Chaintech introduces ZNF3-250 motherboard on NVIDIA nForce3-250

PQI Intelligent Stick I-200, the first Flash dongle on SiS150 controller

3Dlabs obtains a license for S3 Texture Compression (S3TC)

M-Systems and Renesas will work together on mobile handsets

SimpleTech at CeBIT 2004: 400GB external hard drives

Chaintech introduces ZNF3-250 motherboard on NVIDIA nForce3-250

Chaintech introduced its new ZNF3-250 motherboard on NVIDIA nForce3-250 chipset for AMD Athlon 64 (Socket 754) processors. The novelty has a rather standard components and features:

• 3 x 184-pin sockets for DDR266/333/400 SDRAM DIMM (up to 2GB)
• HyperTransport
• SATA RAID, up to 4 x Serial ATA devices (1.5Gbps peak bandwidth), RAID 0/1/0+1
• VIA VT6306 IEEE1394, 3 x FireWire ports (100, 200, 400 Mbps)
• 2 thermal sensors for CPU and system fans, 3 monitored fans (CPU, system, chipset)

Original in this board is its bundle that includes 7.1-channel Chaintech Multimedia Card (CMC7.1), 6-in-1 reader (SM/MS/CF/MMC/SDC/MD), beige and black reader panels.

And the most original thing of this board is the RadEX (Revolutionary Active Direct Exhaust) cooling system. According to the company, it provides heat dissipation performance 100 times higher than that of copper heatsinks and 200 times higher than that of aluminium heatsinks. The opportunity of installing the system onto the hottest components will be primarily interesting for overclocking enthusiasts.

PQI Intelligent Stick I-200, the first Flash dongle on SiS150 controller

Late in October 2003 we informed you that SiS introduced 0.18µm small-size SiS150 USB 2.0 Flash controller that provided 18Mbps read and 13Mbps write.

Finally, today we obtained some information about controller´s actual applications. SiS150 will be used in Power Quotient International´s (PQI) Intelligent Stick, I-200. The dongle will be 2.8mm thick at 3g weight and will provide 13MB/s write and 18MB/s sequential read.

Well, if this controller performs good and spreads to various devices, we´ll get a product on it for our lab test for sure.

3Dlabs obtains a license for S3 Texture Compression (S3TC)

S3 Graphics and Creative Technology, the owner of 3Dlabs brand, signed a license agreement. According to it, S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) will be used in the next generation of 3Dlabs´ workstation graphics.

S3TC has been around for a long time. Already in 2000, when a good graphics card had 16-32 MB memory, a problem of local memory deficit for 32-bit mode had arisen. About that time various texture compression technologies began to appear.

Of course, licensing is far from actual implementation. In the respective S3 Graphics´ press release there´s nothing about implementation dates, it only mentions 4x texture compression factor.

M-Systems and Renesas will work together on mobile handsets

M-Systems and Renesas Technology extended their partnership in the multimedia handset architecture field. The companies are to port M-Systems´ Mobile DiskOnChip onto Solution Engine for SH-Mobile processors developed by Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric.

Besides, in a separate note they state that Renesas Technology invited M-Systems to join the SH-Mobile Consortium, dedicated to timely implementation of SH-Mobile processors and solutions like Mobile DiskOnChip into new-generation handsets.

If you remember, Mobile DiskOnChip is an integrated high-density NAND Flash drive with MLC architecture. It´s primarily designed for multimedia portables.

An SH-Mobile is actually a dual-processor structure. One is dedicated to applications, while another is used for communication needs. It bases on SuperH 32-bit RISC architecture and provides JPEG, MP3 support for handsets, features an AMR codec, is capable of MPEG4 encoding/decoding, etc. At the moment the family includes three processor kinds: SH-Mobile 1 (HD6417290BP133 and HD6417290BL133), SH-Mobile J (HD6417294BP120) and SH-Mobile V (HD6417300BL133).

An example of SH-Mobile-V-based system:

• SH3-DSP core
• 1.4~1.6 V internal voltage, 2.7~3.6 V external voltage
• 133MHz clock rate
• 173 MIPS performance
• 128KB RAM
• 32KB cache
• 16KB DSP memory
• MPEG4 accelerator
• SXGA camera support
• Interfaces
  • Dedicated
  • NAND/AND Flash
  • SDRAM
  • Video I/O (direct camera connection)
  • Audio
  • SIM card
  • I2C
  • 1 x serial comm
  • 1 x serial comm FIFO
• 256-pin CSP (11x11x1.4mm) package

SimpleTech at CeBIT 2004: 400GB external hard drives

SimpleTech, the open-standard Flash memory developer and vendor, announced its new external hard drive, 400GB SimpleDrive Deluxe with USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces. According to the press release, we´ll be able to see the novelty at CeBIT 2004.

If you remember, the previous capacity of SimpleTech drives was limited by 250GB. According to the developers, 400GB of space is enough for up to 6.5 thousands of music, 7.2 thousands of digital photos, 16 hours of digitized video or 72 games.

The new drive offer 7200 rpm rotation speed, 8MB buffer and support Plug-and-Play and how swap. Sized 13.9x22.5x3.4cm, they can be installed vertically or horizontally.

The bundle also includes drivers, StorageSync backup software, cables, power adapter. Pity, but at the moment of this publication there was no drive photo at the official website, but I assume it would look like the previous model.

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