Joe's links

Technology News reports

IBM and TDK hope to develop in a joint effort a line of magnetic random access memory chips that will be more compact than current MRAM chips. Read more here.

Also at Technology News is a reflection of the CD turning 25 years of age. Yikes, seems like just a few years ago. Read about the CD here.

ExtremeTech reports

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will be spending $787.8 million US to upgrade its memory chip production lines and boost production capacity. Read more about Samsung to produce more (allegedly) infringing DRAM here.

the Inquirer reports

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd "is expecting the price of memory chips to go through the roof." Read more about Samsung's hope here.

EETimes reports

Hynix Semiconductor Inc. has licensed floating-body single-transistor memory Z-RAM technology from Innovative Silicon Inc. to the tune of reported initial license and engineering fees of $10 million. Read more about Z-RAM here.

The Honorable Ronald M. Whyte

Thursday 08/23/2007
09:00 AM C-00-20905-RMW
HYNIX V. RAMBUS
_______________________
C-05-00334-RMW
RAMBUS V. HYNIX, SAMSUNG & NANYA
_______________________
C-05-02298-RMW
RAMBUS V. SAMSUNG
_______________________
C-06-00244-RMW
RAMBUS V. MICRON
_______________________
Further Case Management Conference

His Honor's Calendar linked here.

Mercury wins a "Beacon"

in the category of "Best IBM Embedded Power Architecture(TM) Solution."

Mercury collaborated with Mentor Graphics to design and develop a fully integrated electronic design automation (EDA) platform based on the Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (BE) processor. Mercury successfully migrated Mentor's Calibre nmOPC EDA software product to its Cell BE processor-based high- performance compute cluster.

Read Mercury's press release linked here.

IBM shrinks Cell BE

. . . and with the shrinkage, less power . . . less heat.

Read more at Investors Hub, courtesy of ThreeJack.

HT Pinehurst Joe.

High-k metal gate transistors

IBM & Intel press forward with "high-k metal gate" transistors made of designer metals intended to reduce the electrical leakage and heat in chips.

IBM used Blue Gene/L supercomputer to crunch and model, claiming that if had used a typical notebook PC, the 250-day job would have taken them 700 years. IBM plans to build chips with the new mixture in 2008.

Intel must have a bunch of smart engineers with sharp pencils because they claim to be coming to market with Penryn chips and its own type of "high-k metal gate" transistors spun off its 45-nm process in the second half of 2007.

Read more at TechWorld.

HT Pinehurst Joe.

Not so popular?

TheTechGrabber reports (with photograph):

While IBM revealed its breakthrough eDRAM memory technology at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, the not so popular Rambus showed its technology dubbed Loki that is aimed to cut down the energy consumed by I/O devices. The prototype is able to rum at 6.25 gigabits per second and transfers information at 2.2 milli-watts per gigabit.

Spelled Rambus correctly and then noted that "Loki, which is power driven by 2AA batteries seems to be a winner."

Hope the vote is counted quickly, licenses signed post haste and the check clears . . .

CNetNews reports:

Rambus, the company everyone seems to love to hate . . .

Rambus Ins. just can't catch a break! Even when the news is good, somebody has to rain on the parade!

HT FinzToRite for links . . . .

Phase-change memory

Macworld reports IBM, Qimonda and Macronix International have developed a new variety of memory - phase-change memory which runs 500 times faster than flash memory and uses only one-half the power.

The article notes that "new chip designs must be relatively easy to manufacture, and they need to be cost-effective enough to attract device makers" and mentions that Rambus was unable to convert the market to its new memory several years ago . . .

Read the Macworld article linked here.

Cell BE Processor in short supply?

The Inquirer repeats a rumor that the supply of Cell BE Processors is thin thanks to Sony Playstation 3 and a run on IBM server blades featuring Cell BE.

According to IBM's site:

IBM BladeCenter QS20 blade features:

Two 3.2 GHz Cell BE processors

1 GB XDRAM (512 MB per processor)

410 GFLOPS peak performance

Blade-mounted 40 GB IDE hard disk drive

Two 1 Gb Ethernet (GbE) controllers that provide connectivity to the BladeCenter chassis midplane and BladeCenter GbE switches

BladeCenter interface that offers Blade Power System and Sense Logic Control

Double-wide blade (uses two BladeCenter slots)

InfiniBand (IB) option, supporting up to two Mellanox IB 4x Host Channel Adapters (External IB switches are required for the IB option.)

Peak performance of 2.8 TFLOPS in a standard single-chassis configuration, and over 17 TFLOPS may be possible in a standard 42U rack (There is a maximum of seven blades per chassis. Each Cell BE blade requires two slots. Cell BE blades should not be intermixed with other blades within a chassis.)

***

Do you want to purchase a Dual Cell Based Blade? Prices linked here. ($18,995 and up.)

IBM to cash in on its chips

While Intel and AMD focused on a perceived need for speed, IBM followed an path of multi-core design and partnerships. IBM chips are in Wii, Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 and it hopes to parley its recent success into billions of dollars over the next decade. Part of IBM's hope hinges on the Cell processor.

"From a technological perspective, we still have a tremendous amount of upside," said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for IBM's systems group. "We've only gone down this road one turn."

IBM is working with other companies, such as Mercury Computing Systems Inc., to adapt Cell and other chips for their own new devices. Cell powers a line of IBM servers and is being used in a supercomputer for the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Toshiba plans to use the chip in TVs.

However, even with Cell's performance boosts, it could have limited paths into other systems unless IBM can encourage many software developers to create applications that take advantage of Cell's unusual architecture.

Read an interesting article about IBM linked here at the Baltimore Sun.