Toshiba’s First Laptops with New AMD Platform, are Out

Toshiba on Wednesday introduced laptops powered by the new Puma-based processors recently announced by Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD’s new Turion X2 Ultra ZM processors will be included in Toshiba’s new Satellite PCs, which will ship later this year, a Toshiba spokesman said.

The Turion X2 Ultra processor is part of the Puma platform launched by AMD on Tuesday. The processors come in two speeds: the ZM-80 runs at 2.1GHz and comes with 2M bytes of cache, while the Turion X2 Ultra ZM-86 runs at 2.4GHz and includes 2M bytes of cache.

Along with the Turion Ultra ZM, Toshiba said two other chips from AMD — Athlon Dual Core QL and Turion Dual Core RM — will be offered in the Satellite P300D, Satellite A300D, Satellite M300D, Satellite U400D, Satellite L300D and Satellite L350D laptops. It wasn’t immediately clear what processors each laptop would come with.

During the Puma launch, AMD said it had won notebook designs for the platform from PC makers including Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, NEC and Toshiba. About one-third of laptop designs have 15-inch screens, with other models having screen sizes from 12 inches to 18 inches.

Puma laptops are designed to run Windows Vista, AMD has said.

The Puma platform also includes the mobile AMD 7-series chipset and ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series graphics cards. The Puma platform supports hybrid graphics technology, which boosts the platform’s graphics performance by running both the integrated graphics processor and a separate graphics card.

Seagate Unveils Self-Encrypting Disk Drive

Seagate says it’s adding a self-encrypting capability to its Cheetah 15K disk drive based on a specification promulgated by the Trusted Computing Group.

The TCG Storage Architecture Core Specification 1.0 defines a way that storage system drives will recognize encryption and decryption security commands and authorization requests, says Gianna DaGiau, senior product marketing manager.

The self-encrypting functionality will be added to the Seagate Cheetah 15K drives by this summer, she says.

“The drive will be encrypting data coming to it,” DaGiau says. “The encryption key is inside the drive and never leaves it. It will require an authentication key for decryption.” The type of encryption supported in the Seagate self-encrypting process is the Advanced Encryption Standard.

The reason that supporting the TCG specification is important is that “a storage system is likely to have dual sources, not just Seagate necessarily,” and system managers will benefit from having a common way to use the self-encrypting process, she says.

AMD Intros New Phenom Chips And Triple-Core Processors

Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday announced new Phenom chips, including quad-core chips and its first triple-core processors for desktop PCs.

The company’s triple-core Phenom X3 8000 series processors provide an option to mainstream PC buyers who don’t want to spend on a quad-core processor but are looking for more performance than a dual-core processor, said Pat Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD.

The chips could be used for high-definition video playback, casual mainstream gaming and productivity applications, Moorhead said.

The company’s first triple-core processors include the Phenom X3 8400, which runs at 2.1GHz, and the Phenom X3 8600, which runs at 2.3GHz. Both will come with 1.5MB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache.

AMD also launched three Phenom quad-core processors on Thursday — the Phenom X4 9750, which runs at 2.4Ghz; the Phenom X4 9850, which runs at 2.5GHz; and the Phenom 9100e, a low-voltage quad-core processor that runs at 1.8GHz and has a 65-watt power envelope during maximum usage. All the processors contain 2MB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache.

PC makers will ship products with the quad-core processors in the second quarter, AMD said.

The triple-core processors are already shipping in volume to PC makers, AMD said. U.S. vendor ZT Systems will list PCs with the new triple-core Phenoms on Monday, with other “major OEMs” and system vendors shipping products next quarter, AMD said. Many major vendors, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard, have already hinted at including the processors in desktops.

Dell has listed plans to use the chip in its OptiPlex 740 business desktop systems. It will ship the triple-core OptiPlex in the second quarter, a company spokeswoman recently said, but she declined to specify which processor will run the desktop. Hewlett-Packard has also listed a desktop on its Bulgarian-language Web site with AMD’s Phenom Triple-Core 8600B processor.

Mesh Computer, a PC vendor in the U.K., is offering the Matrix XXX Plus desktop with the Phenom X3 8400 processor and the Matrix XXX Pro desktop with the Phenom 8600 processor.

Because the triple-core chip is a new concept–set between the widely accepted dual- and quad-cores–it’s unclear how it will fit in the market, said Dean McCarron, founder and principal at Mercury Research.

“You’re going to get a performance enhancement with the extra core above and beyond a dual-core,” McCarron said. But it also falls shy of a quad-core.

AMD designed the triple-core as a way to produce a cheaper chip. The triple-core processor is built on a quad-core CPU, with one core nonfunctional, McCarron said.

The triple-core chip gives AMD a tactical advantage over Intel, McCarron said. Intel will need to answer the triple-core chip with a product priced in the same range while delivering similar performance. Intel can take a dual-core or quad-core processor, adjust features like cache, and price it similar to AMD’s triple-core processor, McCarron said.

Intel Ups Speed of Quad-Core Processors

Intel unveiled two low-voltage, 45-nanometer server processors.

The quad-core Xeon L5400 Series chips run at 50 watts — or 12.5 watts per core — but their performance still reaches the 2.5-GHz mark. Intel is making the chips using the 45nm manufacturing process that it first used with its Penryn family of chips, which were unveiled last November.

