AMD Delays Turion 64 X2 To June
TDK Prototypes 200 GB Recordable Blu-ray Disc With Six Layers
ATI Radeon X1900 GT Goes On Sale Earlier Than Expected
AMD Delays Turion 64 X2 To June
AMD has postponed the launch of the Turion 64 X2, its first 64-bit dual-core processor for notebooks, to June 2006, instead of May 9 as originally planned, sources at Taiwan notebook manufacturers indicated. The push back of the launch date was due to a slower-than-expected demand in the worldwide notebook market caused by Microsoft's delayed launch of its Vista operating system, according to the sources.
AMD Taiwan declined to comment on the report, claiming that launch schedule of its Turion 64 X2 will be coordinated with the release of new products from its contract partners.
Source: DigiTimes
TDK Prototypes 200 GB Recordable Blu-ray Disc With Six Layers
TDK has prototyped a recordable Blu-ray Disc medium with its capacity increased to 200 GB by stacking six recording layers. The new medium boasts the capacity approximately eight times that of the existing single-layer Blu-ray Disc medium.
TDK prototyped a 100 GB recordable medium having four 25 GB recording layers stacked on one another in 2003. This time, the company employed a different signal processing scheme to increase the capacity per layer to 33.3 GB, while increasing the number of the recording layers to six through the adoption of a novel recording material.
The bit error rate at 36 Mbps recording/playback fell within the range between 5.0 x 10-5 and 2.3 x 10-6 depending on the layer.
The prototyped medium has a layered structure in which the recording layers are formed from the bottom L0 layer to top L5 layer, and a 0.1 mm cover layer and a hard coat layer to protect the medium from scratches and dirt are stacked on these recording layers. As for the L0 layer, an inorganic material, i.e. a commercialized Si-Cu alloy layer is used. For the L1 to L5 layers, a novel inorganic material consisting of bismuth peroxide and germanium oxide is employed. When bismuth peroxide is irradiated with laser light, oxygen is deposited to form air bubbles when the temperature reaches 690 K. The presence or absence of these air bubbles is detected based on the difference in reflectance of the laser light.
Germanium oxide has a property that it can freely change the transmittance of the recording layers in the range between 73 and 88% by varying its concentration. Thus, the transmittance of the recording layers--a key factor in stacking technology--can be precisely set, which has led to the realization of six layers.
Source: Tech-On!
ATI Radeon X1900 GT Goes On Sale Earlier Than Expected
One of Best Buy stores started selling ATI Radeon X1900 GT graphics cards, a long-anticipated rival of NVIDIA 7900 GT. It's interesting that the sticker shows a slightly different marking - X1900 GTO - the one mentioned in some early details about this product.
The novelty has 575 MHz core and 594 (1,188) MHz memory clock rates. In 2D the former automatically slows down to 500 MHz. The operating temperature looks better than that of higher-end cards. The "idle" temperature measured by one of the first buyers made 63°C.
At the moment, Best Buy sold every card they had, so you will still have to wait until May 9, when Radeon X1900 GT sales are to start officially.
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