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OCAU News |
It seems that the price of DRAM has increased over the past week on the Asian market and the short term outlook isn't good with the news that a major DRAM manufacture, Qimonda has filed for bankruptcy. The price of 1Gb DDR2 667 MHz DRAM chips already increased 16-percent last week, with average prices for all DRAM capacities rising by as much as 8.7-percent during that time. The worst may yet still come however as prices are further increasing this week as brokers and traders in Taiwan and China return from a week long Lunar New Year holiday.
News isn't much better for the CPU industry with reports that shipments of x86 CPUs declined by 18% between the third of fourth quarter of 2008. For the year, Intel gained market share, going from a 77.1 percent hold in 2007 to 80.4 percent in 2008. Via also went up 0.8 to 1.1 percent. That increase in market share from both companies had to come at the expense of AMD, which fell from 22.1 percent to 18.5 percent.
Here's an interesting article about the difference between ACP and TDP. In many ways, ACP is an arbitrary definition conjured up by AMD which no other player within the industry has accepted. Instead, the big industry players like Intel, Sun, HP and IBM have settled on the suite of SPECpower benchmarks run by a committee of industry players hailing from all those firms and even AMD. This, for the most part, promotes TDP (Thermal Design Power), a measurement Intel favours and which AMD considers inherently biased.
Monty Widenius, MySQL founder has resigned from Sun Microsystems. Monty Widenius, the original author of the MySQL database server, has resigned from Sun Microsystems after months of protracted discussions about his career. In a blog post, Widenius cited the botched release of MySQL 5.1 as the motivation for him to offer his immediate resignation back in August 2008.
On February 16th Australia will be getting their first Android phone known as G1. Optus has, as expected, been the first carrier to jump on the device as the founding partner. There will be four Optus plans. The cheapest option will be the "yes" $59 internet cap with $350 included calls and texts as well as 500MB data. There is an additional handset charge of $51 per month for a 12-month contract and $51 per month for a 24-month contract. Optus plans: iPhone vs. Android
Shadow Communications Minister Nick Minchin has had a victory with The Federal Senate passing a motion which forces the Rudd Government to release the NBN reports from the ACCC and the expert panel. "This is about ensuring the Rudd Government is accountable and the Australian public are properly informed about a project which puts at risk $4.7 billion of taxpayers' money," he said.
Intel confirms 8-core, 16-thread Nehalem-based Xeon processor. Unfortunately for those licking their lips at the prospect of 64-thread performance in a four-processor setup, Intel didn't go into any further detail. All we know thus far is that four of Intel's 17 papers will reveal further details when the ISSCC kicks off on Monday February 8th.
Lian Li has unveiled their new aluminium mid-tower case, the PC-A06F. The 187 x 375 x 490 mm PC-A06F case weighs 3.8kg and features tool-less installation for optical drives and PCI cards and comes with a rather weird PSU placement. According to what we can see from the picture The PSU is placed directly over the CPU heatsink, which might interfere with some tall heatsinks.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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