At this time, the LCD market is extremely crowded, although the big names could be easily written down on a business card, and still have room to take additional notes. Sharp and Sony are two big names, and it's interesting to see they are working together, especially when it's about actually sharing an LCD panel plant...


Less than a day ago, Sharp Corp. and Sony Corp. announced the signing of a non-binding memorandum to establish a joint venture having the purpose of producing and selling large LCD panels and modules. The LCD panel plant to be splitted belongs to Sharp, and is currently under construction in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture. When this plant will be complete, it's going to produce panels using 10th generation mother glass substrates.

This new joint venture should start operations by late March, 2009, and will be 64% controlled by Sharp, while Sony will control the remaining 36%. After reaching its full capacity, the Sakai plant should be able to produce 72,000 substrates monthly, but the two companies are also studying the chance to develop other components for LCD modules together.

Since the main goals of this join venture are to cut down costs and improve efficiency, let's hope this will also bring cheaper and better LCD monitors and TVs in our homes and offices. Unfortunately, it seems such a long road until mid-2009...

As far as I know, computer memory is volatile. You power on your computer, work with it, the memory gets refreshed on a regular basis to keep data stored, you press the power button, and it's all gone, until next system startup. If someone goes away with your memory modules, no valuable data is endangered... or that's what we were all thinking so far, because some guys at the Princeton University said they proved this theory to be wrong.


The group from Princeton published a technical paper in which they demonstrated that standard memory chips retain their data for seconds or even minutes after running out of power. Good, but there's a big gap between second and minutes, first thing, and second, what about computers being already shut down when removing those memory chips from them?

Now, I simply can't understand how could they go that far in claiming security could be compromised this way, especially since it's more likely for a virus to strike or a hacker to break into a system, rather than actually steal those memory modules, freeze them, get away, and then read data on them, if the chips don't get damaged in the process, of course!

According to Edward W. Felten, a Princeton computer scientist, all you have to do is "Cool the chips in liquid nitrogen (-196 °C) and they hold their state for hours at least, without any power. Just put the chips back into a machine and you can read out their contents."

I like Sci-Fi movies and books, but this is probably some research done just for fun, because if we think about serious security agencies or corporations, easiest way to steal data is to use malicious code, and not get in and simply walk away with some hardware!

I am really curious to see if someone can prove these guys wrong, because I am not going to freeze any memory chips to check their theory for myself, but I am sure there has to be someone with the hardware, know-how and luck required to actually freeze some computer memory and see how long can data "survive" in a frozen state...

In the race towards faster processors that use smaller and smaller semiconductors, everyone thought AMD is left behind. In fact, they are behind, at least when talking about what they have on the market at this time. The good news is that AMD, together with IBM, just made one step closer to semiconductors as large as 16nm and even smaller!


The story is very simple - AMD and IBM managed to produce a 45nm chip by using Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) litography on its entire 22 mm X 33 mm area, and while this technology was only used for a part of the chip, things are expected to evolve as we all expect - smaller, faster, better. When?Well, that may be a little problem...or not.

The 16nm chips, expected to be fully produced using EUV, should arrive in 2013, according to current estimations, so AMD should keep it up until then. Leaving those grey rumors about AMD being purchased by NVIDIA or someone else, here's the good news of the day - rumors say that Asustek placed a huge Sempron order, to use them with the upcoming products in the E-Monitor, E-TV, and E-DT series.

In the meantime, be sure to subscribe to our news feed below, if you haven't already done that! This way, we'll be closer to your, and you effort to reach our news will be smaller...

As we all know, laptop sales are going slowly up, and the market share of portable computers recently surpassed that of the desktop computers. Obviously, this tendency is not going to fade, and so hardware for portable computers gets faster and cheaper with each day...or bigger, when we talk about internal storage.


Today, we're going to note that Fujitsu just announced its first 500 GB hard drive for laptops, making it the third producer to join the "500 club", when talking about drives for laptops, because those for desktop computers have reached 1TB already...

Following Hitachi and Samsung, Fujitsu announced a 500GB capacity becoming available for portable computers, with the help of a three-platter design. The 500GB drive from Fujitsu uses 3 platters with a 170GB capacity each, and is 12.5 millimeters thick because of that (most laptop drives are 9.5 millimeters thick).

The new 2.5-inch 500GB Fujitsu drive will use the SATA interface and only 4,200 rpm, with announced seek/write times of 12/14 milliseconds. Pricing was not announced yet, since the drive will arrive in stores in May, so there's still a pretty long wait until then...

As I was saying two days ago, video cards based on the NVIDIA 9600 GT started to show up, and one of the first models comes from Biostar. As you can see below, this card has an attractive design, although it may seem a bit too "serious" for some people. After all, what really matters is the performance, as well as the performance/price ratio, and for a lot of people, this is even more important than raw power, so let's see what's under the hood of the Biostar V9603GT52 video card...


The V9603GT52, announced yesterday, has an engine clocked at 650MHz, 512MB of DDR3 memory running at 1800MHz, and uses the PCI-E 2.0 interface(fortunately, it's backwards compatible, so you don't have to worry about any issues if you want to grab such a beauty for your older PCI-E mainboard). The memory bus is 256-bit wide, and the card's GPU has 64 stream processors.

Output connectors available are S-Video and Dual-DVI, while HDCP and the PureVideo HD are also featured by this card. On top of all, the price is set at $189, and if Biostar is right when saying that the performance gain is 90% when compared to the older 8600 GTS, we just may have a very solid competitor to ATI's HD 3870...