Google Increases Patent “War-Chest”

Google has purchased 1,023 patents from IBM in a play the search engine giant says will protect its Android operating system against numerous patent lawsuits. According to the blog SEO by the Sea, which initially broke the story, Google acquired the patents in mid August. The patents acquired are fairly broad are not specific: Java scripting, wireless technology, circuit design, parallel database systems and architecture, and user authentication were amongst the intellectual property acquired.
Google declined to comment on the acquisition cost of the patents, but says the purchase was necessary because of a “hostile, organized campaign” against Android by rival smartphone manufactures such as Apple and Microsoft. Google’s acquisition of 1,030 patents from IBM in July and recent purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings were also done as a protective measure.
Google’s general counsel, Kent Walker, told the Wall Street Journal that patent-infringement litigation was being used by corporations to “block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology.”
David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer blogged that “[Google’s] competitors are waging a patent war on Android and working together to keep us from getting patents that would help balance the scales.”

Sponsored By

Read More

Intel Announces New SATA Solid-State Drive for the Data Center

Intel Corporation announced today its latest solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel Solid-State Drive 710 Series, a purpose-built Multi-Level Cell (MLC) data center SSD and replacement for the Intel X25-E Extreme SSD. While the Intel X25-E was based on more expensive but highly reliable Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND flash memory, the Intel SSD 710 uses compute-quality Intel 25-nanomenter (nm) MLC NAND flash memory with Intel High Endurance Technology (HET) to deliver the endurance and performance necessary for data center, financial services, embedded, Internet portal, search engine and other demanding storage and server applications, but at a greater value.
“The Intel SSD 710 Series gives enterprise data center and embedded users extreme endurance and performance, enabled by Intel’s High Endurance Technology based on Intel 25nm MLC NAND technology,” said Rob Crooke, Intel vice president and general manager of the Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. “Intel SSDs are widely deployed in the data center due to their performance, reliability and value. Our latest SSD product family offers more than 30 times the write endurance of our current MLC SSDs, plus improved performance and new features, such as power-loss data protection and surplus arrays of NAND for enhanced reliability.”
The Intel SSD 710 delivers nearly the same endurance as SLC-based NAND SSDs, yet utilizes the higher capacity and more cost-effective MLC NAND. It achieves write endurance out-of-the-box of up to 1.1 Petabytes (PB) and comes in 100-Gigabyte (GB), 200GB and 300GB capacities. Targeted for I/O-starved applications, the Intel SSD 710 achieves a 4K random write performance of up to 2,700 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 4K random read performance of up to 38,500 IOPS across the full span of the drive, making this a suitable replacement to an SLC SSD or multiple enterprise-grade hard disk drives (HDD). In addition to performance, the Intel SSD 710 can replace many power-consuming HDDs with a single SSD to help reduce data center energy costs.
Cisco and Intel teams have worked closely, looking at the requirements for servers in the data center – IT organizations today more often run out of memory, and need memory density as well as capacity and performance,” said David Lawler, vice president of product management for Cisco. “The Cisco UCS B230 M2 server offers the highest density memory capacity, and is one of the highest-density two-socket, half-width form factors powered by the Intel Xeon E7-2800. Cisco will offer the Intel SSD 710 Series to further increase the performance and storage capacity in the UCS B230 with two local drives offering 100GB each in September and up to 300GB each in the fall.”
The Intel SSD 710 also includes increased reliability and security features. These include enhanced power-loss data protection to reduce potential data loss during a power failure; added data security with surplus NAND flash memory to provide system protection should a NAND die fail; Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with 128-bit pre-configured encryption technology to protect the data from an external threat or internal system issues and Temperature Monitoring and Logging containing an internal temperature sensor that can be monitored using two self-monitoring analysis and report technology (SMART) attributes to prevent downtime.
Positioned for high write usage models, the drive can also be over-provisioned by the user to achieve up to 80 percent greater write endurance, creating an outstanding storage value. Intel HET combines NAND silicon enhancements and unique SSD NAND management techniques to extend the write endurance of MLC-based SSDs. Intel HET comprises Intel-developed firmware, controller and high-cycling NAND for optimized endurance and performance for the heavy loads of data crunching and writing experienced in 24/7 data centers or scientific, financial or other high-intensity usage models. Firmware enhancements from Intel include optimized error avoidance techniques, write amplification reduction algorithms and system-level error management beyond the normal industry Error Correction Code (ECC) standards.
Providing a better dollar-per-GB value than its previous-generation Intel X25-E SSD, the Intel SSD 710 Series is priced at $649 for the 100GB version, $1,289 for the 200GB, and $1,929 for 300GB, all based on 1,000-unit quantities. It is backed by a 3-year limited warranty.

