(ZD NET) Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices will start prodding consumers to jump over the megahertz gap next month. AMD is preparing to launch its next desktop Athlon processor, a 1.5GHz chip, in late September, sources said. The new desktop processor will be AMD's fastest chip. But despite performance boosts, the 1.5GHz Athlon will still be a clock speed underdog compared with rival Intel's Pentium 4 processor line, set to hit 2GHz later this month.
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(ZD NET) Prices have sunk to the point where memory manufacturers are selling their chips for well below cost and are unable to cut costs deeply enough to squeeze out a profit, despite repeated rounds of layoffs. Hopes for a quick end to the carnage have faded since memory makers have reported several weak quarters. That's good news for consumers, who can add memory for a fraction of last year's prices, but disastrous for manufacturers. To illustrate the extent of the plunge, take a look at pricing for 128-megabit synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) chips, the most common type of memory used in PCs. A year ago, SDRAM chips averaged $18.40 each. Now, the same chip sells for about $1.50 on the spot market. On average, prices on DRAM decline by about 32 percent per year, according to Dataquest.
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(Press Release) Adaptec, Inc. announced that it is the first vendor to achieve Ultra320 SCSI performance in a RAID controller. Samples of Adaptec's Ultra320 SCSI ASIC are shipping now to major PC-server OEMs for their PC server motherboards and RAID controller designs. Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu/Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are among the PC server OEMs that have already received Adaptec's Ultra320 SCSI ASIC samples. Higher performance SCSI is crucial for RAID arrays with many drives on a SCSI bus segment, and for applications such as e-commerce, real-time computing, data mining and audio/video editing. Gartner Dataquest projects that terabytes attached to SCSI-based host RAID controllers and host bus adapters will increase 8.6 fold between 2000 and 2005. This huge increase in SCSI disk drive storage capacity requires the level of throughput performance provided by Ultra320 technology.
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