Intel shows off 16 GB DDR3 DIMMs at IDF

Posted on Aug 28, 2008

San Francisco (CA) – You can’t have enough RAM, as is often said in the computer world, and Intel has demoed 16 GB RAM sticks at its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.  The RAM is made by Hynix and uses technology from MetaRAM to stack all the individual DRAMs onto the stick.  Intel reps showed off the memory inside a number crunching server that was populated with 10 of these sticks for a total capacity of 160 GB of memory – heck some people don’t even have hard drives this big.

The server was running dual Nehalem EP processors and was churning through a massive 100 GB for the top ten customers of a company.  An Intel rep told us the program had loaded the file into RAM and this gave approximately a 1000 times speedup versus doing the same computation from the hard drive.

The upcoming Nehalem processor will use triple channel DDR3 memory so you’ll need to fill three memory slots for maximum memory bandwidth. source

ASUS to Offer Eee PCs with 320GB HDD & Windows Vista?

Posted on Aug 22, 2008

According to reports, ASUS is said to be working on new N-series Eee PCs which are very likely to "shake up" the netbook market. Reasons? Not much is known about these N-series Eee PC (No official confirmation here whatsoever) except that they will likely feature up to 320GB spinning hard drives and full fledged Windows Vista installation.

If this ever sees the light of day, the N-series Eee PC will be priced between $480 - $640 range. It is expected to come in 10" size.

We hope ASUS doesn't fail in offering minimum of 2GB RAM since we hear the word Vista!

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Intel Nehalem's Market Named Leaked to be Core i7

Posted on Aug 13,2008

Making its way around the Internet late last week was speculation of the official name for Intel’s future processor microarchitecture, currently codenamed Nehalem.

If the rumors are to be correct, the Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors will officially be announced August 11 with an expected launch date of Q4 2008.

Nahalem is expected to be initially manufactured with a 45nm process and be available with two, four, or eight cores, for up to 731 million transistors in the quad core variant. A very exciting aspect of the new architecture is the new integrated memory controller, called the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, with DDR3 SDRAM support, which will eliminate the bottleneck that was the front side bus and which had been haunting Intel for years. This should result in a substantial performance increase despite Intel’s competition, AMD, having been using an integrated memory controller in their processors for years.

Another feature of Nahalem will be the re-introduction of Hyper-Threading technology, which was used previously in the Pentium 4 series of processors. Hyper-Threading allows a single core to run an adjacent virtual core, allowing for two threads per actual core, making for potential performance gains. With all the added performance of the upcoming Nahalem processors, power usage is not expected to rise much, providing for greater performance-per-watt efficiency.

Nehalem will come in variants for desktops, servers, and notebooks. The upcoming home desktop variant is codenamed Bloomfield and will use the new LGA1366 socket, making it incompatible with all previous generation motherboards.

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