IT-Code-News: IT News Head Lines (Tech Report) 10/11/2012

Nvidia posts record quarterly revenue

Maybe it's the sheer popularity of the firm's Tegra 3 chips. Maybe it's all the new 6-series GeForces. Most likely, it's both. In any case, Nvidia enjoyed some very strong results this past fiscal quarter. Revenue hit $1.2 billion, a new record that represents double-digit percentage growth from both the previous quarter and the same quarter a year ago. Gross margin also reached a record high, at 52.9%. Things are looking so good that Nvidia has issued a ... Read more...

Release roundup: Tiny storage and big cases We've already covered major releases this week—including new coolers and PSUs from Corsair and a compact mechanical keyboard from Cooler Master. Still, we had plenty of fodder for the roundup. LaCie, Mushkin, and Raidmax all sent us announcements about new products:

Oh dear... Well, I've done it now. Like a mistreated spouse returning to his abuser, I've crawled back into Apple's aluminum, glass, and white polycarbonate arms—I've gone and bought an iPhone 5. That would a completely unremarkable purchase if I hadn't updated this very blog a month ago with a long tirade about Apple's failings. At the time, I was sick of Apple Maps, sick of ... Read more...

Hard drive prices one year after the flood

More than a year has passed since massive floods ravaged Thailand. The deluge put entire industrial parks underwater, including those responsible for manufacturing most of the mechanical hard drives sold worldwide. Production stalled as drive makers and their suppliers began the daunting task of mopping up the damage. Hard drive prices rose sharply in response, ending years of steady decline. We've been watching their slow migration toward pre-flood prices ever since. Now, one year later, the industry seems to have recovered. Market analysts project more hard drives will ship this year than in 2011, suggesting production is back in full swing. To determine whether prices have experienced a similar recovery, we once again called on the helpful folks at Camelegg. They provided us with a treasure trove of data detailing the day-to-day price changes of over 30 mechanical hard drives. Camelegg tracks prices at Newegg and doesn't include mail-in rebates or special coupon codes, so the data should be a good indicator of what's going on in the broader market. First, let's look at how current prices measure up to their pre-flood levels. The graph below illustrates the changes in price from the first week of October 2011, just before the flood, to the past seven days. We used the mean price over each seven-day period to prevent outliers from tainting the results.

Only a quarter of the drives we're tracking cost less now than they did before the flooding. A couple have come full circle, but the vast majority have higher prices. Look at the results more closely, and you'll see that all the drives that have returned to or dropped below pre-flood levels are 2.5" notebook models. Each and every one of the 3.5" desktop drives we're tracking is more expensive now than it was in early October of last year. We're not talking about differences of a few percentage points, either. On average, the desktop drives cost 35% more than they did a little more than a year ago. Compare that to an average price drop of 5% for the notebook drives. While there are clear differences between the notebook and desktop drives, no single manufacturer seems to be better or worse than the next. There isn't a definitive trend on the capacity front, either, although it's worth noting that the 500GB desktop drives have suffered some of the highest price increases. Let's break down the drives by manufacturer to get a more detailed look at the data. You can click the buttons below the graphs to switch between drive families. We'll start with 3.5" desktop drives.

Switching between the various drive families nicely illustrates the rise in prices in late October of last year. Although prices have declined since their peak, it hasn't been an uninterrupted fall in all cases. A handful of Western Digital's drives increased in price for sustained periods well after the flooding. For the most part, prices haven't budged in the past few months.

A number of Seagate's Barracuda desktop drives didn't hit the market until after the flooding, so they had to sit out our pre-flood comparison. Even those newer models weren't able to escape high post-flood prices, though. While the 7,200-RPM Barracuda lineup has maintained largely consistent pricing over the last little while, the low-power Barracuda Green family has benefited from recent discounts.

Newegg's selection of desktop drives from Hitachi and Samsung has dwindled since those firms sold their HDD businesses to Western Digital and Seagate, respectively. That leaves us with only a handful of drives for analysis, and the picture is a little mixed. Samsung's low-power EcoGreen F4 has gotten more expensive recently, but the 7,200-RPM Spinpoint F3 has largely held the line since its last sustained price reduction. Meanwhile, both of the Hitachi Deskstars we're monitoring continue their slow decline. Now, let's switch gears and look at the 2.5" notebook drives. The scale of the Y-axis is different for these graphs, since notebook drives tend to cost less overall.

Western Digital's Scorpios received hefty cuts in the spring, and prices have trickled down since. Only the 500GB models have failed to drop below pre-flood levels.

The Momentus XT 750GB hybrid wasn't introduced until after the flooding, and its price has dropped steadily. That drive's predecessor, the 500GB XT, dipped below its pre-flood price this summer and has largely stayed under that threshold. The purely mechanical Momentus line has seen fewer price changes overall.

The price of Toshiba's MK5061GSYN rose recently, but the MK5076GSX has returned to its pre-flood level. Don't you just love cryptic model numbers? The Spinpoint and Travelstars have all returned to last year's prices or dropped below them. Last graph, I promise. Storage devices are often quantified in terms of their cost per gigabyte, so we've run the numbers for all the drives we're tracking.

