Intel has just been granted a patent that claims the rights to the concept of using initially inactive processing cores to replace failing cores.

According to the patent, increasingly complex processors with a greater number of cores, referred to as many-core processors by the company, will see higher failure rates than single- or dual-core processors. In fact, the patent states that the lifetime of a core may “shorten from generation to generation.” The reasons include electromigration, stress migration, time dependent dielectric breakdown, negative bias temperature instability (NBTI), and thermal cycling.

To alleviate failure concerns, the patent covers an approach of core management, which is heavily focused on temperature monitoring of the individual cores: “Because many semiconductor failure mechanisms are expressed at elevated temperatures, temperature thus has a direct bearing on core MTTF [mean time to failure] and many-core reliability,” the patent document explains. “If the temperature cannot be decreased, a many-core processor would activate spare cores to protect both the possibly failing core as well as neighboring cores. Both failed and spare cores are described to “absorb heat generated by active cores, driving the temperatures on the active cores down.”

In an allocation/reallocation scenario, Intel says that the temperatures of cores can be drastically reduced.

There is no indication when Intel will actually use such a technology, but the examples in the patent start with at least 32 cores total, which use 16 active and 16 spare cores.

Over the past two weeks, we have learned about the upcoming Ivy Bridge processors and its “S” & “T” versions. Thanks to another leak, posted by VR-Zone, we now get to see a little about the upcoming Ivy Bridge mobile platform. The M-series will come with 35W, 45W, and 55W TDP. The U-Series will come with a 17W TDP. This is a change from the current Sandy Bridge mobile line up that offered three levels; SV – 35W, 45W & 55W, LV – 25W and ULV – 17W.

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Asus is prepping yet another ROG LGA 2011 motherboard with the Rampage IV Gene, a high-end solution that comes in the Micro-ATX form factor and targets LAN party goers reports softpedia.

Despite its small size, the Asus board includes pretty much all the features that one would expect from a top of the line ATX, or even much larger board, such as SLI/CrossFireX compatibility, a high-end VRM, Intel Gigabit LAN, SupremeFX III sound and out of the box DDR3-2400 support.

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The Talos 2 SAS SSD drive is based on a 2.5″ form factor and a dual-port Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 6 Gb/s. It features “DataWrite Assurance” Protection and OCZ’s “Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0″ technology. OCZ claims that VCA 2.0 “optimizes the drive for enterprise environments and mixed-workloads ensuring excellent overall performance.” DataWrite Assurance Protection helps protect data in case of sudden power loss. Also, the Talos 2 includes the option to enable T10-DIF (Data Integrity Field), allowing for the insertion of 8 bytes of additional data during transfers to ensure complete data integrity.

The Talos 2 SSDs are available in 100 GB to 1 TB capacities, in MLC, eMLC, and SLC NAND configurations to cover the complete spectrum of applications. Talos 2′s performance offers up to 550 MB/s (read); up to 375 MB/s (write), with 4 kB random operations of 70,000 IOPS (read) and 35,000 IOPS (write). To address the demands of the enterprise segment, it offers mixed-workload performance or 54,000 IOPS 4K Random (75 percent read; 25 percent write) and 42,000 IOPS 8K Random (75% Read; 25% Write)

“The Talos 2 SAS solid state drives expand on the original series by offering enterprise customers superior performance, reliability, and density all in a compact footprint,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ technology Group. “The Talos 2 enterprise SSDs are optimized for the most demanding storage systems and provide clients with an easy to deploy solution that vastly improves application performance over traditional SAS based HDDs.”

The Talos 2 has a MTBF of 2 million hours and comes with a 3-year warranty. To learn more about the Talos 2 SAS SSD, visit OCZ Technology at its product page.

