Topic: "Satellite-Debris"; misc news
"AMD kills off big cores, Kaveri, Steamroller, and Excavator"
"Intel kills off the desktop, PCs go with it
Analysis: Broadwell has no socket, PCs have no relevanceIntel logo 63x58 Intel kills off the desktop, PCs go with it Intel is killing the desktop, but not quite as soon as people expect it to, there will be one last gasp, but that is irrelevant. Word is finally leaking there won’t be a desktop PC chip in a bit over a year.
In a story that SemiAccurate has been following for several months, Broadwell will not come in an LGA package, so no removable CPU. The news was first publicly broken by the ever sharp PC Watch, english version here, but the news has been floating in the backchannel for a bit now. The problem? This information wasn’t floating around the OEMs or the majority of the PC ecosystem, they had no clue. What does all of this mean? Quite a bit.
The most direct effect is that of Broadwell, the 14nm successor to next year’s Haswell CPU, will essentially shut out the enthusiast. Motherboards will still be available, but the CPUs that come with them will be soldered down. In addition to being a inventory management nightmare, OEMs won’t buy CPUs any more, the few remaining mobo vendors and ODMs will. As a side effect, it also cuts the enthusiast out of the picture for good"
Quoted from: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/26/inte … o-with-it/"
"no new chipsets for Broadwell"
...
"Broadwell cores are also not slated for a major revision, they are mainly being shrunk to 14nm. A few bits of low hanging fruit are being picked with the shrink, but no big bangs. Think performance per watt gains, outright performance will again underwhelm on the CPU side.Will Broadwell bring anything to the table worth noting? Actually yes, SemiAccurate moles have said that the CPU will have a brand new GPU with a lot of new instructions, and a few radically improved ones too. It will not be the big graphics bang that Haswell is, but it should increase GPU performance by a claimed 40% from what it’s 22nm sibling has. If Broadwell is only at the same TDPs, it will be a clear win, but it will likely drop power by a substantial margin. Unfortunately for the user, Intel graphics drivers are still woeful and broken, and there is no internal impetus to change that."
...
"the state of Intel drivers is going to keep discrete GPUs relevant for another generation."
Quoted from: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/29/inte … ails-leak/
"Cash-hungry Sharp 'offering juicy stakes to US firms'
Sharp is in talks with US firms including Dell, Intel and Qualcomm to sell off bits and pieces of itself, it has been reported."
Quoted from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/30 … e_rumours/
"Moody's cuts HP's credit rating amid competition concerns
...
"from A3 to Baa1, which is three steps above 'junk' status."
and then there's "Bob". Cue Homer J. Simpson; "Ding Dong Ding, D'OH!!!"
I sense some market consolidation forces gathering energy; this is not advice, only my humble opinion.
"NAND flash gets baked, lives longer
Discovery by ROM manufacturer Macronix could defeat flash's greatest weakness."
...
"It's long been known that annealing NAND flash—that is, subjecting it to high heat—can force the long-trapped electrons out of the NAND floating gate, reducing its retained charge and returning it to usefulness. But it's been thought all along that such annealing was too energy-intensive and too difficult to do precisely—essentially, an entire NAND chip had to be baked for hours.However, using techniques borrowed from phase-changing RAM, where heat is applied to a material to change its state from conductive to insulating, the Macronix boffins constructed a redesigned NAND flash package with its existing electrical pathways modified to carry heat to the floating gate, the portion of the NAND transistor that is filled and drained to denote a 0 or a 1.
The modification is a complex one and required substantial engineering, but the results are impressive—a brief and restricted jolt at 800C appears to "heal" the flash cell, removing its retained charge. Macronix estimates that this can be done repeatedly as needed, leading to a flash cell that could potentially last for 100,000,000 cycles, instead of the roughly 1,000 cycles that current 21nm TLC flash cells are rated to last.
Since flash cell life cycle decreases as process size shrinks, this method of heating cells back to life is good news for the future of SSDs. Moore's law charges on; the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors projects an eventual arrival at 8nm features, and the useful life of NAND flash at that size is very, very short. If Macronix's method can be commercialized it will have profound implications on the future of the medium."
Quoted from: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/ … es-longer/
Wow, if i end up with an out-of-warranty SSD with a wretched-excess of dead cells & redundant data; i'll have to bake it for a few days ("sans" plastic) at 80°C (or more?) to try that one out.
Last edited by TechDud (2012-12-02 10:21:09)
MemTest86+ Video Memory Stress Test D-P-C Driver Latency Tester (Win7-max)
