Techo Rama

NVIDIA and TSMC have announced that they have developed the world’s first graphics chip with embedded DRAM. The chip will be used in handheld devices. TSMC has developed the chip on a 65nm embedded DRAM process. The process shrinks the cell and the macro size by nearly 50% compared to its previous generation. The company is targeting higher bandwidth that will be offered by the embedded DRAM at applications such as game consoles and multimedia processors. The embedded DRAM also allows some power saving functions that include – sleep mode, partial power cut-off and on-chip temperature compensation and also improves the data retention time. The company has not revealed any more details of the chip.

Water is being used to cool processors are graphics cards. The problem with these devices is that as they get more performance speed they also release a lot of heat and if that heat is not dissipated in a proper way then the whole system gets vulnerable. But until now no one made any RAM which required a water cooling system. OCZ Technology is the first to release water cooled RAM. The RAM is named Flex XLC Water-Cooled RAM. The chip has integrated heat-spreaders that can be connected to any water cooling system. The RAM operates at DDR2-800 speeds, so the company might have thought to keep it cool…!

Agere Systems has begun sampling Industry’s Fastest Preamplifier chip for Enterprise and Desktop HDD markets. The chip named TrueStore PA7800 preamplifier offers exceptional speeds topping 2.5 gigabits-per-second, while consuming nearly 30 percent less power in write mode than any other chip manufactured by the company. As a drive reads data from the disk drive platter, the preamplifier amplifies these extremely small signals before they are sent to a read-channel IC for a sophisticated processing and digitization. The company expects to begin the mass production of these chips by the end of this year

Electricity bills face the heat when servers are designed to run on power hungry machines. Intel is trying to cut the power consumption with the new low-power range of Xeon processors, which the company plans to release Monday. The new quad-core Xeon processor will consume just 50-watts under peak load. These chips are a lot cooler than the company’s other quad-core offerings, which are rated at 80 watts and 120 watts. Intel’s rival AMD is also selling chips that consume less power. These chips consume 68 watts under peak load conditions.

World’s largest chipmaker, Intel has launched a pair of Xeon quad-core processors with 50-watt thermal envelopes. The company has launched these low-watt quad-core models as a part of its short-term road map. These Xeon quad-core processors decreases 60 percent power, which has 120 thermal watts envelops and it also drops 38 percent from 80 watt-models. Now the company is offering 11-quad core processors. Intel has unveiled two new 50-watt processors, named the Xeon L5320 and the L5310, which offers speeds of 1.86GHz and 1.6GHz, respectively. Both chips have a total of 8MB of Level 2 cache and use a 1066MHz FSB. These chips will work with Intel’s Bensley server platform and compatible with the existing dual- and quad-core Xeon processors. The cost of the Xeon L5320 processor is $519 per 1,000 units, while the Xeon L5310 is priced at $455 per 1,000 units. The company is planning to launch a 3.0GHz version of its quad-core chip as well as processors, which will include a 1600 MHz Front Side Bus (FSB). Even the company is planning to produce quad-core chips, which uses its 45 nanometer manufacturing process.

According to recent reports, chip giant Intel is planning to release their next-generation chipsets named ‘Bearlake’ at CeBIT show. These new chipsets will introduce support for DDR3 memory as well as the company’s upcoming 45nm quad-core and dual-core processors. These new chips will be named P35 and will support front-side bus speeds of 1333 MHz and DDR3 memory speeds of 1066 MHz. They will also provide backward compatibility support for DDR2 RAM which should allow motherboard makers to restrict DDR3 support to their new P35 boards. P35 motherboards should hit the market by April or May.

Tyan earlier introduced a personal supercomputer that was powered by Intel’s Quad-Core Xeon processor. Now the company has moved one step forward by launching a new ‘Personal Super Workstation’ that packs as many as ten dual core Opteron 2200 processors for a total of 20 cores and a whooping 80GB DDR2 RAM. This all architecture is spread over four compute nodes and a fifth head node. This head node also supports a PCI Express X16 slot which can easily comfort a high-end graphics card. No news on the availability and the pricing of the system but we will keep you posted.

Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE in Northern Victoria has streamlined from 16 servers to just two in three weeks and without any down time. All this that looks to be a dream comes courtesy of Virtualization. Virtualization technology enables organizations to consolidate data without disrupting its business and doing so also saves time, money and manpower. Virtualization technology separates the software layer of computing which includes OS and applications from hardware it runs on. Once a system has been virtualized, it can run any number of instances of any operating system. After this each appears to the other as it is having its own hardware. The technology is important because most organizations have to maintain different servers for different applications. Big organizations have web servers, database servers and many others for many different applications. This is an increase in cost and we also require manpower to look after all these systems. On the other hand using Virtualization technology can put all these servers in one or two servers. This reduces the cost and manpower and does not have any adverse effect on the computing capacity. TAFE caters to 17,000 students and 450 staff workers. The country college which has six campuses in north-western Victoria had 45 servers scattered through the network were managed from a data centre in Shepparton. Some of these machines were old and were in need of replacement. The college now settles on Dell’s PowerEdge 6850 servers with Intel Dual-Core processors running version 3.0 of VMware’s enterprise virtualization software. This entire consolidation effort took less than three weeks with no downtime. Now the work done by 16 servers has been consolidated into two virtual servers which provide all the facilities that were there with 16 servers. Virtualization technology is not new, it has been available on Mainframes and UNIX based systems for many years now. The only change is that companies like VMware and Microsoft have extended that capability to the popular x86 microprocessor architecture that is used by chip giants Intel and AMD in desktop computers and low-cost servers. The concept is much easier in high-end machines that run multiple core processors. The credit to get Virtualization in desktop system can be given to VMware. VMware was founded by a husband-wife team in 1998. Today the company has more than 4 million users and 20,000 corporate clients. Australian businesses are rapidly up-taking Virtualization as it can deliver both innovation and cost-reduction in the data centre. Consolidation of servers saves money in server acquisition and maintenance. Another major benefit of Virtualization is easy disaster-recovery, as it is easy to load a backed-up virtual server onto new hardware without affecting other bits and bytes.

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has announced that its 55nm process technology is ready for use in large scale productions. The new process is a half-node based on the company’s existing 65nm process and should allow all chip designers to move from 65nm to 55nm without any risk and effort. Die sizes are expected to be reduced by 15%, increasing the number of dies per 300mm wafer. This will also save 10%-20% power without any reduction in gate switching speed. The new family will include general purpose and general consumer platforms. The production of 55GP will begin this quarter while the production of 55GC will start later this year. We can expect that ATI and NVIDIA will begin testing the technology soon and the first products using the technology should be available by the end of this year.

In the near future, visually impaired people will be able to have access to the audio and video content, thanks to the IBM. The tech firm will very soon unveil a multimedia browser to make it possible. Dubbed the Accessibility Browser (A-Browser), the new software has been designed by a blind employee named Dr Chieko Asakawa who works at in IBM’s research laboratory in Tokyo, Japan. The A-Browser allows the blind or the partly-sighted people to have the same sort of control over the multimedia content as experienced by the normal people. Currently, the team is focusing on the Real Player and Windows Media Player compatible content. By using the A-Browser, the visually-impaired person can control media content by using preset shortcut keys instead of having to seek the control buttons using a mouse. The browser also allows the users to slow down or increase the speed of the video. The volume controls let user adjust the sound of various sources in parallel. Frances West, director of IBM’s Human Ability and Accessibility Centre said: This is not just from a social responsibility standpoint, but with ageing baby-boomers we think that such technology could really benefit the population in general because all of us will be on this ageing journey. It hasn’t been revealed that whether the A-Browser will be launched worldwide or in select markets. As it is anticipated to be offered for free later this year, we could expect a global launch.