Samsung drives up to 256GB

The company says the new drive has been tweaked to be its fastest ever, with read times of 220 MBps and write times of 200 MBps. Erase times have also been improved, with speeds of 100GB per minute, meaning the drive can be completely wiped in under three minutes.
”While SSD’s have always been touted for their performance, Samsung is turning the storage industry upside down now with an SSD that delivers truly disruptive performance,” said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor.
”Getting our exceptionally high performing 256GB SSD in a notebook is analogous to having a 15,000rpm drive, without all of its size, noise, power and heating drawbacks.”
Samsung says the drives are around three times faster than standard 7,200rpm platter disk drives and around ten times more efficient as a similar laptop drive.
It attributes the speed increase to a redesigned chip controller, improved NAND flash and improved firmware.
The drive also more power efficient than a platter drive, consuming 1.1 watts of power compared to two or more for a traditional drive.

A Game Designer's Life: Paid to Watch Football

There are dream jobs, and then there are Dream Jobs. Anthony White has the latter.

Every week during football season, this EA assistant designer receives a little black box at his desk at EA's Tiburon Studios. Inside the box is a portable hard drive with videos of that week's NFL games.

White then fires up that little black box and proceeds to get paid for watching every single one so he can ensure EA's Madden NFL Football titles are as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

"Sometimes I have to pinch myself," White said, to which we say, "no kidding!"

But, lest we all incorrectly assume this kind of job just fell into White's lap, think again. Since 1991, White has basically lived and breathed the Madden franchise. Back then, the series was only two years old, and White was fresh out of high school awaiting deployment in the United States Air Force.

"I would sit there and play continuously, all through the night," said White, 35. "Mom and Dad thought I was nuts. . . . While most other guys my age were into hanging out, going to the mall, girlfriends and things like that, I'm at home drawing up plays on notepads and different things I want to try out in the game."

The insanity eventually paid off. After starting a Madden strategy site in 1999, White got noticed by EA. He was offered a job as an assistant producer at Tiburon in 2005.

Today, he's basically in charge of making sure the plays you run against friends in Madden are as accurate and fresh as possible. For Madden 09, that meant watching and adding 32 new formations, and about 1,200 new plays.

Just last week the NFL saw a number of new, unorthodox plays unveiled by teams like the Miami Dolphins. You can bet White saw every minute of Miami's quaterback-less offensive packages, and that they'll be in Madden 2010. It's what he does, after all.

Six-Core Chip Is Set for Release

Intel Corp. is expected to release its six-core Xeon 7400 chip Monday, just as VMware Inc.'s big annual show begins in Las Vegas. And the timing is no coincidence.

Intel's chip is aimed at users seeking a consolidation and virtualization server platform, analysts said. Moving multiple virtual machines (VMs) to a six-core chip will improve management of virtual as well as physical systems. Consolidating physical servers to a single, presumably energy efficient system, may help users tight on data center space.

Intel isn't alone in picking VMware's conference to release its chip. Over the next week, vendors will be making numerous hardware announcements all designed with virtualization in mind. As virtualization use expands in data centers, so does the need for server hardware with added processing capability, memory and networking connections.

Vendors will announce over the next week products tuned for virtualization, integration with virtualization platforms and new services to support deployment.

Dell Inc., for instance, announced new PowerEdge blade servers today, including the M905 four-socket, dual- or quad-core chips from Advance Micro Devices Inc. it says can support 66 virtual machines. The system can support Citrix XenServer, VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V. The company announced new storage and services as well.

In describing Intel's six-core chip, code-named Dunnington, at the Intel Developers Forum last month, Pat Gelsinger, Intel executive vice president, cited a number of workloads for it, including database, ERP, Java-based and virtualization.

AMD is also working on a six-core chip, code-named Istanbul, which is due out in the second half of next year.

Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64 in Saratoga, Calif., said the six-core system is a niche product intended for large applications such as transaction-oriented workloads and databases that already use multithreaded environments and virtualization.

The six-core Xeon was built on a single piece of silicon, unlike Intel's quad-core chips that are built from two dual-core chips. As a result of the improvements in Dunnington, Brookwood said it handles caching much better, improving performance. He called it "the best multiple core chip that Intel has introduced to date."

With six cores, Brookwood said users can consolidate more VMs in one physical server, and being able to do so improves the management of the VMs. The risk is that if that physical server should fail for any reason, it can affect lots of people, Brookwood said.

The increased number of cores not only lend themselves to managing more workloads, but six-core systems will also take up less space in a data center and use less power, said Rich Partridge, an analyst at Ideas International Ltd. in Rye Brook, N.Y. For some users, "having a consolidated server that is more efficiently managed is very attractive," he said.

Partridge also said Intel is seeking to appeal to users who have typically turned to Unix and RISC-based systems to operate large workloads. But he also said the target audience for this server isn't users who want to run one workload across six cores, but those who want to manage multiple apps across a hypervisor.

Free Browser "Google Chrome"

The new Web browser that Google released Tuesday is designed to expand its huge lead in the Internet search market and reduce Microsoft's imprint on personal computers.

The free browser, called "Chrome," is being promoted as a sleeker, faster and more secure alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has been the leading vehicle for surfing the Web for the past decade. Despite recent inroads by Mozilla Foundation's Firefox, Internet Explorer is still used by roughly three-fourths of the world's Web surfers.

Google have announced plans to take on Microsoft and Firefox with their own open-source browser, codenamed Chrome, by releasing a specially drawn comic by Scott McCloud explaining the app. Based on the existing Webkit rendering engine, Chrome will integrate not only tab-based browsing but Google Gears and a newly integrated search and address system called Omnibox.

Omnibox will replace the individual address and search boxes and offer search suggestions, popular pages and history pages. It will also automatically replicate a webpage’s own search box, allowing site and query strings to be entered simultaneously. An Amazon search, for instance, could be triggered by entering “amazon”, pressing tab and then the search term.

Chrome will also include some of the more popular features from existing rivals. It will have a homepage of nine instant-access shortcut thumbnails, as found in Opera 9, with a sidebar of recent searches and tabs. The tabs themselves will be switched to above the window, not below it as on Firefox, and there’ll be a privacy option similar to Internet Explorer’s recently announced InPrivate mode, in which no record of sites or searches will be stored. A malware and phishing protection system will be integrated and constantly updated, with Chrome automatically downloading a list of dangerous sites in the background.