Über Memory: Corsair Dominator® GTX 8GB dual-channel DDR3 2400MHz

Corsair, the makers of high quality memory products have announced and released the fastest DDR3 memory for desktop computers, the Über Dominator GTX 8GB dual-channel DDR3. This new member of the  Dominator® GT family of memory is built using hand-picked chips. A 4 stage testing process is used to hand-pick the best 5% of parts and combine them into this exclusive hardware. Used by overclockers to set records this is not everyday memory but true Über RAM. Better buckle up this is quick stuff.

Memory in a computer system is responsible for shuffling data and instructions from the memory to the CPU where the processing is done. With 19.2GB per channel bandwidth this RAM ensures your CPU will be constantly fed with data and instructions. To achieve 19.2Gb bandwidth the GTX runs at  2400MHz – the operating frequency or number of times it can read/write a second-, this memory is 50% quicker than the current standard for desktop memory DDR3-1600 which delivers sustained bandwidth of 12.8GB. While some desktop motherboards are capable of using DDR3-2000 -16GB bandwidth- the new Dominator memory is the next level again with 19.2 GB of bandwidth per channel, a total bandwidth of 38.4GB.

From Corsairs press release “The purpose of these kits is to help overclockers explore the limits of memory performance,” said Giovanni Sena, Director of Memory Products at Corsair. “They’re the product of careful screening, selection, and testing, and we’re eager to see what enthusiasts will do with them. As long as our customers are obsessed with making computers faster and more powerful, we’ll continue producing extraordinary memory kits to help make that happen.”

As with most Über hardware you need other top end hardware to go along with this performance part. Your motherboard, CPU and power supply will need to be up to specification in order to get the most out of this Dominator, check the site for details. When overclocking your system the CPU will be capable of doing much more work, a 50% overclock can require up to 50% more data and instructions to keep it busy. That’s where the Dominator® GTX comes in, with extra speed and bandwidth this memory can cope with a 50% overclock without trouble. Expect new overclock records including this memory soon.

While overclockers and power users with systems capable of running this memory at it’s intended 2400MHz will get the most benefit don’t underestimate the power of Über memory. Because this is hand-picked high quality parts they will be capable of very good latency. Granted mid range memory could probably achieve similar latency - the amount of time it takes to read or write - the Dominator will do low latency and low power, making for a responsive and sharp feeling computer. Latency is a strange characteristic of memory, lower latency makes a system feel sharp and responsive, it won’t affect frame rates in games or benchmarks but it feels much quicker.

This memory does signal the end of the domination of the memory market by 2GB sticks of Ram and hopefully means the 4GB sticks are now the new standard. Up until recently all performance memory such as the Dominator memory was built using memory chips that allowed a 2GB stick of memory. The fact that Corsair has achieved these speeds with two 4GB sticks of ram is a good sign.

Not recommended for everyone, while it will work in all DDR3 desktop systems it will only be of advantage to a select group of users, overclockers and power users specifically. To those users though this memory, even at $500 USD, is well worth the investment.

Specifications from the products webpage:

• Warranty: Lifetime
• Size: 8GB Kit (2 x 4GB)
• Performance Profile: XMP
• Fan Included: Yes
• Heat Spreader: DHX+
• Memory Configuration: Dual Channel
• Memory Type: DDR3
• Package – Memory Pin: 240
• Package – Memory Format: DIMM
• Tested Voltage: 1.65
• SPD Voltage: 1.5
• Speed Rating: PC3-19200 (2400MHz)
• SPD Speed: 1333Mhz
• Tested Speed: 2400Mhz
• Tested Latency: 9-11-10-30
• SPD Latency: 9-9-9-24

Pictures Courtesy of Corsair
More information at: Pres Release,  Dominator’s page

Buddha’s Brother out…

Bow Down: 200 Megapixel Hassleblad H4D-200MS $45,000

Hassleblad has announced that its new H4D-200MS camera is available for shipping. Introduced at last year’s Photokina, the 50 megapixel camera features the company’s own multi-shot image technology which allows it to combine multiple successive images into one 200 megapixel photo. The new professional-level camera has been given a suitably huge price tag but owners of the previous multi-shot system don’t have to buy a completely new system, H4D-50MS models can be returned to the Hasselblad’s factory for a complete refit.