The notebook drives cost more per gig than their desktop counterparts, which is to be expected. Only a couple of them slip below 10 cents per gigabyte. Low-power drives like the Barracuda Green and Caviar Green dominate the top of the chart, with per-gigabyte costs around five cents. Seagate's 7,200-RPM Barracudas aren't far behind, though, and the Deskstar 7K4000 4TB is only 7 cents/GB. With SSDs still running more than about 70 cents/GB, it's easy to see why mechanical storage still has a place in today's PCs.

New Zotac Zbox packs fastest Brazos 2.0 APU Zotac's Zbox nettops have stuck to the same designs for several years now, but Zotac hasn't been shy about updating their guts with the latest low-power chips. Case in point: the new Zbox AD06, which features AMD's Brazos 2.0 platform and the quickest member of the matching processor family. The E2-1800 chip inside the Zbox A06 has dual cores clocked at 1.7GHz, and its 80 shader ALUs run at 523MHz with a peak speed of 680MHz. (Zotac touts a "Radeon HD 7340 GPU," but that's just ... Read more...

Retina iPad mini due next year, reports say

If you've had a chance to play with an iPad mini, you were probably pleasantly surprised by the device's build quality, light weight, and convenient size for one-handed reading. There's just one problem: the display has a 1024x768 resolution, which works out to just 163 pixels per inch. That's a little blocky for a mobile device these days. Thankfully, relief is on the way—albeit not anytime soon. The folks at SlashGear have dug up a couple of stories —one from Chinese website DoNews and another from MENAFN —that suggest a Retina-infused iPad mini will be out ... Read more...

Wednesday Shortbread The Fierce Five

Reuters: Qualcomm revenue beats Street, shares rise
CBS News: Google rolls out new search page look
DigiTimes: Notebook brands to mainly promote Windows 7 notebooks in 4Q12
X-bit labs: Nvidia boosts performance of video games in Linux by up to two times
VR-Zone: New Uncharted game revealed

VivoTab RT slips to $549, keyboard included Hoping to stick a Windows RT tablet under the Christmas tree this year? Then you might be hard-pressed to do better than Asus' VivoTab RT. The device seems to have gotten a fresh price cut, and right now, both Newegg and Amazon have it listed for $549.99—that's 50 bucks down from the launch price. Of course, the trimmed price tag includes the VivoTab RT's keyboard dock accessory. While the dock doesn't actually come in the box, Asus is letting folks request one for free ... Read more...

Cooler Master shrinks mechanical keyboard, keeps numpad Mechanical keyboards typically come in two flavors: full-sized designs and "tenkeyless" ones that ditch the numpad. Cooler Master makes both varieties, and now it's added a twist. The new CM Storm QuickFire TK retains the numpad of full-sized keyboards but ditches the paging block and inverted-T directional keys. Those have been mapped to secondary functions in the numpad, while the top row of F-keys offers a side order of multimedia controls.

As processor shipments slump, AMD loses ground to Intel The third-quarter x86 processor market share numbers are in, and they're not good for AMD. According to Mercury Research data quoted by PC World, the perennial underdog saw its share of the market decline to 16.1%, down from 18.8% a year ago. Intel's share grew from 80.6% to 83.3% over the same period, with Via picking up the remainder. Although the story doesn't quote specifics for different chip segments, it says AMD lost more ground on the desktop front than it did in the mobile space. You may recall that AMD had to write down $100 million of unsold inventory in the third quarter, mostly made up of Llano-based APUs. While AMD and Intel jockeyed for position, the x86 processor market shrunk as a whole. Shipments were down 8.6% from the third quarter of 2011 and 4% from the second quarter of this year. Q3 usually has ... Read more...

AMD trims low-end A-series, Athlon II prices As the holiday shopping rush looms, AMD has quietly adjusted prices for some of its lower-end Athlon II and A-series desktop processors. The company's new price lists show cuts ranging from just a few percentage points to more than 30%. Of course, since the affected chips were almost all below $100 already, the actual differences don't amount to all that much. Here's a look at the tweaks for A-series offerings. As always, these prices are ... Read more...

Imagination Tech buys MIPS, gets license to thrill These are certainly interesting times in the tech industry, not least because of the success of chip firms who license their IP for use by others—with ARM being the most prominent example. Right behind ARM in public awareness is Imagination Technologies, an early player in the PC graphics market (with chips like the Kyro II) whose PowerVR graphics processor designs power a host of popular devices, including Apple's iOS offerings. Now, Imagination Tech is looking to get a better foothold on the CPU side of things with the acquisition of a familiar name: MIPS Technologies, one of the microprocessor leaders from the old RISC vs. CISC wars who found itself on the losing side of a battle for supremacy against Intel. MIPS has since made a business ... Read more...

Available Tags:Nvidia , Zotac , APU , iPad , keyboard , Cooler Master , AMD , Intel ,

Friday, November 9, 2012

IT News Head Lines (Tech Report) 10/11/2012

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