Articles tagged with: components

The folks over at Super Talent have come up with an easy route to upgrade you Asus Eee PC. Its Eee-tested SSDs are designed to replace the built-in SSD storage attached to the Eee's miniPCI-Express slot.

They come in sizes from 8GB to 64Gb with reasonable-ish read rates of 40MB/sec and write rates of between 15 and 28MB/sec. Read on for which models you can use them with.

What with all this credit crunch business you'd think merging was all the rage these days but chip-maker AMD's going in the opposite direction and splitting, amoeba-like, into two companies.

After a fierce custody battle, one half will keep the AMD name and focus on design and development. The other, newly spawned off-shoot will be known as The Foundry Company and will consist of the manufacturing side of the business.

The good news for us is that the deal comes with some heavyweight financial backing from two Abu Dhabi investment firms, which means more money for R&D and hopefully some serious graphics and processor hardware to raise the competition with Intel and nVidia.

[AMD]

Intel has announced that it will be launching two new solid-state disk drives this year, with 80Gb and 160Gb capacities. The X18-M and X25-M are 1.8in and 2.5in SATA drives, respectively, and Intel reckons they’re capable of increasing “storage system performance” over nine times, compared to a traditional hard disk.

Both the Intel X18-M and X25-M SSDs are only available in 80Gb capacities for now, with 160Gb capacities following towards the end of the year. Intel claims that the 80Gb drives achieve up to 250Mb/sec read speeds, up to 70Mb/sec write speeds and have an 85ms read latency. Both drives costs $595 for quantities up to 1,000 – that’s around £4.20 per gigabyte, compared to a typical 2.5in hard drive’s cost of around 43p per gigabyte.

It’s the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week and chip manufacturer has used the shindig as cover for the launch of its dual-core Atom processor. Confirmation of the new processor's existence comes from from a ‘news fact sheet’ that Intel quietly slipped onto its IDF press web site. The sheet ostensibly details the new D945GCLF2 desktop motherboard, but it's a mini-ITX motherboardthat comes with an integrated Atom 330 dual-core processor.

Unfortunately, the fact sheet only lets slip a little information about the chip itself (the formal launch is expected later today), so there’s a recap of what we know about the Atom 330 for sure – and what we suspect – after the cut.

The performance of its C7 chip may have been one of the crushing disappointments with the HP 2133 Mini-Note, but VIA is keen to let everyone know that its mobile processor plans don’t end there. It announced the Nano processor earlier this year (under the guise of ‘Isaiah’) and now VIA is showing off the performance of its latest low-power processor.

VIA has released a video that shows one of its OpenBook (VIA’s low-cost open source ultraportable reference design) playing 1080p HD video alongside an Asus Eee PC 1000. The 1.3GHz Nano chip in the Minibook visibly out-performs the 1.6GHz Intel Atom in the Eee PC – but this being a VIA video, it would, wouldn’t it..?

If a review of the Asus Xonar U1 USB Audio Station isn’t quite what you expected to see after searching for “big knobs for laptops”, then we’re sorry to have misled you with this Google-baiting sentence. The Xonar is indeed a big knob for laptops, but it’s one that plugs into a USB port to upgrade its onboard audio, rather than, er, any other kind for purposes we can’t imagine.

Actually, we have seen other USB-connected knobs before – the Griffin PowerMate has been available since 2002 and we reviewed the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator for Notebooks earlier this year. Rather than just act as a mere rotary controller though, the Xonar actually packs a high-quality external sound card into its compact form.

EETimes has been speculating about the manufacturing cost of the iPhone 3G and has come to the conclusion that it costs around half as much to make as the original model.

Expert analyses of the first iPhone resulted in a best-guess bill of sale for components of $170 – the iPhone 3G’s components are estimated to cost a mere $100 (or £51 at the prevailing exchange rate).

The manufacturing cost cuts are thought to be the result of both engineering improvements to the iPhone’s sophisticated touch-sensitive screen (it’s most expensive component) and the tumbling price of flash memory.

Intel launched its low-power Atom processor at Computex earlier this week, but the device's true raison d'être is a source of confusion for many.

As the Atom begins to show up in low-cost budget laptops introduced at Computex this week, numerous press reports and blog posts continue to peg the device as Intel's ticket into the mobile phone market.

We promised MSI that we wouldn't reveal which processor was inside the Wind ultraportable in our hands-on write-up last week, but now the cat’s out of the bag – it’s an Intel Atom processor! D'oh, we knew you knew that anyway.

MSI will launch the Wind desktop and laptop PCs tomorrow at Computex and there will no doubt be lots more info then – be sure to check back at Mobile Computer for the full skinny. In the meantime, we have a few exclusive photos that show more of the MSI Wind’s specifications after the cut.

Scorchingly hot laptops may soon be a thing of the past if Compal has anything to do with it. The Chinese laptop maker demonstrated its new lid-cooled laptops at last week’s IDF and if the technology proves popular, it should lead to lighter, quieter – and cooled – laptops for all.

The technology uses heat pipes to transfer heat from a laptop’s processor to the laptop lid, which contains heatsink. This is much larger and therefore much more efficient than a heatsink that would otherwise fit in the laptop and while the lid gets warm as a result, the rest of the laptop stays cool.