SOURCE via OCZ

Considering how frequently Intel roadmaps leak out, you have to wonder which super-spy is smuggling all those diplomatic bags out of Santa Clara. The latest seems to contain detailed plans for 2012′s Ivy Bridge desktop chips (and the sad news that the release has been pushed back to Q2). There are no big surprises in the documents, since the company just shrunk some Sandy Bridge CPUs in the wash. Going down from a 32nm to 22nm microarchitecture has managed to wring 19 percent better power usage, which enabled Chipzilla to concentrate on beefing up the range’s integrated graphics performance, making it (reportedly) 60 percent faster than its bigger brother. The chipset will sit neatly atop your current Sandy Bridge motherboards, (You’ll just need to flash your BIOS), which is good because we’re stuck with the asthmatic, geriatric processor for at least another few months.

SOURCE via Xbit-Labs

Nordic Hardware asked Mr. Bliemer if AMD gaining in any segment thanks to the performance of Llano, which has been very successful for AMD. In his comments, Mr. Bliemer acknowledges (in a roundabout way) that AMD has the lead in the Llano & Brazos market segment. Intel still sees AMD as a serious competitor, but more in the price-to-performance arena versus pure performance power. This is interesting giving that AMD plans to shift its focus away from competing with long-time processor rival Intel starting in 2012.

“AMD is and will always be a serious competitor of ours. I do think that based on where we started this discussion, particularly on the manufacturing side and the lead that we have with architecture and manufacturing that it has been alot [sic] harder to them to compete effectively against us. So there for [sic] most of it is price driven, so I would say if there’s an area – we have to always continue to make sure we will remain competitive in the low end of notebooks right now, which is largely fueled by their Llano and Brazos products that actually go into that segment. So it’s a pricing game but I think that from a performance and experience point of view it is not much for them right now to really pleased about I think. But they will always stay competitive.”- Pat Bliemer, the Managing Director of Intel Northern Europe

Mr. Bliemer discussed the future of integrated graphics and how it can compete in today’s market with discrete graphics solutions. Being a PC enthusiast and gamer, I find it hard to believe that integrated graphics solution has any value for the end-user. It is not until I take a step back and realize that I am not the majority but a very low minority in the grand theme of needs / usage. This is the battle Intel and AMD alike have to battle on how to convince consumers that integrated solutions are sufficient. With AMD’s Llano and the changes coming to the integrated graphics on Ivy Bridge (HD 4000), we are seeing how the integrated graphics solution is capable of playing HD content, games or accelerating applications better than ever before.

“The future goal is certainly not that we have a vision or so that in a few years’ time there’s not going to be any external graphics solutions available any longer. We do not think that 100 percent of the market is going to go integrated. We do think that more people will realize that they, what actually they have in their default is good enough to run 99,98 percent of the things that they do. If you talk about mainstream gaming you can elegantly do it already based on GT2 [Intel HD 3000] solutions that we have. If you want to go do something like some of the real serious games that these guys are playing here behind us [at Dreamhack], then you have the need for external graphics.” – Pat Bliemer, the Managing Director of Intel Northern Europe

Read more on the interview at Nordic Hardware.

Monday Seagate said that it began shipping its second-generation 2.5-inch solid-state hybrid drive, the Momentus XT, deeming it as the company’s fastest drive ever for personal laptop computers. That’s because it comes equipped with double the NAND flash than what was available on the first-generation drive, now packing 8 GB of Single Level Cell NAND. Seagate also cranked up the disk capacity to 750 GB while keeping the drive’s pricetag hovering at a not-too-shabby $245 USD.

Joni Clark, Seagate’s product marketing manager, said on Tuesday that the company switched NAND flash vendors for this model, thus the new drive will have 1.5 times better performance than the first-generation model. The company also switched out the drive’s interface, replacing the slower SATA 3 Gbps connector with a zippier SATA 6 Gbps pipeline. This makes the new model 70-percent faster than its predecessor and up to three times faster than a traditional 750 GB hard disk drive.

Also new to the table is what Seagate calls FAST Factor technology. This feature “blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives” and enables faster access to applications, quicker bootup and higher overall system speed. There’s also “tweaked” Adaptive Memory technology which identifies data usage patterns, and then moves the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. It effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use over the course of three boot-ups.

