HDD Crisis Was Fake: Seagate and Western Digital Post Big Profits

Hard drive manufacturers Seagate Technology and Western Digital have reported great financial results after such a prolonged hard disk drive “crisis”. 

There was always talk about the fact that hard disk drives are so cheap that the profitability of the manufacturers in getting low enough to limit the R & D investments they would otherwise make.

Many industry insiders were talking about overstocking and lowering profits. The situation was bleak. 

One year ago, Samsung wanted to get rid of their HDD division despite the fact that the products developed there were quite good. The F1 and F3 lines of desktop HDD are very good performers to this day and they’ve been since way back in 2008.

Seagate jumped at the opportunity and snatched Samsung’s hard rive division for almost 2 billion dollars back in April 2011.

Hitachi was also doing quite alright. They’ve had good mobile HDDs and the very successful 1000.C hard disk drive line that excelled when dealing with multi-threaded work. Still the marketplace for HDDs was so difficult that they’ve announced they’ll be selling their hard drive division to Western Digital.

The Thailand flood came and went and we were left with the hard drive “crisis”. While the hard drives were almost never “out of stock” the prices went up even 300%. 

Months passed by, but there seemed to be no end to the hard drive crisis despite the fact that both manufacturers were announcing the restoration of the plants affected by the waters.

In a report earlier his year, we found out that Seagate even managed to increase its HDD shipments with around 2% when compared to the previous year. Where exactly was that “crisis”?

Now Seagate proudly announces it has decided to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repurchase a considerable amount of its outstanding ordinary shares. Spending 2.5 billion dollars less than a year after buying Samsung’s HDD division for another 2 billion, doesn’t really seem like a company “suffering” from a “crisis.”

Western Digital has also announced today its fiscal third quarter financial results. Despite recently acquiring HGST (that’s Hitachi’s HDD division) in March last year and also “suffering” from a “difficult crisis,” they’ve made a net income of 146 million dollars, or 62 cents per share.

"Our third quarter performance demonstrates the potential of the new Western Digital, with just three and a half weeks of HGST results combined with the standalone WD business," said John Coyne, CEO of Western Digital.

By their reasoning: bad market plus low margins plus the HDD crisis equals big profits.

Good job if we may say. We finally have a humongous duopoly in the hard drive market too. This is probably the most desirable situation for the end users paying 300% more money for last year technology.

We shall now wait and see when the prices will go back to where they were one year ago, if ever.

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Intel Looses Market Share to AMD

Market analysis company Mercury Research has reportedly made public their study of the last quarter and concluded that AMD gained CPU market share from Intel.

AMD's market grew to 19.1 percent from 18.2 percent, according to Mercury Research and Intel's share of the market dropped to 80.2 percent during the first quarter of this year from the 81 percent it owned in last year's first quarter.

The overall x86 processor shipments went down in the first quarter of this year compared to the last year. This is probably because of the struggling economies and because of the floods in Thailand that led to the hard disk drive crisis.

AMD benefited from the recovery in the hard disk drive shipments and managed to reach a very consistent 43% of the desktop processor market.

This ultimately proves that CPU performance can be considered “enough” for the average user and especially for the office productivity domain.

The thing is that the low to mid end systems were always the big piece of the market pie and Intel always had the upper hand there. They were selling cheap CPUs bundled with mediocre motherboards with integrated graphics (IGP) and they were practically flooding the market with such products.

AMD only had the CPU. They’ve never manufactured motherboards so they’ve never had anything to bundle with while, although their latest IGPs were net superior to what Intel had, the overall cost of the system was not that much lower than Intel’s while the performance was not that much higher.

With Llano and Brazos, AMD offers a very affordable platform that performs up to three times faster than what Intel is bringing to the table.

Intel’s current low to mid end solution need to be paired with a discrete graphics card to be able to offer the same experience that AMD’s Fusion chip are able to. This raises the system cost considerably over AMD’s alternative and most of the time surpasses the price range of the customer.

We, the enthusiasts, were quite disappointed with AMD’s lack of x86 improvement, but AMD proved it was right all along: we have CPU power for now.

We’ve had enough CPU power ever since the Core 2 Duo times.

You can comfortably play the latest games with a “Pitcairn” based AMD video card on a Core 2 Quad processor. You’re not yet upgrading your processor and you’re not selling your kidney to buy the latest video card. Yet you can still play the games.

This was never before possible. This is 6 years old technology you have in that processor, but it still satisfies the owner.

Think about the end of the ’90 and how CPUs were back then. Add 6 years and you’re in 2005 trying to play Quake 4 on a Pentium III processor with a Radeon X1600 Pro. How would that look like?

AMD apparently really achieved that “good enough” CPU performance and the move towards more 3D performance seems to have been the right one.

This Core 2 Duo or Quad performance that the fully fledged Llano CPUs are able to achieve is enough for 80% of the users out there.