Sponsored By

Read More

SAPPHIRE Announces HD 6870 Dirt 3 Edition Graphics Card

SAPPHIRE Technology has just announced a new model in its successful HD 6800 series of graphics cards – the HD 6870 1GB Dirt3 Edition with Dual fan cooler and a voucher code for the full game in the package. The SAPPHIRE HD 6870 Dirt3 Edition has the same internal architecture as the standard model, with 1120 stream processors and 56 texture processing units, but clock speeds are increased to 920MHz for the core and 1050Mhz (4.2Gb/sec effective) for the 1GB of GDDR5 memory giving users a boost in performance. The new SAPPHIRE exclusive cooler design has Dual fans to keep this model cool and quiet even when under load conditions, keeping even extreme gamers happy! This new design has two 90mm fans with thin impellers that can move the same amount of air at 10% lower rotation speeds than conventional fans, keeping noise low, and their special dust repelling bearings contribute to high reliability. Enthusiast users can tune up performance even more with SAPPHIRE’s dedicated VGA overclocking tool TriXX, which is available free for anyone to download from the SAPPHIRE website, www.sapphiretech.com – just follow the TriXX buttons! Eyefinity and APP acceleration The SAPPHIRE HD 6870 Dirt3 Edition has the versatile output configuration of two DVI, one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort connectors, and can support a VGA monitor with the dongle supplied. Using two of the DVI/HDMI outputs together with the two DisplayPorts enables this card to support up to four monitors in Eyefinity (SLS) mode. The third generation UVD (Unified Video Decoder) in the SAPPHIRE HD 6870 supports MVC (Multi-view Video Coding) for the smooth decoding of Blu-Ray 3D with reduced CPU load as well as other file formats. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio are supported, and HDMI capability has also been upgraded to HDMI 1.4a. This provides deep colour, enhanced high resolution output for Digital Theatre applications and 3D stereoscopic support as well as 7.1 high bit-rate audio. The multiple stream processors of the HD 6800 series can be used to accelerate other applications such as video transcoding. The latest generation of web browsers can be GPU accelerated, and this is also supported for enhanced productivity in Microsoft Office 2010. Second Generation DX11 support The SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series features the second generation of graphics technology from AMD designed to support all the features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 11. These GPUs are built in AMD’s 40nm process to deliver high performance with low power consumption. Advanced hardware features include an enhanced Tessellation unit, dedicated HDR Texture compression, multi-threaded communication with system CPU cores, embedded support for many of the DirectCompute 11 instructions, 3D stereoscopic support, HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2. The SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series is supported by AMD’s DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver which delivers support for all of the key DirectX 11 features required for enhanced gaming experiences as well as GPU acceleration of supported applications.

Sponsored By

Read More

Kingston Digital Seeks Designers and Ideas for Game Incorporating Wi-Drive

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced it is holding a contest for game designers that incorporates the recently released Wi-Drive™ portable, wireless storage solution for Apple iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch® devices. The contest is open to Canadian residents only and is void in Quebec. The grand prize is a 64GB iPad2 with 32GB Wi-Drive, plus promotion of the game globally.
Kingston® seeks game designers between now and October 31, 2011 to weave in elements of Wi-Drive’s features and functionality. Contestants are asked to develop a game idea and use any tools necessary such as software or online game-creation services. To enter, contestants need to have the game hosted on a Web site of their choice and then follow the steps outlined on the Kingston’s Canada Facebook page.
Wi-Drive allows users to stream videos, access music or share files with other Apple device owners. The distinctively designed, pocket-sized Wi-Drive utilizes Flash-based technology to store data from USB-compatible PCs. Files on Apple devices are easily retrieved via Wi-Drive’s built-in wireless transmitter, eliminating the need for cables or an Internet connection. Three users can simultaneously use different file types from a single Wi-Drive without any performance disruption.
A total of 11 prizes will be given out ― six for game creation and five for game ideas. The game ideas must be under 200 words and must describe the main objective of your game. The grand prize is a 64GB iPad2 with a 32GB Wi-Drive, and the second-prize winner receives a 16GB iPad2 with 16GB Wi-Drive. Other prizes include Wi-Drive devices, Kingston SSDNow solid-state drives, and HyperX® memory.
For more information and complete rules and regulations, visit www.kingston.com/canada/widrivecontest. The contest is open to Canadian residents only and is void in Quebec.