The new chips deliver the same performance as their predecessors, the Xeon 5400 Series, but use 40% less power, according to a company spokesman.

Energy-efficient processors are gaining more attention as companies increasingly look to go green — in order to save both power and money. For companies with large data centers, the cost of electricity can sap a significant portion of the IT budget.

“There is a class of customer that is looking more to economically- or environmentally-friendly designs,” said Stephen Thorne, a product line manager in Intel’s server platform group. “And there also are customers who are trying to pack as much performance as possible into their data center.”

Thorne noted that there has been a call for energy-efficient processors in blade configurations. “A lot of users have power constraints or physical constraints,” he added. “Say you have a fixed space in Manhattan. You can’t expand the space, but with lower-energy processors, you could pack more servers into a rack because each server is using less power.”

In January, Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. disclosed that it was picking up speed on delivering its own energy-efficient quad-core chip, the 9100E, which reportedly uses one-third less power than AMD Phenom chips. The 9100E had been slated on in-house AMD road maps to ship in either the second or third quarter. The chip is now on the docket to be released this quarter.

And the clock is quickly ticking down on the first quarter. So if AMD’s new chip is still on track, it should ship this week.

Intel reported that its new Xeon processors have a 50% larger cache than its previous-generation, low-voltage quad-core Xeon processors. They also have 12MB of on-die cache and dedicated 1333-MHz front-side buses.

Thorne said Intel was able to lower the power consumption on the new chips through a combination of using the 45nm manufacturing process, running them at a slightly slower speed and lowering the voltage across all the cores to parse out the reduction.

Vendors supporting the new Xeon chips include Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM and NEC.

Intel also announced that it expects to begin shipping its L5210 dual-core processor, which will boast a 40-watt rating, a clock speed of 3 GHz, a 6MB cache and a 1333-MHz front-side bus.

Sony Unveils Wall-Mountable VAIO Notebook

Sony has added to another notebook in their VIAO lineup with the release of the VAIO LM notebook.

The VAIO LM features PC design reminiscent of Sony’s BRAVIA LCD TV’s with its 19-inch screen framed by a transparent bezel. The new laptop can be wall-mounted and features wireless keyboard, mouse and remote control.

Aimed at those who want the functionality of a PC in their living area, the VAIO LM is designed as an entertainment hub that doubles as a TV, with in-built TV tuner, built-in 1.3MP camera with face-tracking software, 2.1-channel speaker system and sub-woofers.

The VAIO LM features an Intel Core2 Duo Processor T7250 (2.00GHz), 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 250GB HDD, Windows Vista Home Premium, and nVidia graphics card. The laptop comes with the latest VAIO Music Box software, it lets users define default channel capacity for music in advance, so that the system is able to automatically select signal descriptors for sound classification into 24 channels. Besides, VAIO LM new Movie Story software allows users to create and edit their own video easily.

The VAIO VGC-LM18 is available across Sony stores for Rs.1,09,900.

Acer Unveils Multimedia-Optimized Notebooks

Acer unveiled a line of multimedia-optimized laptops in New York at its first-ever U.S. press conference, where it also announced the close of its acquisition of Dutch computer-maker Packard Bell.

Acer unveiled the Aspire 8920 and 6920 series of notebooks with a new design, the company is calling Aspire Gemstone “blue.” The laptops, which come in both 18.4-inch and 16-inch versions, include a Blu-Ray disc drive, full high-definition (HD) LCD screens and support for the Dolby Pro Logic 2.0 surround-sound audio system.

Speaking at a press event, Senior Corporate Vice President Jim Wong said the new design is aimed at bringing a “true multimedia innovation” to the notebook form factor. The new notebooks are based on Intel Core 2 Duo processors and run either Windows Vista Ultimate or the Windows Vista Home Premium OS because of the multimedia functionality those OSes can deliver. However, Wong said, Acer would consider running a different OS — presumably Linux — on machines that don’t require rich multimedia capability.

The New York event, was a U.S. coming-out party of sorts for the Taiwanese computer-maker. Acer is eager to woo U.S. consumers now that it is offering not only its own notebooks here, but also eMachine computers from Packard Bell and PCs from U.S. computer-maker Gateway, the acquisition of which Acer revealed last August.

In his first official press appearance in the U.S., Acer’s President Gianfranco Lanci clarified company’s branding strategy going forward, saying products from all three companies will remain in the market under their own names. “We didn’t buy a company to kill the brand,” he said.

Lanci said Acer plans to keep all three brands in the U.S. and Europe, although Gateway computers — including the eMachines brand — will be sold in “some countries only.” In Asia and the U.S., the Acer and Gateway brands will be most prominent, including the Gateway eMachines brand in the U.S. Lanci said Acer is basing its brand distribution on how well the different products sell in each geographic area.

Having all three brands also will diversify Acer’s market penetration across its three main geographical regions, broadening its reach in the U.S. while reducing the amount of business that comes from Europe, he added.

For the most part, Acer will keep the design of each of the three brands consistent with their current design. The new Aspire Gemstone “blue” design, for instance, will only be used for Acer notebooks.