NEC to showcase a HD-DVD drive at CES2004

VIA Vectro VT6205: a 9-in-1 USB 2.0 flash memory controller

DeltaChrome is to conquer Europe in Club-3D boards

Grantsdale chipset series: in the spotlight on March 29

Canon to own 25% of the compact digital cameras market in 2004

NEC to showcase a HD-DVD drive at CES2004

NEC announced its new drive supporting both existing DVD media, and the new-generation HD-DVD discs. Drive´s unique feature is that its optical head features just one lens for lasers with different wavelengths ("blue" and "red"). If you remember, the HD-DVD standard was offered and supported only by two DVD Forum members, Toshiba and NEC.

Demo system

HD DVD utilizes the short-length (blue) light sources, but media similar to the usual DVD. The capacity of a HD DVD blank is 15GB for a single-sided single-layer and 30GB for a single-sided dual-layer disc. The rewritable HD-DVD have 20GB capacities.

Besides, Sony has recently launched shipments of the new Professional Discs for Data (PDD) with 23GB capacities marketed as the media for high-end storage systems.

Internal drive

According to provisional information, the drive is to arrive for sale in 2005 (despite the demonstration at CES2004 in January), however in the end everything will depend on the amount of content intended to be stored on these new DVD drives. Initially these novelties will be used in PCs to move to the consumer DVD recorders in the future.

Source: ASCII24

VIA Vectro VT6205: a 9-in-1 USB 2.0 flash memory controller

Today VIA introduced its new solution for 9-in-1 USB 2.0 flash media readers, Vectro VT6205.

VT6205 supports CompactFlash (CF) Type I/II, Micro Drive, SmartMedia (SM), MemoryStick (MS), MemoryStick Pro (MS Pro), SecureDigital (SD), MultiMediaCard (MMC), xD PictureCard, and supports NAND architecture. The new module can be integrated into either desktops, or notebooks (and supports energy saving for the latter).

DeltaChrome is to conquer Europe in Club-3D boards

S3 Graphics signed an official agreement with Club-3D related to the European sales of DeltaChrome-based graphics cards. As you remember, DeltaChrome GPU is a solution supporting HDTV rendering and DirectX 9.

DeltaChrome has 8 shaders and 4 shaders for pixels and vertexes (supports DirectX 9.0 ver. 2.0+), up to 256MB RAM, Chromotion video engine and 2D-XP module for Windows XP hi-res video modes acceleration. It also supports DVI, CRT and DuoRotate (image rotation via both channels).

The first models on DeltaChrome are expected in European stores very early in 2004. The expected retail price is about ˆ155.

Grantsdale chipset series: in the spotlight on March 29

According to French x86 Secret, referring to its own sources, the Grantsdale chipset series (i865 replacement) for Pentium 4 processors is to be introduced on March 29 alongside the Alderwood, the replacement for i875.

Summing up everything we have posted before, I´d like to remind that Grantsdale will be introduced in both discrete and integrated chipsets with P and G suffixes, respectively. The latter is likely to support DDR2-400/533 and DDR333/400, while the formar — only DDR2. Anyway, both will support PCI Express. The P model will be designed for 533 and 800 MHz FSB processors as well as the 775-pin Prescott-based P4. G series (including GV and GL) will have Intel Extreme Graphics, while GL will be also designed for Celeron with 533MHz FSB only.

Grantsdale-GV will lack the external graphics support despite the PCI Express x16 slot (unlike AGP, PCI Express x16 is not a dedicated graphics interface). Grantsdale-GL won´t support Hyper-Threading and PCI Express x16, but PCI Express x1. By the way, the new Northway Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) chip will work with PCI Express x1. According to the provisional information, the entire Grantsdale series will support up to 4GB RAM.

Pity, but we can´t provide any new details about Alderwood (designed for 775-pin Prescott-based Pentium 4 processors), but still we suppose it will mainly differ from i875 by DDR 2 and PCI Express support. According to observers from The Register, PC Watch, chances are good that these chipsets will work with ICH6 Southbridge (with Matrix RAID):

ICH6/ICH6R Southbridge:

• 4 x PCI Express x1 ports
• Int. Azalia audio (24bit/192kHz)
• 1 x PATA100 channel
• 4 x SATA150 ports
• 8 x USB2.0 ports
• 6 x PCI slots

Canon to own 25% of the compact digital cameras market in 2004

According to our sources, Canon plans to sell at least 12.5 million compact digital cameras in 2004 that is about 50% more than 8.5 million of this year. This doesn´t include 500,000 SLR cameras that the company is going to sell this year.

According to the company itself, in 2004 Canon will own 25% of the compact digital cameras market indicating the stable 5% growth comparing to this year (about 20%) and 15% of 2002.

These plans are rather ambitious: according to the director of the digital solutions business group, 25% will be achieved independently to the market growth. If it makes 50 million cameras, they´ll provide 12.5 million. If it makes 55 million, they´ll going to provide a quarter of it anyway.

Provisional information indicate that in 2003 Japanese makers are to ship about 40-44 million digital cameras. According to Japanese Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), last year they shipped 25 million units. Speaking of Canon plans for the next year, in 2004 it plans to introduce 18 new compact digital cameras (vs. 9 models unveiled this year). Besides, in 2003 the company announced 2 DSLR modules, including EOS Kiss Digital.

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