Looks like Asus is following the footsteps of its Taiwanese competitor. Just after revealing its 15.6-inch Eee Top, Jerry Shen, the CEO of Asustek says that 20-inch and 22-inch Eee Tops have already been outsourced and will reach the markets by the first half of 2009.
The rest of the details are yet to be out but I expect it to be more or less similar to MSI Wind nettops.
S3, the graphics label for VIA, announced their Chrome 500 series graphics chips yesterday, offering up a competitor to the Radeon HD 4350 line as well as other budget cards that provide features at a much lower price.
This new hardware sports a newer unified shader processor that provides support for DirectX 10.1+ as well as OpenGL 3. Other specs include a 500MHz memory processor, 620MHz core and a stock card decoding Blu-ray. The Chrome 500 is also rather quiet.
You can already get acquainted with the Chrome series by means of the Chrome 530 GT. It features 512MB of memory, an HDMI output, a dual-link DVI and up to a 2048 x 1536 resolution. It costs $45, acting as a mid range card among the current low-end competition from AMD.
Just after the introduction of MSI Wind Nettops, Asus has also jumped in the fray with their Eee Top all-in-one computer. Contrary to a report by PC World, Asus revealed only one Eee Top, the ET1602. The configuration includes a 15.6-inch touchscreen display, Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, 1.3 megapixel webcam, mic, LAN and a card reader. It runs on Windows XP along with the Easy Mode UI.
Asus will be selling this soon in Taiwan at around 18,900 Taiwanese dollars ($580).
As expected, Samsung has started the production of its 2.5-inch 256GB SSDs. The read/write rates also seem to increase from the previous 200/160 MB/sec to 220/200 MB/sec. Based on the multi-level cell (MLC) technology, Samsung claims the SSD to be as fast as a 15,000 RPM HDD without the “noise, size, power and heating drawbacks”.
To please the corporate crowd, Samsung is providing an optional proprietary encryption software to provide full disk encryption to these SSDs.
MSI revealed three Wind Netones in Taiwan. The M16, M19 and M22 boast screen sizes of 15.6-inch 18.5-inch and 22-inch respectively. Going by the machine translation, all the nettops will be powered by an Intel Atom processor with OS option of Windows XP or Windows Vista. MSI has made the displays touchscreen enabled with HD content playback support on M22.
M19 is expected to launch in January 2009, followed by M16 in February and M22 in March. Prices will be in the range of $400 - $800.
Fujitsu Japan today announced a new line of 2.5-inch drives. The new MBD2 RC and MBE2 RC series boast a speed of 10,025 and 15,000 RPM and Fujitsu claims that these drives are 60% faster than the current set of 2.5-inch drives. The drives use perpendicular magnetic recording, support 6GB/s SAS (Serial-attached SCSI) that allows the drive to transfer data at speeds of up to 600MB/s.
The 10,000 RPM drive will come in capacities of up to 300GB while the 15,000 RPM drive is limited to 147GB only. Though both the drives will come out by the first half of 2009 don’t expect it to be cheap since Fujitsu is targeting corporates with their offering and not an average consumer.
AMD is really rolling out the processors these days and are set to launch their Phenom II at the upcoming CES in Las Vegas in January 2009. The Phenom II X4 will be a part of the Dragon platform and is also known as the Deneb core. This will be the desktop processor version of the Shanghai processor that launched yesterday.
This Dragon platform will replace the Spider platform that launched in 2007. The Phenom II X4 will have 8MB of cache and connect to DDR-2 or DDR-3 memory. Apparently, AMD is making a concentrated effort to appeal to the mainstream market, in sharp contrast with the Intel Core i7 “Nehalem” processor, at least in AMD’s eyes.
Options for the Dragon platform include quad graphics and more. Even better, the Phenom II with the Dragon Platform will be packaged with the AMD Overdrive CPU control utility. Also included is the Fusion optimization tool.
With the announcement of this new graphics card, Nvidia has really broken the barriers of visual computing. The Quadro FX 5800 is not aimed at gamers but instead it will benefit people into CAD and DCC content. The card packs a whopping 4GB of GDDR3 memory along with 240 CUDA parallel processing cores and massive bandwidth of 102GB/sec.
Such a powerful card results in better 4D modeling, faster 3D texture transfer and a hell lot of other things required to carry out computer aided designs flawlessly. Geophysicists, designers, scientists, engineers and other technical professionals will want to invest in this card. It goes for a hefty price tag of $3500.
AMD is really rolling out the processors these days and are 
