Chip supplier Marvell is hooking up with e-reader companies, hoping to take the lead in silicon design for this nascent market.
Entourage Edge has both a 9.7-inch e-reader display and a 10.1-inch color LCD and runs Google's Android OS on top of Marvell silicon.
(Credit: Entourage)The market for e-readers, currently led by the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, is poised for growth, according to Weili Dai, a Marvell co-founder and general manager of the consumer and computing business unit. "The timing is right for the e-reader market to take off in volume," Dai said in an interview.
Marvell, though not a household name like Intel, is a major supplier of communications, storage, and wireless chips. Marvell, for example, supplied the Wi-Fi chip in the original iPhone and is a leading supplier of controller chips for solid-state drives.
In the e-reader market, Marvell is hoping to play a leading role in making e-readers a low-cost, mass-market device. "We're targeting a retail price of $150," Dai said. Partners include E Ink, a supplier of electronic paper displays; FirstPaper, an e-reading and advertising start-up; and Plastic Logic, an e-reader maker. Both E Ink and FirstPaper are backed by media company Hearst.
E-reader from Spring Design runs Android and integrates two displays.
(Credit: Spring Design)The Marvell Armada 166E system-on-a-chip, which will power a number of upcoming e-readers, integrates key features onto a single piece of silicon, such as the main processor--called an application processor--and the display controller. Armada is based on intellectual property from U.K.-based ARM, whose designs power most of the world's cell phones. Marvell ships 1 billion chips per year, two-thirds of which include Marvell processors running the ARM instruction set.
Marvell processors running at 1GHz will be used in many of the initial e-readers, though Marvell has designs that scale up in performance to 2GHz, according to Dai.
One of the first products to use the Marvell chip is the Entourage Edge, which claims to be the first "dualbook"--combining an E Ink EPD (electronic paper display) with an LCD and Netbook, notepad, and audio/video player functions.
Marvell will also power the dual-screen Alex e-reader from Spring Design. Like the Edge, Alex's dual-screen display design combines a monochrome electronic paper display with a color LCD screen.
"Periodicals are the next big frontier in eReading," Gil Fuchsberg, president of FirstPaper, said in a statement. To enable better newspaper and magazine reading experiences, e-reading devices will need richer layouts and more complex content, according to FirstPaper.
Corrected on November 3 at 7:40 a.m. PST: This story initially described FirstPaper incorrectly. It is an e-reading and advertising start-up.
Samsung on Wednesday night said it has begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives. This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.
Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.
The new 256GB drives are faster too, the company claims, more than doubling the performance rate of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs.
The drives combine sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second, with sequential write rates of 200MBps. "This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 (percent) and 70 percent for other SSDs," the company said.
Samsung did not mention random write performance, however. Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles' heel of solid-state drives.
Getting this 256GB SSD in a notebook "is analogous to having a 15,000-(revolutions-per-minute) drive, without all of its size, noise, power, and heating drawbacks," Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, said in a statement.
The 256GB SSD boosts data transfer when large multimedia files are simultaneously read and stored. "It can store 25 high-definition movies in just 21 minutes, a significant advancement over a 7,200rpm hard disk drive (HDD), which takes about 70 minutes," the company said in a statement.
The drive's performance is derived from a new single-platform design consisting of a chip controller, NAND flash, and special drive firmware developed by Samsung. "This single platform is designed to easily adapt to Samsung's 40-(nanometer) class NAND flash memory," according to the company.
It consumes 1.1 watts of power, versus 2 or more watts for a comparable HDD. Similar in weight to a 128GB SSD, at 81 grams, the 2.5-inch multilevel cell 256GB SSD has the same 9.5-millimeter drive thickness.
Samsung's 256GB SSD is also available with optional proprietary encryption programming that provides full-disk encryption, a key feature for some corporate users.
Pricing was not immediately available.
Intel is shipping new server processors that consume as little as 12.5 watts per core.
Cumulatively, the racks and racks of servers in large data centers can require power rivaling that consumed by entire city blocks. So, getting power consumption as low as possible while delivering adequate performance has become a delicate balancing act for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
New additions to the Xeon 5000 Series include the L5430 and X5270 processors, the fastest of which boasts a clock speed of 3.5GHz, Intel said.
The low-voltage L5430 uses only 50 watts of power or just 12.5 watts per core. The dual-core Xeon X5270 draws 80 watts, according to Intel.
"Much of the energy efficiency these new processors provide comes from Intel's...45 (nanometer) manufacturing capability and its reinvented transistors that use a Hafnium-based high-k metal gate formula," Intel said in a statement. Transistors with high-k metal gates can control current leakage better than those with silicon dioxide gates, which Intel had used in the past.
Not all processors, however, boast low power consumption. Intel will also ship high-performance versions with relatively high power consumption, including the X5492, which consumes 150 watts.
All of the new Xeon chips use packaging materials free of halogens, which can release toxins if incinerated. This is a goal Intel has set for all of its processors.
Vendors expected to bring out systems include Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Gigabyte, HP, IBM, Microstar, NEC, Quanta, Rackable Systems, Sun Microsystems, Supermicro, Tyan, and Verari Systems.
The processors are targeted at organizations using workstation and blade and mainstream servers, Intel said.
Pricing ranges from $562 for a quad-core Xeon L5430 (2.66GHz) to $1,493 for a quad-core Xeon X5492 (3.4GHz).
Dupont and Dainippon Screen Manufacturing will form a strategic alliance to develop mass production techniques for organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, according to an announcement made in Japan.
Sony OLED display
(Credit: CNET)The focus is on developing better processes and printing equipment for the fabrication of OLED displays.
OLEDs are attracting interest because the panels are paper thin but offer extremely high-quality images, superb color saturation, and fast response times. And they draw little power because they don't require a backlight.
At the same time, they face durability challenges. The organic matter used to illuminate the image can by ruined by the elements, so special sealing technology is necessary. Also, a new study by DisplaySearch found that the brightness on Sony's 11-inch XEL-1 TV began to degrade significantly after 1,000 hours.
That's not all. OLEDs face size constraints. Many of the widely-used, mass-market OLEDs used today are only between and three and four inches diagonally. Sony's XEL-1, one of the largest, is only 11 inches but is priced at close to $2,000.
Dupont and Dainippon hope to solve the size problem and bring down the cost in the process. Their goal is to develop printing equipment that that will enable the production of very large OLEDs that would rival the largest LCD TVs in size.
DuPont brings its small molecule-based OLED solution materials and process technology to the table, while Dainippon Screen has developed a nozzle printing technology.
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