Seagate Technology on Monday launched its first combination disk storage and flash memory hard drive, joining rival Samsung Electronics in offering hybrid drives that manufacturers say quicken the boot up time of PCs and significantly boost battery life.

The Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD, which stands for "power savings drive," offers 160 Gbytes of traditional rotating disk storage and 256 Mbytes of flash memory. Sony is the first PC maker to offer the new product, making it available in its Vaio SZ650, Melissa Johnson, product-marketing manager for Seagate, said. Three other PC manufacturers also plan to offer products with the new drive, but Johnson declined to name them.

The Momentus sells for $190, which is almost a 30% premium over a traditional drive of equal storage. The higher price, however, gets the buyer technology that Seagate claims can quicken the time it takes to boot a PC by 20%, and uses half as much power as a traditional hard drive. The Sony Vaio gets 25% more battery life from using the hybrid drive, Johnson said. "There's good value across the board for this hybrid technology."

Samsung started shipping its hybrid flash/hard drive in March. Samsung and Seagate offer the same size drive, but Samsung also sells models of 80 Gbytes and 120 Gbytes. Over the next 10 years, Seagate plans to offer hybrid drives as an option across its entire line of disk drives for notebooks, desktops, and ultra mobile PCs, Johnson said.

Seagate and Samsung have been working with Microsoft(MSFT) to take advantage of technology in Vista that can leverage their hybrid drives. ReadyDrive in Vista treats flash and disk as one memory space, so it can be used for caching frequently needed data, or as a disk-write cache when the disk is spun down in order to save battery power.

Vista's ReadyBoot technology speeds up the processes of booting the system and recovering from hibernation by keeping track of the files most often needed when the system boots and building a temporary cache when the system starts.

Despite the enhancements in Vista, however, PC buyers won't get full advantage of hybrid drives until other makers of PC components jump onboard in a big way. BIOS makers and manufacturers of device drivers have yet to take advantage of the flash memory in hybrid drives. BIOS, or basic input/output system, is the firmware code in a PC that identifies and initiates component hardware, such as hard drives, and CD drives. Device drivers run everything from printers and scanners to digital cameras.

Makers of hard disk drives, however, have banded together to promote hybrid drives for notebooks and to work with PC makers in helping them adopt the technology. Founding member of the Hybrid Storage Alliance include Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Toshiba.

Besides Sony, Dell(Dell) offers hybrid drives in its Latitude line of corporate PCs. The computer maker plans to eventually offer the same drives in consumer PCs, a spokeswoman said.

The number of new notebook computers using some form of flash memory for data storage will soar from a negligible number today to more than 50% in two years, according to iSuppli. The research firm sees three approaches to flash data storage evolving over the next couple of years: Intel(INTC)'s Robson, hybrid hard-disk drives, and solid-state drives. Robson is the code name for a platform technology that uses flash memory to increase system responsiveness, make multitasking faster, and extend battery life.

AMD will release its brand new quad-core Opteron processor today, according to all the media who got a press release early.
Those of us who told the world plus dog about the Barcelona chip launch in June and even found a sales video last did not get a copy so we were very excited to hear about it from outfits who broke embargos to tell you the news "first".

Like I said, we have never heard of this 'Barcelona' gizmo before, but according to CNET, it will pull AMD's nadgers from the fire after CEO Hector Ruiz will formally unveil the quad-core Opteron chip during an event in San Francisco Monday evening. If CNET is to be believed we got the event launch all wrong and are sending our top hack, Paul Hales to AMD's Barcelona launch in Spain this morning. Still he has not had a holiday since last week.

Apparently, Barcelona will be AMD's first chip with four processing cores, which is four small brains doing the work of one big one, in case you didn't know.

AMD said says that Barcelona is "the world’s most advanced x86 processor ever designed" and is the "first native x86 quad-core microprocessor".

The chip can "deliver breakthrough capabilities to customers in a time of dramatically escalating performance-per-watt emphasis".

Barcelona promises to be as much as 70% faster than its predecessors when running some database applications, yet will consume the same amount of power, according to AMD. With some floating-point operations, which often are used to crunch complex scientific data, the chip is expected to run 40% faster.