Hassleblad first introduced it’s integrated multi-shot camera format – the H3DII-39MS – in 2008, and then upped the pixel count even further with the introduction of the H4D-50MS. The new H4D-200MS is based on the latter but has added a half pixel step to the multi-shot process that gives it a massive 200 megapixel count. The 50 megapixel, 36.7 x 49.1mm CCD sensor - twice the size of 35mm camera sensor - is mounted on the company’s symmetrical multi-shot frame. Unlike Sigma’s Foveon X3 system, the Hassleblad uses Bayer Mosaic color filtering. Developed primarily for highly detailed still life studio shots, the H4D-200MS offers professional photographers the versatility of a 50 megapixel single-shot mode for subjects that just won’t keep still enough for the four-shot, 50 megapixel multi-shot mode or the new extended six shot, 200 megapixel multi-shot mode. Read the full article »»»»

Lockheed Martin Hack

US defence contractor Lockheed Martin confirmed that it had detected “a significant and tenacious” attack on its information systems network. The world’s largest aerospace and weapons conglomeration  has been hit by an unspecified hack attack.  Lockheed Martin said its information security team detected the attack almost immediately and took what is described as “aggressive actions” to protect it’s systems.

“As a result of the swift and deliberate actions taken to protect the network and increase IT security, our systems remain secure. no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised.” said Jennifer Whitlow, from Lockheed Martin. Read the full article »»»»

SID. The State of Display

The latest technology for displays has been on show for Display Week, part of the 49th Annual SID conference. The conference is a chance for the display industry to break records and get some attention. Many deals will be done in seedy back rooms, deals and decisions that will affect next years models of tablets, smart phones and TV’s. With the whole display industry watching on all of the big players lay their cards on the table to see who’s got the best hand.

And so it was all of the largest players in the display industry were present with their latest technology, LG, Samsung, Toshiba, E-Ink, Sharp and Sony were just a few of the big names. If anything SID can be accused of having too much vaporware, technology that never actually makes it to market for one reason or another. This is a common by-product of such leading edge technology being on display, on the positive side it is interesting to see technology develop over the years till it finally turns up in a market ready form. This year E-Ink displays are the new stars of the display world, turning up in everything with a flat surface that can fit a screen. The other obvious trend was for increasing resolutions, this was even applied to the E-Ink displays. There were a number of 10 inch displays with 2560 x 1600 resolutions, the magic 300 dpi barrier has to be passed to achieve this resolution and many companies achieved this goal with many kinds of displays. E-Ink and Epson’s e-Paper, LG’s AH-IPS, Samsung’s PenTile displays, and Toshiba with the record 367dpi 4 inch LCD display, all displays that passed the 300 dpi mark.

E-Ink were not only on display through other people’s products – OEM- but they also had a leading edge technology display. Working with Epson – who provided the high speed processing, the circuit board – E-Ink has developed a 9.3″ display capable of 2,400 x 1,650 resolution and high refresh rates for an e-paper display. While this panel is indeed leading edge it is actually important for other reasons. This is a generic panel that opens up the manufacturing of the product to companies without large r&d facilities. This will become the template for many cheap e-readers. E-Ink was also on display in a multitude of other products, obviously OEM manufacturers are becoming comfortable working with E-Ink displays. New E-Ink enabled gadgets included snowboards, radios, thermostats, sheet music readers, flexible and rollable displays. There’s e-ink everywhere.

Sharp took the highest resolution display crown at the show with their monstrous 85 inch 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution LCD panel. Released to compliment NHK‘s Hi-Vision standards, this TV is the first ever TV capable of meeting the new 4k and 7k Hi-Vision standards. For the next 5 to 10 years this display will only be found in studios and production houses. Some demonstrations may be available for the 2012 olympics but don’t expect to see a display like this on sale until 2020. The current standard Hi-Def will be replaced by 4k Hi-Def eventually and that will be replaced with 7k Hi-Def so Sharps record beating display is a full two generations away from domestic use.

Samsung has made a real push at this years SID event, they started early with the announcement of ultra high-resolution PenTile displays before the show had even opened. This early announcement was from Samsung and Nouvoyance, demonstrating their 300 dpi RGBW display – WQXGA 2560 x 1600 -, branded as a PenTile display. Samsung will likely have this in a Galaxy Tablet very soon. For the accident prone Samsung also had a fully plastic display built into a laptop making an almost indestructible laptop. Laptop’s like this may allow for much cheaper machines, being almost completely made of plastic. Samsung also has its own competing technology in the e-paper world, called an Electro-wetting display -EWD-  it uses voltage to control a liquid in each pixel, moving it to change the reflective properties. While a very cool technology it is still a few generations behind E-Ink.

