The PC Report

Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT; a joint venture between Intel and Micron), responsible for a huge chunk of advances in SSDs and flash technology, has announced that they are sampling 2-bits-per-cell 25nm MLC NAND (pictured above). What this basically means is that solid state drives will be able to be bigger in capacity as well as cheaper for the consumers – both great pieces of news for the SSD market. Mass production of this new 25nm NAND should begin in Q2 of this year with products such as Intel’s 3rd-gen X-25M drives arriving in Q4.

New reports are coming through about when both AMD and Intel will release their new six-core processors into their ranges. According to Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers the Intel six-core “Gulftown” CPUs, starting with the Core i7-980X, will be coming out at the end of March this year and priced at greater than US$1,000.

AMD will be releasing their six-core “Thuban” processors sometime in May of 2010. The CPUs will go under the Phenom II X6 1000T series, and will start with the Phenom II X6 1075T, 1055T and 1035T and will all be based off the 45nm process. A quad-core Phenom II X4 960T will also be released along with the six-core CPUs, and the new 890FX and 890GX chipsets will come a month before.

Another Windows 8 related rumour has hit the streets today via a roadmap from past Microsoft employee Chris Green. While a previous roadmap put Windows 8 in 2012, this new, and very detailed roadmap places Windows 8’s release in July of 2011, with mainstream support lasting until July 2016.

The roadmap also details the release of Office 15 (or Office 2012 as the roadmap shows) in July of 2012 and Windows Server 2012, the next iteration of Windows Server, is placed also for a July 2012 release. We’re not entirely sure about the credibility of the roadmap, however we do know that it was created while Green was still an employee at Microsoft. We’re also sure that this is just one of many Windows 8 rumours to come.

This is a badass motherboard if you ask me. The EVGA W555, which was shown off at CES 2010, is a dual-processor motherboard that is designed for overclocking unlike most workstation motherboards. The board is larger than the E-ATX standard meaning that you may not be able to fit it in your standard case, but you should expect that when it has two CPU sockets on the one board.

On the board are two LGA 1366 sockets, mainly used for Intel’s upper-end Core i7 range of processors. However, you can’t just chuck in any old Core i7 CPU in this board because they lack a pair of QPI links, instead you’ll need to grab a processor from the Xeon W5000 series which has that pair of QPI links to talk to the northbridge and the other processor at the same time. Unfortunately these Xeons are much more expensive than the standard Core i7s thanks to them being more suited for the workstation computer.

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If you have an ATI graphics card then now is the time to update your drivers to 10.1 – the first batch of the year. Not much has been improved upon this time around except for the usual bug fixes, but production support for Ubuntu 9.10 has been added. To grab the drivers, head over to the AMD website as usual. Stay tuned, because the next few Catalyst updates are said to contain “major features.”

We finally have closure on one of the biggest rumours of the past couple of years – the Apple iPad is finally released. To summarise what it looks like, it’s basically a huge iPod Touch. It’s 1.3 cm thick, weighs close to 700 grams and has a nice and large 9.7-inch capacitive touch IPS LCD display with a 1024×768 resolution. It has a slightly curved back similar to the iTouch/iPhone and also carries a similar button set: Home, Power, Volume and Mute.

On the inside we’re seeing a custom-made Apple A4 processor running at 1GHz, flash storage sizes of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi, accelerometer and digital compass. There’s also an optional 3G model supporting data only and assisted GPS (A-GPS). Connectivity wise there is a 3.5mm headphone jack as well as a 30-pin dock connector which enables charging, video output at 1024×768 VGA and 480p via composite, keyboard via a dock and a camera import attachment kit that allows importing of photos straight to your iPad.

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8199.5 MHz. That’s pretty bloody fast for a single core processor to pushed up to. A guy buy the name of TiN from XtremeLabs has achieved such a feat by pushing an old single-core Intel Celeron D 347 right up to almost 8.2GHz (the standard clock speed is just 3.06 GHz) to break the new speed record by just 16.8MHz.

TiN achieved such speeds thanks to a DFI LanParty UT P35 motherboard, OCZ RAM and a custom-made liquid nitrogen CPU cooler. He also apparently heated the processor up to 200°C to remove the integrated heat spreader attached to the chip. Unfortunately while huge clock speeds were achieved, no comparisons to other processors were made. I’m really interested to see how this CPU would perform in comparison to a top-of-the-line Intel Core i7 or i5 CPU.

Check out some nice pics of the process in the source link below.

AMD has released 5 new processors into the Athlon II and Phenom II line-up to fill out the lower-end of the scale, and also to compete with the recently released Intel Clarkdale processors. In this selection, we’re seeing two Phenom IIs and three Athlon IIs with prices ranging from US$74 up to US$169.

To get into the itty-bitty details, there is a Phenom II X4 910e running at 2.6GHz with a low power consumption of 65W but the highest price of US$169. Also new to the Phenom II range is the X2 555 BE – a dual-core processor clocking 3.2GHz and costing just US$99. In the Athlon II range there is the X4 635, X3 440 and X2 255 – with clock speeds of 2.9GHz, 3.0GHz and 3.1GHz respectively and prices of US$119, US$84 and US$74 respectively.

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Of course, not much fresh news here for those who are already using Google Chrome 4.0 via the beta channel, but Chrome 4.0 for Windows has finally gone stable; sorry Linux users, you’re stuck with the beta channel for just a bit longer. The major change for Chrome 4.0 is support for the extension framework, which should rival Firefox’s Add-ons and create more competition between the two browsers.

Currently, there are over 1,500 extensions available for Chrome, including ad blockers, several Google product enhancement tools and a lot of extensions that are available on Firefox already. Also new in Chrome 4.0 is bookmark sync, which synchronises your bookmarks across your different machines so you don’t have to create them on each machine – to use bookmark sync you’ll need a Google account which, as a Chrome user, you should have already.

Head over to Google’s Chrome page to download the browser if you feel like adopting it right now, or you can update to 4.0 from within Chrome.

Sun’s VirtualBox is an extremely handy (and free) tool to use for virtualising operating systems inside your current OS. It is one of the best free virtualisation tools available, making it a great solution for those who don’t want to pay for programs such as VMware Workstation.

VirtualBox runs on most of the popular operating systems that are available today including Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Solaris, Red Hat and more. You can virtualise most Linux distributions as well as most versions of Windows (both DOS and NTFS); Mac OS X is unsupported unfortunately. We installed VirtualBox 3.1.2 on our Windows 7 32-bit machine and wrote up a guide on how to get an OS running inside a virtual machine.

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