There have been rumors last week that Dessau could be leaving the company and today we got the confirmation via a blog post published by Dessau on AMD’s website. The post, which offers some predictions for AMD in 2012 reads:

“I too find myself at an inflection point. While I am truly excited by the prospects for AMD, there are projects in my life outside of AMD that offer me compelling opportunities. As some of you know, one of those projects is the website The 3 Minute Mentor; I have been planning a book based on the website for some time. […] “I will remain at AMD to assist with marketing organization transitions and the 2012 planning cycle. After that, I will put on my shades and head off into the Texas sun.”

A unnamed source with AMD told us that some additional changes may soon be coming. A good chunk of the marketing team was served pink slips earlier this year, shortly after Read’s arrival, when 10 percent of AMD’s workforce was waved goodbye. Among the laid off was corporate fellow and corporate vice president Patrick Moorhead, who has moved on and has become a member of the blogging world and founded business consulting firm Moor Insights & Strategy.

AMD today launches the Radeon HD 7970, its first graphics card built at a 28nm production process and the first member of its Southern Islands family of GPUs. As its name suggests, the HD 7970 is the replacement for AMD’s fastest single-GPU graphics card to date, the HD 6970. The new card increases transistor count from 2.6b to 4.3b, cranks the engine clock speed up from 880MHz to 925MHz, and adds 33 percent more Stream processors, jumping from 1,536 to 2,048. VRAM is also up from 2GB to 3GB — with a 384-bit memory interface for a bandwidth of 264GBps — but the most important change is in internal architecture, with the new Graphics Core Next setup promising to untap the card’s potential to perform more computational tasks (i.e. GPGPU) without sacrificing any of its gaming prowess.

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While SSDs remain considerably more expensive than hard drives on a per GB level, the flash-based storage devices are coming down in prices much faster than HDDs have.

According to the data released, SSD memory cost 120 times as much as HDD memory in 2007, but only 32 times as much in 2011. The average price for a HDD per GB was $0.075 in 2011, the SSD cost $2.42 per GB. The lowest per GB price for a SSD was $1.50, while HDD could be purchased for $0.053 per GB. According to Pingdom, the 2011 average price per GB for the SSD is about the same as it was for HDD in 2002. SSDs are expected to be priced at about $1 per GB sometime in the second half of next year.

Despite the rapid price decline, it is unlikely that SSDs will be matching the price level of hard drives anytime soon unless hard drive technology will hit a substantial physical barrier. That barrier has been pushed out continuously for as long as modern hard drive has existed. The most recent increase in capacities has been driven by perpendicular magnetic recording technology and it appears that heat-assisted magnetic recording could surface in 2013 or 2014 to push the limits even further. Seagate, for example, believes that heat assisted recording will increase the maximum storage density of perpendicular magnetic recording by at least 50x.

SOURCE via Pingdom

Christmas at the House of Meg means there’s two new wireless mice coming to fill the stockings of those who don’t eat chocolate. Both units are clad in shimmering plastic and (not-so-shimmering) soft touch rubber, accommodating righties and lefties with equal ease. The 2.4GHz devices will give you 30-foot of roaming distance and a purported battery life of 30 months (on the X4000). The higher-end X5000 [pictured] has a touch scroll strip and four customizable buttons — including a one-click Facebook button to match the social butterfly X7000. We’ve got a teaser video below that’s either hyping these mice or the next James Bond movie, and you can snap ‘em up from our source links, costing $29.99 (X4000) and $39.99 (X5000) respectively.

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Intel just warned investors that the hard drive shortage caused by the Thailand flood has impacted processor sales and will lead the company to report a revenue shortfall of about $1 billion in the fourth calendar quarter.

AMD, however, claims that the hit may be insignificant for its business. CEO Rory Read told Marketwatch that he does not see “major pressure in terms of the quarter.” Read indicated that hard drive supply in the channel at the beginning of the quarter was healthy, which is in line with Intel’s statements, but the blue team said that PC vendors are not ordering as many CPUs as they would in a normal circumstance.

Read conceded that there could be a stronger impact in Q1 or Q2 2012, but he “wouldn’t bet against the supply chain,” which he described as “very resilient.” Read is confident that AMD can take back market share against Intel.

AMD has not issued a Q4 revenue warning and it appears that it is not seeing reasons to do so in the near future. The company will discuss its Q4 results on January 24 and recently scheduled its 2012 analyst day for February 2, which should bring more details how the hard drive shortage may or may not affect AMD’s business. Analysts from IHS recently said that the overall hard drive supply will recover in the second half of next year, while IDC is more pessimistic and said that the effects of shortage may be around until 2013.

SOURCE via Market Watch

VIA is hardly the first hawker of x86-based chips to start bragging about its Android compatibility, but it certainly doesn’t want to be left behind as the open source OS starts worming its way into more and more machines. The EITX-3002 is the first of its offerings to sport official support for Google’s OS. At the heart of the Em-ITX board is your choice of a 1.2GHz NANO X2 or a 1GHz Eden X2, and a VX900H, which casn push 1080p video to dual monitors. The target devices are obviously touch-based systems like in-car entertainment computers and kiosks. To see the board in action head on after the break and, please, try to stay calm — we all know how exciting Froyo-based kiosks are.

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Information coming from a “reliable” source has informed DonanimHaber that AMD is expected to release its new Radeon HD 7900 series on January 9, 2010. This is a day ahead of the typical Tuesday release, along with one day before the official start of CES 2012. It is expected to have two cards released, the HD 7970 and HD 7950, that are based on AMD’s new 28 nm “Tahiti” platform. Early specifications for “Tahiti” (based on bits and pieces of information from various sources) are listed below. These specifications match closely to what was originally reported in September for the HD 7970 and HD 7950.