LG had an early start with a press releases regarding their high density tablet and smart phone displays. For the show itself they had the entire range of its next generation IPS panels on display. Convering the full size gamut from 3.5″ to 84″ LG’s new IPS technology called Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching -AH-IPS- are the new Rolls Royce of big screen TV’s. The small panels -3.5″ – 10″- have ultra high-resolution - over 320 dpi - and full colour reproduction. The large TV panels benefit from high colour, better viewing angles and the best LCD picture available. There is talk of Apple switching to an OLED panel for the next iPhone and iPad but these LG panels should keep that contract with LG.

Toshiba takes the resolution crown at the show by introducing a mobile phone display with 367dpi -dots per inch-. The compact display was shown streaming 720HD video at full frame rate with no need to reduce resolution for this 4-inch HD (720 x 1280) display. The HD display will be on sale in the third quarter this year in an un-named smart phone. Also on show by Toshiba was their take on the flexible OLED display. Faster and brighter than e-ink this flexible display was closer to the normal LCD than all of the E-Ink displays. Breakthroughs include lower fabrication temperatures – 200°C – that allows the use of a plastic substrate and the use of indium gallium zinc oxide -IGZO, In-Ga-Zn-O)- in the circuit production. The etcha-sketch looks to be making a come-back as well, with an electronic version demonstrated by Toshiba. Called ‘Write-Erasable Input Display’ this cool little gadget is basically a pen enabled E-Ink display that lets you jo down notes, save them and erase the screen with a swipe.

Sony had a number of flexible display advancements on show. An extremely flexible e-ink display that can be rolled up - to 5mm radius -. The display itself was a 13.3″ next generation e-ink monochrome display capable of showing animations while being bent and twisted. Also on display was a colour flexible display with a resolution of 1600×1200 this is a full-page display. Based on colour e-ink technology this is part of the new e-paper generation. There were a number of process improvements required to make the colour display possible, Sony developed a more accurate way of assembling the filter and display assembly so the aperture size of each pixel is maximised. For the screen to work properly everything has o line up with an accuracy of 5um – nanometer or billionth of a meter -.

Many of the demonstrations at SID are highlighting an improvement in a process or other background technology, they aren’t a specific product. While they may end up being a marketing highlight for a new product much of whats on display is a proof of concept demonstrators. Toshiba has flexible displays produced on plastic substrate instead of glass. This was achieved by lowering the production temperatures so the plastic doesn’t melt, and by using indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO, In-Ga-Zn-O) and other exotic materials to produce the circuits. Sony had such new technologies as Top-Gate aligned TFT’s to make for much more even brightness on OLED displays. Top-Gate TFT’s are a redesign of circuit that cleverly uses the layers of the circuit to remove any interference. Nanosys had QDEF screen technology, a thin film quantum dot overlay that enhances the colour of a display. For this technology to be really effective though it will need to used as the filter inside the LCD. If it is superior to current thin-film filters they will do well.

So new technologies like OLED and E-Ink are coming along nicely, the second half of this year should see lot’s of new technologies finally make it to market. Colour E-Ink displays and resolution tablet displays are just a few of the highlights to expect. If you like machines raw, with-out cases and fully exposed then SID is the biz.

Pictures courtesy of TechOn

Buddha’s Brother out…

iSYS X13 Chromium Chrome, First Chrome OS Lifesized Modular Desktop

ChromiumPC the shiniest of shines and the name of the first ever Google Chrome OS based desktop computer. iSYS Technologies and Xi3 Corporation have teamed up to release a flexible and impressively hip looking compact computer. Using a very clever modular design Xi3 have managed to fit an impressive amount of computing power into this coke can sized computer. Then just to make it catch your eye they made it out of Billet Aluminium and Chrome.

More than just a PC the Chromium represents a new PC architecture as well as a new software architecture in Chrome OS. This is a small shiny PC with a leading edge punch. Using a modular design the PC’s internals are spit into three daughter boards that are upgradable. The layout of the modules  helps with keeping temps down inside. It sounds logical but the smaller internal space in a computers case the easier it is to keep cool, small spaces collect heat very fast. The three modules that make up Chromium are the Processor Module, the Primary I/O Module and Secondary I/O Module. Each of the modules are upgradeable as new technology is released.

The Chrome OS that comes installed as standard is an interesting beast in itself. The first real operaing system that is integrated with the clouds – cloud computing that is -. Chrome makes heavy use of Google’s online applications and tries to do as much work as possible online. That’s the theory anyway, you can just run Windows and normal apps just as easily on Chromium. The ChomeOS based laptops from Samsung and Acre will be out July 3rd, beating the Xi3 to market but the Xi3 should still be the first desktop to market when realeased on July 4. Obviously Google already had plans on July 3.

