Our Digital Age

• 3 megapixels
• Autofocus
• Tap to focus
• Video recording, VGA up to 30 fps with audio
• Photo and video geotagging
• iPhone and third-party application integration

• UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz)
• GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
• Wi-Fi (802.11b/g)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR

• Assisted GPS
• Digital compass
• Wi-Fi
• Cellular

• Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery
• Charging via USB to computer system or power adapter
• Talk Time: 3G - Up to 5 hours, 2G - Up to 12 hours
• Standby time: Up to 300 hours
• Internet use: Up to 5 hours on 3G, Up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi
• Video playback: Up to 10 hours
• Audio playback: Up to 30 hours

A solid state drive is a storage device that uses solid state memory to store data. While technically not a disk, a solid state drive will often be referred to as a solid state disk drive, or a solid state disk, in reference to the fact that, in some ways, it replaces the traditional hard disk drive.

Hard disk drives have been a faithful servant to computing for many years. But with heads, platters, magnetic surfaces, spindles and an array of other complex moving parts, they are most certainly fallible. They can be slow, too: disks have to start spinning if they're not already doing so, then they have to get the head to the correct position on the disk to read or write the data. Add this to the physical problems occurring when a piece of dust or other foreign object gets into the mechanism, or when an impact jolts the drive, and we have a distinctly imperfect system. Solid state drives address many of these timing and structural problems inherent in the hard disk drive.

The principle behind solid state drives is that there should be no moving parts: no spinning platters, no moving heads. Data is split into word length pieces and stored in memory. It is then accessed almost instantaneously using unique system-wide addresses. This behaviour has been used in computer RAM for many years, but for a long time it was too expensive for manufacturers to consider using it as persistent storage in sufficient volumes to replace the hard disk drive.

Solid state disks use either NAND flash or SDRAM (non-volatile and volatile storage respectively). NAND flash is so-called because of the NAND-gate technology it uses and is common in USB flash drives and many types of memory card. NAND flash based drives are persistent and can therefore effectively mimic a hard disk drive. Synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) is volatile and requires a separate power source if it is to operate independently from a computer.

Solid state drives may be preferred over traditional disk drives for a number of reasons. The first advantage is found, as mentioned briefly above, in the speed of operation. Because hard disk drives need to be spinning for the head to read sectors of the platter, sometimes we have to wait for "spin up" time. Once the disk is spinning, the head must seek the correct place on the disk, and from there the disk must spin just enough so that the correct data is read. If data is spread over different parts of the disk (fragmented) then this operation is repeated until all the data has been read or written. While each individual operation only takes fractions of a second the sum of them may not. It is often the case that reads to and writes from the hard disk are the bottleneck in a system.

Because the information on solid state drives can be accessed immediately (technically at the speed of light) there is no latency experience when data is transferred. Because there is no relationship between spatial locality and retrieval speed, there is no degradation of performance when data is fragmented.

Consequences of the increased speed of writes for fragmented data include a much decreased application start up time: SanDisk, for instance, claim to have achieved Windows Vista start up times of around 30 seconds for a laptop with its SSD SATA 5000 2.5".

Solid state drives also enjoy greater stability over their disk counterparts. Because there are no moving parts there is less that can go wrong mechanically. Dust entering the device ceases to become a problem (and in any case solid state drives can be sealed air tight unlike disk drives which require a certain air cushion to function properly), and dropping the drive is less likely to cause damage to the data. There are no heads so head crashes are a thing of the past.

This speed and stability comes at a price, of course, and in early models prices of even the most modest of solid state capacities greatly surpassed that of the largest hard disks.

From PCTechGuide (http://www.pctechguide.com)

The world of graphics is...interesting to say the least. I know many of you would call the move from $1000 GPUs being the king of the proverbial hill to $250 cards dominating that space to be less exciting, but there is no arguing that it is more affordable. We have seen our fair share of new graphics cards hit the market with one prevailing trend: performance is getting cheap; really cheap.

