Thursday, January 29, 2004

SanDisk 1GB SD Card Ships. SanDisk has recently announced that they have started shipping their 1GB Secure Digital (SD) flash card. Although it has slipped its expected date, it is still the first production 1GB card. Jointly developed with Sharp, it contains a unique [base "]stackable[per thou] packaging technology which has both a low-cost and high-yield so that it can be competitively-priced. It is available immediately with a suggested retail price of $499.99 [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)] Sandisk is really showing off its engineering talent now. I would never have thought you could go above 512MB in a Secure Digital form factor. I think digital video cameras that use Flash Memory cannot be far behind with these process shrinks going on. There's no doubt in my mind the small camera makers are going to benefit greatly from the increase in storage. Casio and Sony and Panasonic are all going to do great things in the future. Especially Panasonic, with their miniature digital video cameras. 8:13:48 PM    comment []

Intel plans demo of Opteron rival: 'CT'. The chip giant plans to demonstrate a 64-bit revamp of its Xeon and Pentium processors in mid-February--an endorsement of a major rival's strategy and a troubling development for Intel's Itanium chip. [CNET News.com - Front Door] The Register has followed the ongoing heartbreak of Itanic since it's announcement 10 years ago. Each passing year Itanic's horizon line gets fainter and less distinct. When? Now AMD has beat them to punch with a consumer grade 64bit architecture. Not quite the RISC killer Intel had waxed about so philosophically in press releases, news conferences, and interviews. Intel FUD'ed Itanic to the front page of every "systems" news weekly. RISC is dead, Intel has won. Well I'm going to say, now that IBM's Power 970FX is out, they are starting to lose. AMD is also beating them. So they are scrambling to develop a "strategy". 8:05:44 PM    comment []