Not that you are locked into Chrome, other options include a half a dozen flavours of Windows 7, Linusx Suse and Embedded Windows 7. Options on the website are a plenty for hardware as well, a little surprising for such a compact machine. Options for the CPU’s at the moment are the all low power AMD CPU’s – 3400e X2 dual core at 1.8Ghz, AMD 3100 2Ghz single core and the ultra low power AMD X2 2000. Xi3 is working on Intel based modules at the moent and modules for ARM cpu’s and other exotics are possible. Hard drive, monitors and keyboard/mouse options are all covered.

Other clever add-ons for the Xi3 include mounting brackets for wall mounting, customized paint work and the crafty Z3RO Module. Also called a processor extender the Z3RO allows you to run upto 4 workstations for four users, on the one Xi3. Each workstation needs its own Z3RO Module – starting at $250 per seat -  but the cost’s reduction with 4 users running off the one machine are huge and large corporations will take advantage of technology such as this. The specs for this model state the dual core cpu as a requirement, obviously there is some impact on performance with 4 people using a single system but a quick dual core should negate this impact to an extent.

The systems total power useage is rediculously low 30watts, part of the secrets for dealing with heatin small spaces. 30 watts also makes this a very green computer, with only Atom based netbooks using less power.

Along with the usual assortment of inputs and outputs intergrated into the back panel of the Chromium Xi3 has included the Xm3dia™ (x media) plug, exclusive to the Xi3. There is very little technical information regarding this mystery interface other than it’s a feature rich bus offering limitless expansion according to Xi3′s website. Traditionally this is the kind of bus interface used by media devices to connect expansion devices such as TV Tuners and PVR’s.

The pricing for the top spec Xi3 is $1,387.00 US when ordering from the website. For that you get a copy of Windows 7 Home, 128Gb SSD hard drive, Chrome finish and AMD 3400E dual core cpu. The basic setup drives the price down to $849.

The Xi3 is nicely packaged day to day desktop machine capable of doing double duty as a media centre or light duties desktop. The Xi3′s good looks lets it get away with going into new teritory, a computer on the mantal piece, Xi3 could do it. If there was an award for the most striking looking PC the Xi3 would win it.

ChromiumPM CPU Options and System Specifications

The CPU Options Include

• Standard -Athlon Dual Core 3400E 22W – 2G DDR2
• Less $50- Athlon 3100 2.0GHz 25W – 2G DDR2 (Z3RO Modules require a Dual Core processor)
• Less $40- Athlon 2000+ 8W – 2G DDR2 (Z3RO Modules require a Dual Core processor)

The systems specs:
Primary I/O Module (Module No. PIO-5A-M62)

• eSATA 3.0, 2.5 and 1.5 support
• USB 2.0 support
• PMC Optical Interface
• SSD Quick Boot (Linux or Windows)

External Connectors:

• 2 – eSATA 2.5 Ports
• 6 – USB 2.0 Ports (root hubs)
• 3 – Reconfigurable Audio channels
• (1-3, Microphone, Headphone and/or
• Line-in/Line-out)

Internal Connectors:

• 1 – USB 2.0 Connector
• 1 – Fan Connector

Secondary I/O Module (Module No. SIO-5A-G20)

• DirectX Support: DX11
• Open GL: v2.0
• Video Decode: UVD 2.0 – VC-1, MPEG2, MPEG4
• HDCP: v1.3b (up to 1080p)
• Side-Port Memory: 128MB (DDR2-800)
• DP/DVI: 1080p, with Digital Audio (HDMI optional)
• Max Resolution: 2560×1600 @ 32bpp (dual output capable)
• Dual Display Standard: DVI-DL + VGA, DVI-DL + DP,
• VGA + DP (HDMI converter optional)

External Connectors:

• 1 – Ethernet connector (10/100/1000)
• 1 – Display port (DP/DVI, HDMI optional)
• 1 – Display port (DVI-DL + VGA, DVI-DL + DP, VGA + DP)
• 1 – Power connector (19volts DC @ 3.42amps)

External Size: 4.0- x 3.656- x 3.656-inches
Integrated Power Management Controller
Operating Temp. 32F – 140F
Non-Operating Temp. -4F – 158F
Elevation ≤ 10,000 Ft
Phoenix Legacy BIOS
Warranty 3-year Advance Replace (parts)

Xi3′s Website and ChromiumPC Options page.

Buddha’s Brother out.…