can pick up machines that can do more than netbooks can but aren't radically larger or heavier, all for not much more money than a netbook will cost.

The moles also suggested buyers are waiting for Intel to release its second-generation Atom N-series chips, which it's expected to do in H2.

"Recently, ATI launched the Radeon HD 4890 using the RV790 GPU, a respun RV770 with a few tweaks and improvements in order to improve its position in the higher end $200+ price bracket. However, most of its sales are in the $100 category and lower price points. Today, ATI delivers a GPU to consumers at that range that NVIDIA can't match.

The Radeon HD 4770 video card that is launching today uses the RV740 GPU, which is the first 40nm GPU in mass production. The GPU consists of 826 million transistors at a core clock of 750MHz, measuring 11mm by 11mm. The Radeon 4770 features 512MB of GDDR5 DRAM clocked at 800MHz, but effectively provides 3.2 Gb/s over a 128-bit bus.

The new GPU has 640 Stream processors, the same number as the Radeon HD 4830 that it will replace. The Radeon 4830 will be quietly phased out since the Radeon 4770 offers better performance at a much lower production cost to AMD. This is offset by higher costs for GDDR5 RAM." - DailyTech

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Adjusting core clock speed has a much higher impact on performance than only adjusting memory speed. At stock clock speeds the 4890 is much more compute bound than memory bound, and this is where the difference comes in. While the 900MHz core clock variant will not offer huge performance gains over the stock card, the performance gains will be fairly proportional to the clock speed increase.

Despite the fact that a 50MHz bump only offers a maximum potential average performance improvement of about 6%, we often see realized performance gains of between 3% and 5% on 900MHz core clocked 4890 hardware. This is certainly a much better return than we saw even with a 23%+ memory overclock. Even so, 5% real world performance isn't the holy grail. So we decided to test multiple core clock frequencies ranging from 850MHz to 1000MHz in 50MHz increments.
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In non-CPU limited situations, the approximately 10% to 13% performance improvement out of a potential 17.6% improvement is nothing to sneeze at.

AMD is stepping up its game with the launch of two new flagship AM3 processors to succeed the original Phenom II X4 940 & 920 AM2+ models. These processors will be known as the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition (3.2 GHz) and Phenom II X4 945 (3.0 GHz).

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IBM AND ITS "technology alliance" have announced they'll be moving to 28nm process technology, perfect for small, low-powered, consumer devices and delivering a swift sharp kick to Intel's shins.

IBM, along with the additional fab five, Chartered Semiconductor, GlobalFoundries (sic), Infineon Technologies, Samsung Electronics and ST Microelectronics will apparently be jointly developing the 28nm, high-k metal gate (HKMG) tech, extending an existing development agreement between the six.

The new tech is touted as being capable of providing a 40 per cent performance boost and a 20 per cent reduction in power guzzlage on a chip half the size of those made using current 45nm process.

IBM and co. are also lauding the tech's power-performance and time-to-market advantages, as well as the ‘hardly-leaky-at-all' HKMG technology, good for bumped-up battery life.

The move is especially significant to AMD spinoff, GlobalFoundries, which is busy floundering around for new third-party customers to chip away for.

Cooler Master has just released a new case in their Storm series, dubbed the Scout. This mid tower chassis is targeted towards the LAN gaming enthusiast and features military influenced looks. Portability and durability are paramount when going to LAN parties or competitions, and CM has thoughtfully designed the Scout to meet those needs.