Founded back in 1970, Western Digital Corporation is one of the largest hard drive manufacturer, but this Lake Forest-based company is also a semiconductor maker, involved in more than simply "hard drives". One of the less known facts about them is that Western Digital platters were sold to other hard drive manufacturers, including Seagate, the world's leader. I said "were sold," because Western Digital just changed this...


Obviously, they will simply cease to sell platters to the competition. Basically, the Komag company that is specialised in manufacturing of platters, is owned by Western Digital, so they decided to stop selling platters to the others, as well as change Komag's name into "WD Media."

Don Blake, WD Media's vice president and general manager, said "This action sizes our media and substrate operation to the current demands of a single customer-WD's hard drive business. It efficiently streamlines our media and substrate operations while enhancing focus on the development of future manufacturing technologies to support media and substrate requirements resulting from continued success in our hard drive business."

Now, we should see how the rest of the industry reacts to this move, but I wouldn't worry, especially since the classic hard drives are getting near the end of their existence, and I am sure Komag wasn't the only hard drive platters manufacturer...

Today, Intel has come up with some great news for anyone interested in building a high performance server (or even more, why not?), because their latest low power server processors look simply great, at least on paper. Obviously, when we talk about low power and low heat, performance remains to be seen in benchmarks, but it's simply great to have such processors available with a TDP of only 50W!


Based on the 45 nm Harpertown core, the new L5400 series is up to 25% faster than the 65 nm L5300 series, based on the Clovertown core, according to Intel. The new L5410 and L5420 processors are cooler and faster than their predecessors, with clock speeds of 2.33GHz and 2.5GHz. Both include 12MB L2 cache, compared to an 8MB, in previous 65 nm models.

The pricing goes like this - L5420 for $380, and L5410 for $320, for orders of 1000 units. Leaving these two processors aside, it is also worth mentioning that Intel promised a 3GHz 40W dual core processor to feature FSB 1333 and 6MB of L2 cache for a Q2 launch.

CPUs are way behind GPUs. It was nothing like this when dedicated GPUs appeared in the mid 1990s but now its more than a fact. That’s why ATI and Nvidia are aiming at general purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) with their next-gen series. And that’s why Intel is preparing its Larabee CPU-derived GPU that it’s supposed to leave ATI and NVIDIA with a fat lip. ATI also prepares the Fusion array of products which will combine CPUs and GPUs in a single chip. OK, I digress, but for a solid reason: CPUs are not fast enough as they’re supposed to. It’s because the CPU manufacturers still use some old technologies.

Nowadays, the CPU components are interconnected with nano-scale wires or pipelines and this is one of the obsolete technologies I was talking about earlier. Just think about simulating the Big Bang or create artificial intelligence for instance. With present day technology, you need a cluster of parallel-supercomputers to initiate large-scale simulations and AI computations. That’s beyond energy efficiency. The idea is simple: replace the nano-scale wires with something that would transport information faster. Replace them with lasers.

In this sense, Sun Microsystems has just received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to play around with lasers. They're to work on a way of connecting silicon chips via lasers, which, if successful, will increase chips speeds by a factor of thousands.

If all works according to pla, it would be possible to create more-compact machines that are a thousand times faster than today's computers. Each chip would be interconnected directly with every other chip in the array via a beam of laser light that could carry tens of billions of bits of data a second. However, Sun claims that they are only expecting a 50% success rate, so we might not see any commercial implementation until they figure out how to up the success rate.

When looking at the graphics market today, it is very interesting to see how everyone talks about the high-end video cards, and low-end ones get a few reviews, they are mentioned in the news, but usually get a pretty good market share, especially in the emerging markets. Now, AMD seems to have a gap that needs to be filled, and rumors say a new HD 38xx card should arrive pretty soon...


As soon as NVIDIA released the excellent GeForce 9600 GT card, AMD slashed prices of its HD 3850 and HD 3870 cards, but there's still a pretty long road from the HD 3650, priced around $100, and the HD 3850, sold for around $170.

Being given the above, rumors say that AMD will introduce the ATI Radeon HD 3830 card, expected to have 320 unified shader processors, 16 texture units, and also features such as UVD, but only a 128-bit memory bus.

Pricing will probably place this card around the $120 mark, but since AMD didn't say anything about this yet, I guess we'll have to wait for some official news, as usual...

The Eee PC is here, and he's doin' great, but it seems ASUS managed to open a path, and now more and more companies follow it, or at least they are getting ready to start their journey. Leaving aside those competitors to Eee PC that have sufaced already, today I will tell you about one that's expected to arrive pretty soon, but is lurking in the shadows, for now - a portable computer from Acer, set to enter the entry-level PC market...


According to the latest rumors, Acer's entry-level PC is expected to become available in May, and all we know for now is that the upcoming 8.9-inch ultra portable will have a price around $250-$300, which is obviously lower than the $350-$400 asked for a 8.9-inch ASUS Eee PC, but since nobody said anything about the processor or other technical details of this computer, I can't tell anything else about it yet.

For now, Acer didn't say anything about this story, so we can dream without being disturbed, for now. For me, a portable computer can't be of any use yet, especially with such a small screen(I enjoy big screens), but what would you like to get in a ultra portable computer, to make it more interesting than the one from ASUS?