In March we saw the GeForce GTS 250 take over the space of the 9800 GTX+ while lowering the price and most recently the AMD Radeon HD 4770 brought the world the first 40nm GPU and a handy $99 price tag. And the

Radeon HD 4850 is still a dominant force selling for the $130 range. Which brings us to today's article comparing a couple of new cards we had sitting around the office both of which are overclocked and offer more features than their reference sidekicks.

The ASUS GeForce GTS 250 Dark Knight 512MB

The ASUS GeForce GTS 250 Dark Knight edition (no relation to Batman though) is a custom cooled version of the popular GPU that is slightly more attractive.

The GTS 250 DK uses a single 6-pin power connector.

NVIDIA unleashes world's most powerful graphics card technology. Image: NVIDIA.

All hail the new Quadro FX 5800 graphics card, which, according to an extremely proud NVIDIA Corp., is set to take the computing world by storm as the most powerful professional graphics solution ever produced.

Likely to leave computer game fans drowning in their own drool, the Quadro FX 5800 is being primarily targeted at business customers such as the oil and gas industries, design professionals, and those involved in the development of medical imaging - all of which require high-performance GPUs.

Described as offering “unprecedented performance and scalability,” the Quadro FX 5800 arrives as the industry’s very first 4GB graphics card and also provides up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores, which, according to NVIDIA, makes it the perfect choice for the above mentioned professionals.

“The challenge for today’s professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze and use to make impactful decisions,” explained Jeff Brown, general manager of Professional Solutions at Santa Clara-based NVIDIA.

“At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people’s lives,” he added. “The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions.”

Those advanced features attributed to the Quadro FX 5800 include: Interactive 4D modelling (with time lapse capabilities); 10-Bit colour capabilities; memory bandwidth of up to 102GBs per second; a fill rate in excess of 52 billion texels per second and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second; support for next-gen OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX 10 applications; and advanced multi-system and multi-device visualisation environments with Quadro G-Sync II.

Brown’s clear enthusiasm is shared by NVIDIA’s existing customers, such as Realtime Technology AG (RTT), a leading supplier of real-time visualisation technology and virtual prototyping solutions for the automotive, aerospace, industrial and consumer goods design industries.

“Our customers are making important decisions about future products on the basis of RTT-powered 3D real-time models,” said Ludwig Fuchs, co-founder and CEO of Munich-based Realtime Technology.

“The new Quadro FX 5800 will be the platform of choice to bring that arena to the next level. Higher levels of realism, physical correctness and large models are now made possible through a double number of cores and a generous frame buffer.”

Available through leading PC manufacturers, NVIDIA channel partners, and workstation system integrators, the Quadro FX 5800 comes attached to a recommended price of $3,499 USD.

by Stevie Smith, http://www.thetechherald.com

P45 and Core 2 Duo Are Still Around

High Definition Audio (also called HD Audio or “Azalia”) is a specification released by Intel in 2004 for delivering high-definition audio that is capable of playing back more channels at higher quality than previous integrated audio codecs like AC97. During development it had the codename Azalia.

Hardware based on Intel HD Audio specifications is capable of delivering 192 kHz/32-bit quality for two channels, and 96 kHz/32-bit for up to eight channels. However, as of 2008, most audio hardware manufacturers do not implement the full high-end specification, especially 32-bit sampling resolution.

Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows XP SP3 include a Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) class driver which supports audio devices built to the HD Audio specification. Mac OS X has full support with its AppleHDA driver. Linux also supports Intel HDA controllers, as do the OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD operating systems.

Like AC97, HD Audio is a specification that defines the architecture, link frame format, and programming interfaces used by the controller on the PCI bus and by the codec on the other side of the link. Implementations of the host controller are available from Intel, NVidia, AMD, and possibly others. Codecs which can be used with such controllers are available from many companies, including Realtek, Conexant, and Analog Devices.

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