Samsung squares up to outbox HP and IBM
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Korean firm promises war Samsung plans to begin a war of attrition against the likes of HP and IBM to become a major supplier to the corporate IT market.â¦
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Samsung Electronics is showing off a new 128GB flash-based SSD (solid-state drive) at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, one of the largest such drives shown to date.The drive is another blow to HDDs (hard-disk drives) in laptop PCs. SSDs have several advantages over HDDs; they&#39;re lighter, more rugged, consume less power, make no noise and enable a computer to start up and load software faster than HDDs.The only trouble is&#160;SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs. But that&#39;s why SSD makers, including Samsung, SanDisk, and others,&#160;aim the devices at the business laptop market, where users are willing to pay more for performance and reliability.Samsung&#39;s 128GB SSDs will be available to laptop makers in the first half of this year, said Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing for Samsung. He declined to discuss pricing, but pointed out that the 128GB model won&#39;t carry quite the premium over HDD technology that Samsung&#39;s 64GB SDD does.The company used a lower-cost type of flash memory chip to develop the 128GB SSD to keep costs down and put an SSD with greater storage capacity on the market, he said. The flash memory, called MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash isn&#39;t as powerful as the SLC (single-level cell) NAND used in most SSDs, nor is it as power efficient. The main difference is that SLC NAND flash lasts 10 times longer than MLC NAND flash, 100,000 write cycles compared to 10,000 write cycles in general.Samsung believes users won&#39;t find the difference to be much of an issue. It put a controller chip on the SSD drive that spreads information out across the 128GB of space on the drive to increase longevity.&quot;It&#39;s a trade-off,&quot; said Elliott. Write endurance is slightly lower on MLC-based SSDs, but the market is looking for larger capacity sizes without the heavy price premiums.The 128GB SSD is available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch versions for notebook and desktop PCs, as well as other possible mobile devices such as ultramobile PCs.The company used the high-speed SATA II interface on the drives to ensure speedy reading and writing. The 128GB SSDs have a sequential write speed of 70MBps, but the speed highlights the difference between MLC and SLC. Samsung offers 64GB SSDs based on SLC NAND that use SATA II with sequential write speeds of 100MBps and sequential read speed of 120MBps second.&#160;
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Samsung is close to producing a lighter, thinner, better television.
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Â· Sun's Â£30m device soon to be overtaken by rival IBM  Â· Machines getting more powerful and less costly
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard Co. is sticking with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) in a new family of blade PCs designed to compete with offerings from IBM Corp.
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IBM is making a big deal out of its announcement of three Power5 processor-based servers. The machines are faster than those built by competitors Hewlett-Packard and Sun.
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Samsung's Q1 Ultra mobile PC shows that Samsung listened to criticism. But this second-generation device still doesn't live up to its potential.
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MacCentral - Hewlett-Packard Co. is unveiling a broad new line of consumer electronics products and peripherals, including its first plasma and LCD TVs, new inks that purportedly print long-lasting photos, new paper, a clutch of printers and multifunction devices, and a home theater projector with an integrated DVD player.
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Dell (DELL) will set out Thursday to conquer markets dominated by Apple (APPL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and others with products that include its first small digital music player, photo printer and plasma TV.
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roundup Plus: SGI works on Linux performance software...Good Technology supported by HP, Samsung...RealNetworks loss widens on litigation.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. is sticking with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) in a new family of blade PCs designed to compete with offerings from IBM Corp. HP announced its BladeSystem bc2000 and bc2500 products on Monday, promising to reduce IT management costs and improve data security for corporate buyers by replacing traditional desktop and notebook PCs. Specialist blade manufacturers like ClearCube Technology Inc. and Wyse Technology Inc. also compete in this segment, as vendors see growing demand from businesses that struggle to balance security and compliance regulations with an increasingly dispersed and outsourced workforce. The new BladeSystems are the desktop version of HP's range of remote computing products. They fit between a blade server arrangement for workers with light computing needs and a blade workstation system for engineers and stock traders. In all three models, the user connects to a remote processor and data storage by accessing the office network with a desk-based access device such as a thin client. Since the main computing resources are located in a single, controlled data center, the corporate IT department can cut management costs by making hardware repairs and applying software patches remotely instead of visiting numerous workers at their desks. HP is selling the bc2000 for US$1,000 per unit when a company buys 10 of the machines. Although that is up to twice the price of a traditional desktop, the IT department can pay off the difference in 12 months of operation, said Tate Davis, CCI product manager for HP's consolidated client infrastructure group. IBM is chasing that same market with its HC10 blade and a TC10 thin client from its partner Devon IT Inc., both launched in May. IBM also targets midrange business users, but uses an Intel Corp. Core 2 Duo processor, 8G bytes of memory and 60G bytes of storage. In contrast, HP upgraded its previous blade PC -- the BladeSystem bc1500 -- by increasing the storage from 40G bytes to 80G bytes, the memory from 512M bytes to 1G byte, and the processor from an AMD Athlon 64 1500-series chip to Athlon 64 2100-series (for the bc2000) or dual-core Athlon 64 X2 (for the bc2500). The extra power meets user demands for a blade PC capable of running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista Business edition and its fast graphics handling, Davis said. "Customers say 'If we're going to do thousands of units for a wholesale desktop replacement, we need this thing to support Vista, we need a graphics look and feel equivalent to a desktop PC, and we need a little more processing power than the bc1500, our previous generation,'" Davis said. The bc1500 ran Windows XP Professional. HP says that power allows the bc2000 to outperform other blade computing designs, since it accesses those new processors over a dedicated link instead of through a "time-share" network where multiple users tap into a single blade computer. "The IT department is being asked to do more than keep the trains running on time," Davis said. "They also have to help the end user comply with disaster continuity and recovery, handle outsourcing and offshore jobs, and maintain high security and compliance with the data." The bc2000 is shipping now, with the bc2500 to follow by late July. Pricing for the bc2500 has not yet been announced. Â
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South Korea's Samsung Electronics claimed breakthroughs in key technologies that promise greater data storage and faster processing for computers and mobile devices such as MP3 audio players.
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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK - IBM is rolling out a new line of Power5-processor based servers that it says outperform rivals from Sun and HP.
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IBM Corp. earns bragging rights for surpassing Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2006 storage hardware sales, according to an industry report.
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If the competition between IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. in the computer storage business were a horse race, you&#39;d need a photo to determine how they finished the first quarter. But it would only be for the second place ribbon.
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Catching up to Google and Yahoo, Microsoft joins the search-engine business. Also: Hewlett-Packard creates a replacement for semiconductors & hellip;.  Dell makes safer, cleaner PC for the EU & hellip;. and more.
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Targeting Unix archrivals Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, IBM on Friday topped off the high end of its Power 5-based line of iSeries and pSeries servers, rolling out three systems all capable of hosting as many as 250 virtual servers on a single