Clark said that the new drive will write data on the hard drive platters first and then to the NAND so that data isn’t lost if the NAND happens to fail. “If the NAND ever fails, you’ll still have a perfectly good 7,200rpm hard drive,” she said. “You’ll still be able to boot up just like a regular hard drive, but you won’t be able to take advantage of the NAND flash.”

The Seagate product marketing manager also added that the company conducted performance tests against an Intel consumer-class 320 series SSD. Intel’s drive beat Seagate’s hybrid on boot times only by two seconds. “The Intel SSD works out to $490 for 160 GB,” she said. “Ours costs [$245] for 750 GB. For those two seconds [better boot up time], you’ll end up paying an extra $300.”

On Tuesday Seagate said that seven original equipment manufacturers are gearing up to ship laptops packing the new Momentus XT drive. It’s now available for consumers at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect. But buyer beware: Seagate’s new second-generation Momentus XT is a 4K sector drive, and will not play nice with Windows XP or earlier operating systems that only support 512 Kb drives (“tuning” instructions are here). However Apple’s Mac OS and recent Linux distributions are equipped to work with 4K drive sectors.

SOURCE via Seagate

CPU World reports that the new APUs are now available for pre-order and are positioned above the existing 3850 and 3650 models, respectively. Both APUs are 100 watt parts and clock in at 3.0 GHz and 2.7 GHz, compared to 2.9 GHz and 2.6 GHz for the 3850 and 3650. CPU World shows a pricelist in which the new 3870K is priced at $143.77, which is the same as the cost for the 3850. The 3670K is priced at $121.50, the same as the 3650.

It is reasonable to expect the prices for the 3650 and 3850 to drop slightly once the new APUs are released.

SOURCE via CPU-World

On Tuesday Intel and Micron introduced a “world’s first” with the announcement of a new 20-nm monolithic 128 gigabit (Gb) NAND device which doubles the storage capacity and performance of the duo’s current 20-nm 64 Gb NAND offering. It was created through their joint-development venture IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) with the intent to cram more storage capacity into small form factor devices like smartphones, tablets, USB drives and SSDs.

According to the report, the new device has the capability of storing 1 terabit of data in a single fingertip-size package with just eight die. For consumers, a 128 Gb device translates to 16 GB of storage. Stack eight of these in a single package and you have a memory chip packing a meaty 128 GB of storage capacity.

The new device is also reportedly the first to use a planar cell structure that “breaks the scaling constraints of standard floating gate NAND” by integrating the first Hi-K/metal gate stack on NAND production. It even meets the high-speed ONFI 3.0 specification to achieve speeds of 333 megatransfers per second (MT/s).

“As portable devices get smaller and sleeker, and server demands increase, our customers look to Micron for innovative new storage technologies and system solutions that meet these challenges,” said Glen Hawk, vice president of Micron’s NAND Solutions Group. “Our collaboration with Intel continues to deliver leading NAND technologies and expertise that are critical to building those systems.”

In addition to the 128 Gb NAND device, the duo also said that their 64 Gb 20-nm NAND has entered mass production, and should enable a rapid transition to the 128 Gb device in 2012. Samples of the 128 Gb device are expected to arrive in January 2012 followed by mass production in the first half of 2012.

Today, we learned more information on the upcoming release of the Intel 520 Series SSD from information released by The SSD Review.

In September, we caught our first glimpse of the upcoming Intel 520 Series SSD, which is slated to replace the current Intel 510 Series SSD based on a Marvell controller. The initial report showed the the 520 series will utilize 25 nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory made by Intel and features support for TRIM, SMART, NCQ, and ACS-2 compliance. The capacities will range from 60 GB, 120 GB, 160 GB, 240 GB, to 480 GB and be based on  2.5-inch SATA 6 Gb/s form-factor. The drive looked to be set to compete with current SandForce SF-22xx SSDs at each capacity level and price-point.

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