Sponsored By

Read More

Intel Demonstrates Sandy Bridge E Liquid Cooler at IDF

Liquid cooling solutions for PCs are almost always after market, and rarely ever manufacturer stock. Intel hopes to change this with their Sandy Bridge E processor, as the company on offering a liquid cooler stock with these chips.
This new liquid cooler is made in collaboration with Asetek and will work with the upcoming Sandy Bridge E CPUs but also with the LGA 1366, 1155 and 1156 sockets.

Related Articles 

Read More

Western Digital Delivers The Personal Cloud

Western Digital, the world’s leader in external storage solutions, today introduced its WD 2go and WD 2go Pro mobile apps for its My Book Live personal cloud storage solution. WD’s My Book Live drive connects to the home network creating shared storage that users can access within and outside the home. Secure remote access to the My Book Live is available on any computer through www.WD2go.com, while the WD 2go apps provide mobile access to files stored on the drive using an iPad®, iPhone®, iPod touch® or Android™ compatible mobile device.
Combining the benefits of both public and private cloud solutions, My Book Live personal cloud storage allows users to keep media and files safe at home on their own physical drive and yet access them over the Internet with any PC or Mac® computer or on tablets and smartphones through WD’s mobile apps. Using My Book Live, users can share files, stream media, and access content anywhere with no monthly fees and secure in the knowledge that their data resides in their own home under their exclusive control. In addition, the WD 2go Pro app enables private sharing of files with friends, family and colleagues. Almost any file can be shared, from pictures and personal videos to work documents and presentations.
WD 2go web access marks WD’s second generation of remote access technologies that leverage a peer-to-peer connection between the My Book Live and remote PCs or mobile devices to maximize the speed and throughput.
“Consumers demand the anywhere, any device access they can get from ‘the cloud,’ but don’t want to pay monthly fees or lose control of their personal data. They want access to all their files without worrying about what files are synched to what device,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager for WD’s branded products and consumer electronics groups. “With the new WD 2go mobile apps and WD’s My Book Live personal cloud storage, consumers now have a simple and fast way to securely store, share, and access all their digital content from their mobile devices wherever they are.”
The WD 2go apps add to WD’s vision of providing secure storage and access to digital content on any screen, on-the-go or at home. The app supports a variety of media file formats for streaming movies and music or accessing files such as Microsoft® Office documents. In addition to all of the features currently available in the free WD 2go app, the WD 2go Pro app includes several advanced features, including:
Clipping: Users can clip files, photos, songs, videos or folders to download a copy from the My Book Live drive to a mobile device, enabling subsequent access even without an Internet connection.
Automatic sync: New or modified files added to the My Book Live automatically sync to mobile devices.
Content sharing: The WD 2go Pro app allows users to email files, share files as a link, print and open files with third party apps.
Additional security: Users can leverage an additional layer of security by locking mobile access to the My Book Live drive with a 4-digit pass code.
In addition to remote and mobile access to the personal cloud, WD’s My Book Live features a built-in media server that streams music, photos and movies to any DLNA-certified multimedia device such as a WD TV® Live™ network media player, Blu-ray Disc™ player, Xbox 360®, PlayStation® 3, and connected TV.
Capacity and Compatibility
My Book Live personal cloud storage is available in capacities of 1 TB, 2 TB  and 3 TB and is compatible with Windows® XP, Windows Vista®, Windows 7, Mac OS X Leopard, Snow Leopard, or Lion, as well as DLNA/UPnP enabled devices.
Price and Availability
WD 2go (free download) and WD 2go Pro ($2.99 USD) are currently available for download from the iTunes® Store and Android Market. My Book Live personal cloud storage is available at select U.S. retailers and online at the wdstore.com. MSRP is $159.99 USD for 1 TB, $199.99 USD for the 2 TB, and $249.99 USD for 3 TB.