• 4.50 billion transistors, die-area of 380 mm², built on TSMC 28 nm process
• Advanced GCN 1D architecture
• 2048 1D processing cores
• 128 TMUs, 48 ROPs
• 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, memory clock slightly below 1 GHz, target bandwidth of 240~264 GB/s

In addition, it is reported the new HD 7900 series will introduce Eyefinity 3D. This will add support for 3D-optimized (120 Hz) displays, and allow users to create large stereoscopic 3D display heads using multiple 3D displays. All of this looks to be coming with a hefty price though, as early European pricing for the HD 7970 is in the range of 539-549 Euro (or $699.03 to $712.00)

Hitachi has officially confirmed two new models of 4TB hard drives in the form of the the Deskstar 5K4000 Internal Hard Drive Kit and the Touro Desk External Hard Drive.

The 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 is a 3.5-inch hard drive with a 32MB cache buffer and Hitachi’s CoolSpin power-management technology. Combined with Hitachi’s other power-management tools, CoolSpin offers up to a 28-percent idle power savings over the company’s Deskstar 7K3000 7200 RPM drives and an idle acoustic level of 2.5 bels. The 5K4000 also uses Hitachi’s Advanced Format technology, which increases the sector size on the hard disk drive from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes for increased capacities and improved error correction capabilities.

The new 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 Hard Drive Retail Kit is currently shipping in limited quantities to online and retail stores with a suggested retail price of $399.99. Hitachi will be shipping the Deskstar 5K4000 (bare drives and bulk pack) to OEMs, distributors and channel partners worldwide in Q1 2012.

The external solution, the Hitachi Touro Desk External Drive is a USB 3.0 storage solution with a Deskstar 5K4000 HDD under the hood and is both Mac and PC compatible. It comes bundled with 3GB of cloud storage for free from HitachiBackup.com and will be available in January for approximately $420.

SOURCE via Hitachi

On Wednesday INSIDE Secure said that it entered an agreement with Intel that will see its near-field communication (NFC) products and technologies integrated into future Intel products. What those products are is unknown at this point, and neither company was forthcoming with additional details after the announcement was made.

“The agreement marks a significant milestone for INSIDE Secure and the future of the NFC industry, helping move this emerging technology towards full-scale market adoption,” INSIDE Secure said in a press release. “The agreement gives Intel access to INSIDE’s software, firmware and core hardware technology for development of future Intel products. In addition, INSIDE will provide Intel’s Mobile Wireless Group with access to scalable NFC solutions based on INSIDE’s MicroRead, SecuRead and Open NFC products.”

Previous reports have indicated that NFC technology will be present in future ultrabooks, granting consumers the ability to make quick online payments with the swipe of their smartphone. NFC technology is also rumored to appear in Intel-based smartphone chips in 2012, so the deal struck with INSIDE Secure really isn’t all that surprising.

“The MicroRead NFC controller offers a broad range of NFC options and provides the capacity to support multiple secure element types, including SIM, SE or SD card, to support multiple business models,” the company reports. “SecuRead integrates INSIDE’s award-winning MicroRead NFC controller with a high-performance secure element and a GlobalPlatform-compliant Java Card operating system. Both products are integrated with INSIDE’s Open NFC protocol stack to provide best-of-breed solutions.”

INSIDE Secure chief operating officer Charles Walton told the AFP that the company has seen a booming interest in NFC this year alone. Its already shipped 10 million NFC chipsets in the third quarter and will likely stay on an accelerated track. “We’ve spent years perfecting this technology,” he said. “We’ve given Intel a real advantage in getting to market fast.”

OCZ Technology revealed its Petrol Series SSD, a new drive based on its Indilinx Everest platform, which reduces SSD deployment cost by 30 percent. The Petrol follows in the footsteps of the OCZ’s Octane, which is based on OCZ’s own Indilinx Everest platform. The drive features a 2.5-inch form factor, Asynchronous MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, and NDurance technology. The Petrol will be available in four capacities; 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB. Performance varies based on model size and shows a performance difference between 1) OCZ’s Agility 3 SandForce based drives and 2) Octane’s Synchronous MLC NAND Flash Memory based drives.

• 64 GB: 185 MB/s max sequential read & 75 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 475 MB/s Write)
• 128 GB: 360 MB/s max sequential read & 135 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 500 MB/s Write and Octane – 535 MB/s Read & 170 MB/s Write)
• 256 GB: 370 MB/s max sequential read & 240 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 500 MB/s Write and Octane – 535 MB/s Read & 270 MB/s Write)
• 512 GB: 370 MB/s max sequential read & 250 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 410 MB/s Write and Octane – 535 MB/s Read & 400 MB/s Write)

“Until today, SSD adoption has been limited to high performance applications due to the high cost of SSDs in relation to slower rotating discs, and we are proud to once again close the gap in pricing without sacrificing durability,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. “The new Petrol Series showcases the flexibility of the Indilinx Everest platform and NDurance Technology, allowing OCZ to deliver the benefits of SSDs to a wide new set of applications while retaining the superior real world performance and reduced latency that separate Everest-based SSDs from our competitors.”

Early pricing of the Petrol in stores have the 64 GB listed at $113, 128 GB at $187, 256 GB at $396 and 512 GB at $803. These are early listing, so the final pricing may differ once available.

SOURCE via OCZ