A few weeks ago, rumors about a summer launch for the R700 GPU were all over the place. Now ATI has confirmed everything and further explains the situation.

The highly anticipated RV770 and R700 GPUs will get an official launch sometime in June. However, this does not mean that the graphics card integrators will immediately ship the new products in big volumes. Eventually, we will be able to get our hands on ATI’s next-gen GPU in early Q3 2008, namely July.

On the other side of the barricade, Nvidia plans to launch its next generation GPU around the same time. But if we look back we might notice that consumers usually don’t buy too many expensive computer components during the summer as people tend to go on expensive vacations at that time, away from anything that has to do with IT.

By August, both Nvidia and ATI will have prepared reasonable volumes of OEM cards, while in fall and Q4, when the cool games usually get launched, the sales are expected to reach the highest points.

For ATI, the R700 could really prove to be what R600 should have been last year and the Canadians could once again find themselves on an ascendant slope.

As I have pointed out in some of my previous posts, ATI is apparently doing fine as far as sales and revenues are concerned. However, that is not exactly the real situation. Fudzilla has gathered some info on the previous and current financial years and according to the stats, ATI still doesn’t make any profit out of their video card business.

Since ATI is now an AMD affiliate, the actual money loss is not that dramatic, but the Canadians are far from the fabulous days of the Radeon 9800 series. Here are some real facts. In Q4 2006, the first quarter when AMD took over, ATI lost $27 million. In Q1 2007 it lost $35 million. The worst period for ATI was recorded in Q2 2007 when it lost $50 million, and in Q3 2007 it almost made some profit as it managed to lose only $3 million. Q4 2007 came with a $12 million loss, while in Q1 2008 ATI lost $11 million, in spite of its best selling mid-range video cards.

ATI claims that a $10 million loss is almost like making money, as there are some royalties that the company gets for the console games and other advertisements, and this can help to break even.

Overall, AMD lost $135 million because of the graphics division of their business. It’s likely that Q2 2008 won’t bring any big change either, but things could get better with the launch of the R700 GPUs in Q3 2008.

Currently, I’m planning to give Intel a try for my future system, but I can’t figure out which type of memory I should use. DDR2 modules sure are cheap and reasonably fast, while DDR3 memories are clearly faster and pricier nonetheless. Now Super Talent comes along and presents their latest Project X DDR3 modules, confusing me even more so.

Super Talent Technology is also known for its quality SSD devices. However, the RAM market seems to be more appealing to Super Talent, as the company manufacturers some of the finest gamer-oriented modules around. Super Talent now offers the Project X DDR3-1800 4GB kit, claiming that this is the first on the market offering that much memory clocked at 1.8 GHz.

Unlike other memory integrators, Super Talent manufacturers their own chips, as well as the special aluminum heat spreaders attached on top. The spreaders are specifically designed to double the actual surface area, incorporating 106% more aluminum mass than standard heat spreaders. Super Talent even uses its own thermal adhesive to connect the spreaders to the modules. All this results into more aggressive latencies (8-8-8-24), plus Super Talent offers a lifetime warranty for all its modules.

As always, extreme performance has a price. The DDR3-1800 4GB kit, comprising two 2GB separate dual-channel modules, is priced at around $499.

Although it may not be so well known in some markets, Fujitsu always produced good hard drives, and now they are releasing their first hardware-encrypted 2.5-inch drive, with the new MHZ2 CJ model. If you feel that someone's watching you all the time and software data security is never enough, then I am sure you'll be delighted to hear about Fujitsu's latest drive for those like you...


The Fujitsu MHZ CJ is the first consumer-class device to feature full encryption with 256-bit AES key, while being available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB as well as 320GB capacities, for the Serial ATA-150/300 interface. Anyway, performance is not a weak spot, especially if we think about the fact this is basically a hard drive for laptops - 7200rpm rotational speed, 16MB of cache, and a declared average read seek time of 10.5ms, followed by a write seek time of 12.5ms being good even for desktop computers.

While Seagate offers 128-bit encryption for some of its drives, Fujitsu's 256-bit encryption is better, and the drive comes with a feature which allows all data stored on the disk to be erased instantly, in less than a second!

Humm...it seems that thieves stealing laptops have less chances with each day to steal personal data, too, and that's nothing but good news for the rest of us.

One year ago, IT analyst predicted that SSDs won’t be posing much of a threat for the good ol’ HDDs sooner than 2011, but looks like somebody underestimated Toshiba and its powers. Toshiba is one of the first SSD makers that sought to improve capacities and cut down prices and they sure know what they are doing as they recently announced some competitive plans for their upcoming SSD lineup.

Toshiba thinks it can quadruple the capacity of its solid-state drives by 2009, and at the same time cut the production costs. Toshiba semiconductor chief Shozo Saito claims that process refinements will let the improved SSDs store up to four data bits per memory cell and shrink the chip-making process to 30 nanometers by the end of 2009, allowing the company to offer a 512GB drive in that timeframe.

Having SSDs that can store that much info is one thing, but knowing that a 128GB solid-state drive is currently priced around $1,000, what would Toshiba do in order to make the bigger drives more affordable? The Japanese are confident that by fitting more data into a given space, they will also be reducing the cost of making flash memory itself. Moreover, Saito points out that the company can reduce the price of making SSDs by as much as 40 to 50 percent every year, resulting in far less expensive drives at greater storage levels.

While I’m happy to hear SSDs will soon reach 1TB capacities, I can’t really figure out the prices for such storage devices. Sure we need more and more storage space, but we also want these devices to cost as low as the current HDDs and that won’t be happening sooner than analysts previously predicted.