TSMC Expects Design Explosion with 28nm Chips

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company believes that 28nm process technology opens a number of new doors for the company. The world's largest contract manufacturer of chips claims that it has almost ninety 28nm design wins and believes the new fabrication process will have high popularity among chip designers for ultra-portable devices.
"The smartphone and tablet is the new killer application. We are seeing a design explosion at 28nm. We have 89 tape-outs in the pipeline," said Maria Marced, president of TSMC Europe, in an interview with EETimes web-site.

 

Read More - http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20110515145941_TSMC_Sees_Design_Explosion_with_28nm_Chips.html

Intel Smart Response Technology - SRT

Introduction

Intel is among a small list of solid state controller manufactures producing enthusiast class products. By nature, SSDs are still considered premium products with large performance benefits over traditional platter based hard drives but the performance isn’t what constitutes a premium category listing. SSDs cost considerably more than traditional spinners and the cost vs. capacity ratio is much higher. Technology improvements have brought this ratio down for SSDs but the same can also be said for traditional HDDs as well. For some, the imbalance is just too wide to consider a move to high speed, low capacity solid state technology.


Solid state technology improves the user experience two ways, one you can see and one you can feel. They say seeing is believing and it’s possible to show with graphs and plotted lines sequential performance. SSDs are now capable of delivering 500MB/s read and write speeds when asked to perform a straight sequence. This is a 3x increase over the highest performing traditional HDD. A 3x increase in what’s still the slowest performing component in your computer system is significant but it’s not what enhances the user experience in day to day tasks. To put this into a personal perspective, ask yourself how often you transfer a DVD, Blu-Ray ISO or other large file from one location to another. These are sequential tasks.


While you are questioning yourself go ahead and ask how often you open a web browser, application, turn on your PC and for that matter double click on anything found on your boot drive. SSDs sequential read and write speeds get most of the marketing attention because big numbers look better in advertisements. The user experience comes from small numbers, numbers measured in microseconds

Read More - http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/05/11/intel_smart_response_technology_srt

Intel Debuts New Enthusiast-Class Core-Logic Set with SSD-Based Caching Technology.

Intel Corp. this week released a new enthusiast-class platform for its latest Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" microprocessors. The platform is powered by the new Z68 core-logic set along with 311-series "Larsen Creek" solid-state drive (SSD) that speeds up typical workloads by working in companion with a hard disk drive (HDD).

"The Z68 chipset offers new overclocking and caching features for PC enthusiasts who want more control over their [...] desktops. The 20GB Intel SSD 311 is optimized for the new Intel Smart Response Technology caching feature in Z68 which helps speed boot times, application loads, and many other PC uses," said Daniel Snyder, a spokesman for Intel.

 

Read More -  http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboards/display/20110513122307_Intel_Debuts_New_Enthusiast_Class_Core_Logic_Set_with_SSD_Based_Caching_Technology.html

Nvidia are developing their own AA technology

NVIDIA is developing its own antialiasing (AA) technology to rival morphological antialiasing (MLAA). The subpixel reconstruction antialiasing (SRAA) NVIDIA is currently conducting research on aims to provide better image quality with minimal performance penalty. It "combines single-pixel (1x) shading with subpixel visibility to create antialiased images without increasing the shading cost," as NVIDIA puts it in its research abstract. SRAA is suited for rendering engines that don't use multisample antialiasing (MSAA) since they use deferred shading. For such renderers, SRAA works as a post-processing layer, just like MLAA.

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