IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 01/02/2010

Intel and Micron announce 25nm NAND flash production

We all know that Intel pride themselves on being at the cutting edge of manufacturing technologies wherever possible, and today sees the announcement of another landmark for them, in partnership with Micron, along these lines.آ On this occasion, the landmark in question belongs to IMFT (Intel-Micron Flash Technologies), who have begun sampling flash memory created using a 25 nanometre manufacturing process.آ What does this mean for the consumer?آ Cheaper and higher capacity SSD units as we reach the end of 2010, hopefully.

Today IMFT is announcing that it has begun sampling 2-bits-per-cell MLC NAND flash manufactured using 25nm transistors. The company believed it had a 6 month head start over the competition in 34nm, and now believes that with 25nm NAND it’s roughly a year ahead of anyone else.

Volume production will happen sometime in Q2, with products shipping before the end of the year. In my last SSD article I mentioned that Intel’s 3rd generation X25-M would be shipping in Q4 at 160GB, 320GB and 600GB. These drives will use IMFT’s new 25nm flash.

The first 25nm product is an 8GB (64Gbit) 2-bits-per-cell MLC NAND flash. A single 8GB die built on IMFT’s 25nm process has a die size of 167mm2. Immersion lithography is apparently necessary to produce these 25nm NAND devices, but the extent is unclear. This is technically Intel’s first device that requires immersion lithography to manufacture.

Anandtech has more information on this break-through.

View or post comments.

Read More ...

---

Compact P55: Four micro-ATX motherboards tried and tested

If you're looking to build a small yet powerful PC system, you're spoiled for choice when it comes to picking out a suitable micro-ATX motherboard these days, so which one should you choose?آ Tom's Hardware have taken a look at four micro-ATX boards sporting Intel's P55 chipset for Socket LGA 1156 Core i5 and i7 parts (as well as i3 CPUs if you can live without integrated video), to see where you might want to splash your cash.

ASRock’s P55M Pro targets the upper-mainstream, including a few items and features that the P55 chipset native lacks. This is the only microATX board in ASRock’s P55 portfolio. The board comes with a FireWire 1394a controller with one port, and ASRock implements two of the P55’s six SATA 3 Gb/s ports as eSATA ports. Interestingly, they come as shared USB 2.0 ports—you can use either one or the other. However, there are some eSATA storage devices available, such as eSATA thumb drives, that require this type of port. eSATA alone is not capable of supplying power to the storage device.

The board has five-phase voltage regulators (4+1 design), which should really be sufficient for most processor overclocking scenarios. For some reason, this board showed the highest system idle power—not just a little, but as much as 15W. At the same time, it showed the lowest system peak power consumption when using a Core i5-750 processor overclocked to 4.0 GHz. ASRock’s BIOS option to enable power savings (Intelligent Energy Saver) was switched on during the testing.

Read their findings and results in full over here.

View or post comments.

Read More ...

---