Related Articles

Read More

Kingston Digital Launches First SandForce-based Business-Equipped SSD

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced it is shipping the SSDNow KC100, the company’s first SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) business-equipped SSD. KC100 utilizes the latest award-winning SandForce controller. This powerhouse SSD delivers exceptional performance and instantly boosts the productivity of any client system.
KC100 is backed by a five-year warranty to match the industry average for product refresh cycles in the enterprise. Utilizing SandForce’s DuraClass technology, KC100 delivers world-class data integrity protection. Corporations can rest assured their data is safe as the drive offers advanced wear leveling and garbage collection to maintain optimal endurance and performance. Data integrity protection runs transparently in the background so it never disrupts daily business.
KC100 is the only business-equipped SSD to offer enterprise-level S.M.A.R.T attributes. The SSD’s usage statistics, health and life stage can be monitored with industry standard and publicly available S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools. This provides peace of mind for IT departments knowing their employees are taken care of as the KC100 client-side SSDs are reliable and running optimally.
“Kingston is thrilled to offer the new business-equipped KC100 SSD to enterprises,” said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. “Data integrity is important to every company and the KC100 is sure to deliver the highest standards of data protection on the client systems in which it is installed. Users can rest assured that with the combination of its endurance, reliability and performance, KC100 will become a very important asset in the workplace.”
The new KC100 self-encrypts to provide full and immediate client-level data encryption. With two embedded encryption engines, running in both AES-128 and AES-256, encryption is performed at the drive level without draining host system resources and slowing down data transfer rates. KC100 is also backwards-compatible with current SATA 2 systems so investments are future-proofed for the next client system upgrade.
SSDNow KC100 ships in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities, as a standalone or as an upgrade bundle kit. It is backed by a five-year warranty, 24/7 tech support and legendary Kingston reliability.


Related Articles

Read More

Club 3D Unveils GeForce GTX 560 Ti Green Edition

Club 3D today unveiled GeForce GTX 560 Ti Green Edition model, powered by Nvidia’s GF114 GPU.
According to the press release, the GeForce GTX 560Ti Green Edition is up to 10% more efficient than the standard reference card because of energy efficient hardware components.
Club 3D’s GTX 560 Ti also has a dual-slot cooler featuring a newly-designed CoolStream fansink, 384 CUDA Cores, GPU/shader clocks of 822/1645 MHz, a 256-bit memory interface, 1GB of GDDR5 memory set to 4000 MHz, 2-way SLI support, and three display outputs – two DVI and one mini HDMI.
It supports Mini-HDMI 1.4a including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D support, x.v.Color, HDMI Deep Color, and 7.1 digital surround sound. The card also supports NVIDIA’s new 3D vision surround.
The GeForce GTX 560 Ti Green Edition should be available in late September.

Sponsored By

Read More

Microsoft Promises Record Breaking Boot Times For Windows 8

Microsoft released a video this week that demonstrated how fast Windows 8 can boot on standard PC hardware. The company claims that when testing a computer running Windows 8 against a computer running Windows 7, the Windows 8 machine usually booted 25%, and sometimes up to 75% faster.
“Few operations in Windows are as scrutinized, measured, and picked apart as boot. This is understandable—boot times represent an effective proxy for overall system performance,” wrote Windows division president Steven Sinofsky in a Thursday blog post. “Boot times represent an effective proxy for overall system performance and we all know the boot experience is an incredibly important thing for us to get right for customers.”
A video that Microsoft provided, which can be found below, shows Windows 8 booting on a modern HP laptop in approximately 7 seconds. The reason why Windows 8 is able to boot so fast is because it hibernates the kernel as opposed to closing it, which has been the norm in other iterations of Windows.
Sinofsky explains that “compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk.”
In addition to kernel hibernation, another new feature that Microsoft has incorporated into the Windows 8 boot process is the simultaneous loading of drivers with the hibernated files, which makes the entire process more efficient when used with a multi-core processor.
“Another important thing to note about Windows 8′s fast start-up mode is that, while we don’t do a full ‘Plug & Play’ enumeration of all drivers, we still do initialise drivers in this mode,” Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows wrote in the same blog post. “Those of you who like to cold boot in order to ‘freshen up’ drivers and devices will be glad to know that is still effective in this new mode, even if not an identical process to a cold boot.”
Microsoft promises that hybrid boot mode will result in a faster start-up time regardless whether a machine is using a traditional hard-disk drive or an SSD.
More details are expected at Microsoft’s BUILD conference, taking place next week in Anaheim, California.