Initially, Barcelona will be released in two versions, standard and low-powered. Neither will exceed clock speeds of 2.0GHz. This is slower than some of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 chips, codenamed 'Clovertown,' which were released last year. Xeon X5355, for example, is currently shipping and runs at 2.66GHz.

AMD said another higher-frequency version of Barcelona would ship in the fourth quarter sometime.

"AMD has prioritized production of our low-power and standard-power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native quad-core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen," said AMD server and workstation VP Randy Allen, in a statement.

Barcelona is being touted by AMD as the first "native" quad-core chip because all four cores are on a single silicon die, compared to Intel's quad-core devices, which essentially are two dual-core chips packaged side by side.

AMD contends that having a processor built from the ground up to have four cores will enable higher performance.

Intel has said its two-by-dual-core design enabled it to keep costs low while it works on a single-chip quad-core using the next-generation 45-nanometer manufacturing process, which promises to help keep power dissipation low. Intel's forthcoming 45-nm quad-core processor, codenamed 'Harpertown,' is expected to launch this year.

Barcelona, at least initially, will be manufactured in the larger 65-nm node. And this doesn't seem be a factor, at this point in time, given Barcelona's thermal profile so far also seems low.

But it is worth noting AMD has only recently moved to the 65-nm node. The general rule is that the smaller the manufacturing node, the lower the manufacturing cost and the higher the performance.

AMD did not release Barclelona pricing.

Sun is taking aim at blade servers again with the release today of the Sun Blade 6000, a 10U system capable of housing 10 blades based on any combination of Sparc, AMD and Intel processors and running Solaris, Linux and Windows.

The systems use the PCI Express Module to connect blades, support hot-plugging and address problems involved in mixing and matching technologies. They also represent Sun’s first use of Intel chips since the firms announced an agreement in January.

“One of the issues with blades has been the lack of standards in I/O and the way blades fit in the chassis,” said Garry Owen, Sun UK systems practice marketing manager.

“With most blade systems you can have either Intel or AMD but you can’t mix them together. By supporting both plus Sparc you can envisage a system that has Sparc running an Oracle database, Intel Xeon for the Exchange email system and AMD for high-performance computing.”

Systems will initially be available with two-socket, quad-core Intel Xeon processors, two-socket, dual-core AMD Opteron processors and single-socket, eight-core UltraSparc T1 chips.

Service terms will be on a per-chassis basis to simplify administration for Sun and customers. Prices are based on customers having six blades installed in the chassis.

Owen said that the release of the Sun Blade 6000 is effectively the firm’s first attempt to compete in the mainstream blade market as the Blade 8000, announced last July and notable for its huge chassis, was intended for high-end, compute-intensive environments.

“The Blade 8000 has been a bit misunderstood and we probably haven’t done a good job explaining it,” Owen admitted.

Another unusual feature is storage. The Blade 6000 supports up to four hard drives and Sun plans a “storage blade” with even more disk capacity for later this year.

Sun faces a tough task to compete with HP and IBM, the giants that together account for about three-quarters of the blade market. However, the market is still growing with almost 30 percent growth in the last year, according to IDC.

Sean Maloney, executive vice president of Intel noted, said the company expects the 45nm platform to account for 50% of its shipments by the third quarter of 2008, while the 65nm platform will account for the rest. Maloney also pointed out that Intel Q33 and Q35 chipsets are shipping now ahead of their original third quarter 2007 introduction, while the integrated Intel G35 chipset and the high-end Intel X38 chipset will ship within 90 days.

Intel unveiled the new Intel 3 series chipset family along with several other technology plans that surround the company's popular Intel Core 2 Duo and Quad processors for home and business PC users at Computex Taipei 2007

The Intel 3 series chipsets support DDR2 up to 800MHz, or DDR3 memory with data transfer speeds up to 1333 MHz, enabling speedy access to files and a more responsive PC. The chipsets also support PCI Express 2.0, which doubles the available bandwidth for graphics cards and are engineered to support Intel Turbo Memory which enables faster application loading and boot times.

The Intel 3 series chipsets also includes versions with integrated graphics (G33 and G35 Express chipsets). These products will include Intel Clear Video Technology and supports High Definition Media Interface (HDMI). Additionally, the G35 integrates hardware support for DirectX.