Sunnyvale (CA) – AMD announced two new add-in cards and a new external combo tuner in its TV Wonder series, which promise to equip a PC with the capability of a high-definition digital video recorder.
Posted by Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst, Enderle Group
Analyst Opinion - If you were watching these two companies over the last decade, you might wonder whether one of them was constantly giving the other either a cure or a disease. I can’t remember a time when both were at the top of their game – which is the case right now as well: In the portable music player market, Apple is weakening and Sony is suddenly looking like they are getting their game on.
An innovation in hard drive technology could push future drive capacities to 4 TB. Hitachi claims it can shrink the GMR (giant magnetoresistance) heads currently used in reading hard drive platters and achieve a four-fold increase in capacity. The company will present its research at the upcoming Perpendicular Magnetic Recording conference in Tokyo.
AMD has released Catalyst 7.10 yesterday, which, according to the company, will speed up the gaming performance of some its graphics card configurations by up to 80%. HD 2400 and HD 2600 cards get Crossfire support.
UMC's got a brand new bag full of 65nm Radio Frequency CMOS tools. Called RFCMOS, full integration with existing silicon designs is now possible for the world of the wireless.
As Intel and AMD are gearing up to launch a new generation of microprocessors, the outgoing models are likely to drive the Christmas business for the PC industry. In one of the more significant trends, quad-core processors are replacing dual-core processors on the upper-end of the mainstream segment.