Sponsored By

Read More

AMD Achieves New World Record CPU Frequency

We bet you weren’t expecting to see this headline today, but it’s true – AMD’s yet to be released FX processors have already achieved a significant overclocking world record.
About 2 weeks ago, we had the opportunity to fly down to Austin, Texas in order to get briefed on the finer points of AMD’s upcoming and highly anticipated Bulldozer (Zambezi-FX) processors. While we still can’t reveal any particular details about the CPU’s themselves, we can now tell you about this new milestone.
Now AMD have only been testing the extreme overclocking capabilites of the FX processors for about a month, but they were quickly able to determine that these new chips did not appear to have any cold bugs under liquid nitrogen, and this opened the door to something a little more extreme – liquid helium (LHe). The hope was that by improving conductivity and decreasing operating temperatures to a few degrees above absolute zero, they might be able to achieve something amazing with their new microarchitecture…and they did.
With a bunch of media in attendance, some quickly binned processors, and whole lot of liquid helium a supremely capable group made up of Sami (Macci) Mäkinen, Brian (Chew*) McLachlan, Aaron Schradin, Pete Hardman, and Simon Solotko pushed an octo-core FX-8150 (with two cores enabled) to new heights and achieved a new CPU frequency world record of 8429.38 MHz at 2.016V. This surpasses the current record by 119.44 MHz, a Intel Celeron 352 LGA775 chip clocked at 8308.9 MHz, and finally ends the streak of lowly “Cedar Mills” Celerons that have consistently held the title of world’s highest CPU frequency.

This demonstration was somewhat reminiscent of an event at CES 2009 during which Sami Makinen, Sampsa (Sampsa) Kurri, Petri (SF3D) Korhonen, and Pete Hardman used liquid helium to push a just launched Phenom II X4 940 to 6.5GHz, while also casually setting a new 3DMark 05 world record. However, this particular overclocking endeavour was even more important for AMD, because due to this new milestone the AMD FX processor is actually going to be entered into the Guinness Book of World Records. I am convinced that 8.34GHz is just the tip of the iceberg though, these AMD FX processors are going to break the 8.5GHz mark once the manufacturing process improves further. But in the mean time, all that is left is for AMD to actually launch these chips!

Related Articles 

Read More

Bulldozer Ships

Today AMD announced that the first of their Bulldozer chips, the server targeted Interlagos, has begun shipping to OEMs and retailers with a targeted availability of October. AMD claims that Interlagos is the world’s first 16-core x86 processor. While AMD’s press release claims that Interlagos is a 16-core processor, the reality is this is claim airs on the side of PR-sophistry. Interlagos has 8 Bullzoder modules: a module contains two independent integer processors, but only one FPU as well as shared fetch/decode/execute units. In the traditional sense each module has more than one core, but it isn’t quite the two as advertised. “This is a monumental moment for the industry as this first ‘Bulldozer’ core represents the beginning of unprecedented performance scaling for x86 CPUs,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group in a press release. “The flexible new ‘Bulldozer’ architecture will give Web and datacenter customers the scalability they need to handle emerging cloud and virtualization workloads.” Berman had no answers, however, about the fate of Bulldozer’s desktop iteration, the 8 core Zambezi CPU. Semi-confirmed rumors have it that Zambezi cannot reach a clockspeed that would make it competitive with Intel’s Core i7 chips. X-bit labs claims that AMD has cancelled its Komodo and Corona products in favor of focusing on Vishera desktop chips next year, Zambezi’s successor.

Sponsored By
 

Read More