Toshiba introduces their new pair of external hard drives, the  StorE Art 3 series portable USB hard drive with a stylish and modern design.

The stylish 2.5-inch hard drives with internal shock protection sensor and rubber edging for bump resistance will be  available in 750GB and 1TB capacities giving users more space for documents, digital photographs, music or videos. The 1TB model is available in black, with the 750GB option available in blue and they will come with NTI BackupNow EZ software pre-installed enables users to easily backup their complete PC system with a single click.

The Toshiba StorE Art 3 will be released in May 2010.

Popularity: 1% [?]

AMD has officially launched its first ever 45nm ‘Shanghai’ Opteron processor for servers and workstations.

The Shanghai chips are designed using the 45nm technology using a new technique called “Immersion Lithography”. The chips come with a higher amount of cache amounting to  8MB and the core frequency rises up to 2.7GHZ from a 2.3GHZ base model. The chips feature an integrated memory controller supporting up to DDR2-800.

AMD is also expected to launch its 45nm “Deneb” desktop CPUs before the end of the year.

Popularity: 99% [?]

OCZ Technology has launched the Solid Series SSDs,  a new series of low-cost SSDs which are best suited as alternative to expensive solid-state drives in the market.

The new 2.5-inch, SATA II drives are available in 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB capacities and  a better performance compared to other equal-size notebook drives. The drives deliver an incredible 155 MB/s and 90 MB/s read/write speeds and seek times of less than 0.35ms. OCZ also claims that the Solid Series consumes half as much power than the traditional hard disk. The drives come with a mini-USB port to let OCZ offer firmware upgrades in the future.

There is no word about the pricing as of posting time.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Intel’s first Core i7 processors will be unveiled in a press conference on November 17 according to an announcement from Intel. The press conference will be held in San Francisco and according to invitations sent by Intel, the Core i7 will become “the fastest processor on the planet”. The claim is based on the SPECint_rate_base2006 benchmarking, which will be the highlight of the event. The Core i7 chips each have four cores capable of a total of eight threads.

The pricing for the Core i7 processors are $284 for the 2.66GHz Core i7 920, $562 for the 2.93GHz Core i7 940, and $999 for the 3.20GHz Core i7 Extreme 965.  These prices are for entities buying in 1,000 minimum quantities.

Popularity: 100% [?]

SanDisk has developed an advanced flash filesystem that will have the potential to increase the operation of next generation Solid State Drives by 100 times over existing systems.

Called ExtremeFFS, Sandisk’s new technology operates on a page-based algorithm, which means there is no fixed coupling between physical and logical location.  When data needs to be written, the drive will put it where it is most convenient and efficient, resulting to tremendous improvement in random write performance by up to 100 times.

Sandisk will ship products carrying the ExtremeFFS technology sometime next year.

Click here to read the full announcement

Popularity: 100% [?]

Analog Devices launched the new Blackfin BF51x  series, the newest members of their  convergent-processor family.  The Blackfin convergent-processors have superior ability to reduce cost, power consumption, software complexity, and development schedules in a broad spectrum of mobile lifestyle, industrial and instrumentation, portable medical diagnostic and VoIP telephony applications. Blackfins are commonly used in Asterisk- based VoIP appliances like Astfin and Digium AA50.

The newest members of the Blackfin family are the BF512, BF514, BF516 and BF518, they are all  single-core convergent processors that surpass outdated, heterogenous MCU+DSP approaches in reducing part-count, system cost, board space, and power consumption. These new processors are available at clock speeds of up to 400 MHz and include 116 kBytes of RAM plus an optional 4 Mbits of serial (SPI) flash memory. Each also integrates Lockbox™ security for code and content protection.

The BF51x processors feature high clock rates and low power dissipation per unit of processing (MMACs/mW), and like traditional MCUs, these convergent processors are OS and compiler-friendly.

Click here for more details.

Popularity: 4% [?]