The question is: if you have enough CPU power and you want to play a little, are you willing to spend another 100 USD for the graphics card? Or you’re going to get the “not so ultra” CPU that will run decently your game for free?

AMD certainly knew the right answer to this question.

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Galaxy GeForce GXT 680 GC Custom Card Officially Launched

Chinese company GalaxyTech, reportedly has already started shipping its custom designed GeForce GXT 680 GC video card to online shops in the western world.

The price is a very nice surprise as the card comes to US buyers at around 535 USD.  That would be almost 405 EUR for the European customers, but we’re sure the price in the old continent will be quite a bit higher than in America.

The card comes with the well-known Nvidia GK104 GPU. This is a very efficient and quite cool chip by the usual “huge” GPU standards. This graphics processing unit has 3.5 billion transistors built on a 28nm process at TSMC.

For more information and details along with pictures and more complete specifications, readers should check out our earlier report on Galaxy’s GeForce GXT 680 GC Custom video card.

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HIS Intros the Radeon HD 7770 IceQX Video Card

Hong Kong company Hightech Information System Limited has reportedly presented the custom designed, pre-overclocked HiS Radeon HD 7770 IceQX silent video card.

The card is built around AMD’s “Cape Verde XT” graphics processing unit that comes with a minuscule 123 square millimeters die size containing 1.5 billion transistors. The default GPU frequency is 1 GHz when working in 3D mode, but HIS’s implementation comes pre-overclocked to a high 1170 MHz GPU speed.

In 2D mode, the frequency of the GPU will drop to a low 300 MHz. The 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at a high 5000 MHz when in 3D mode, but drops to 600 MHz when switched in 2D. This is higher than the reference’s default memory frequency of 4500 MHz.

It works on a tight 128 bit BUS so the performance expectations should be adjusted accordingly despite the factory overclock.

The “Cape Verde XT” GPU is part of AMD’s GCN architecture and comes with much improved GPU compute performance.

The GPU has 640 unified shader processors, 40 texturing units and 16 ROPs. On the connectivity side, the HIS Radeon HD 7770 IceQX video card comes with two mini DisplayPort connectors, a HDMI interface along with DVI.

The custom designed HIS IceQX cooling system has two copper heatpipes that are cooled by a 9 centimeters cooling fan. This is enough to satisfy the cooling requirements of the “Cape Verde” GPU as it will draw a maximum of around 80 watts when in full 3D mode. When idling, the “Caper Verde XT” will consume a meager 3 watts.

The card also uses solid capacitors and a special power design. The iTurbo software will assist the amateur overclockers towards getting some more frames per second out of their favorite 3D game.

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TSMC to Provide 14 nm finFET Design Kits by the End of 2012

TSMC has recently announced at its 2012 Technology Symposium conference that it would provide finFET design kits for the 14nm node by this year’s end.

The foundry seems to be keen on pursuing the finFET concept and it encourages customers to build and design new architectures with finFETs in mind.

It’s no wonder TSMC’s roadmap is heading this way as the foundry’s old Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Dr. Chenming Calvin Hu PhD. is the main architect behind the idea.

Now, Dr. Hu is TSMC distinguished professor of microelectronics at the University of California, Berkeley, but between 2001 and 2004, he was the CTO of TSMC.

It’s strange how Intel manages to implement other companies’ ideas before the initiators do it. They are the first to implement finFETs, they were the first to build dual core CPUs ahead of AMD, and also, they were the first to deliver “APUs” before AMD’s Fusion.

TSMC plans to use bulk technology for finFETs, but this type of transistors will only come with the company’s 14 nm production starting in 2014.

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Script: Wysija Newsletters

Wysija Newsletters is a very powerful and advanced WordPress plugin for sending out newsletters to subscribed users.

Unlike many other similar plugins, Wysija Newsletters works entirely inside the WordPress platform, with no connection to email campaign sites like AWeber or MailChimp.

This means all data is stored inside the WordPress database, and the administrator is not limited in any way by API calls or query/connection delays.

The plugin also features an innovative email template editor, just like the ones found in the aforementioned services.

Of course, the plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository as well. A premium version provides extra features and access to more themes.

Download Wysija Newsletters here.

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Apricorn Aegis Padlock 3.0 Portable Drive Has Buttons

Apricorn has announced a new version of the Aegis Padlock drive, that hard drive unit that has a number pad on its top side.

Armed with either 128-bit or 256-bit AES-XTS hardware encryption, it will keep data safely locked away until the unit is linked to a PC and the password typed.

No special software is needed for everything to work and there is even USB 3.0 support now.

Indeed, USB 3.0 is the asset that led to the new drive being called Aegis Padlock 3.0.

"With the addition of USB 3.0 to our Aegis Padlock drives, we are now able to benefit from improved hard drive and SSD performance. We have also added other enhancements including allowing the drive to be used as a boot device," said Mike McCandless, VP of sales and marketing. 

"This convergence of super fast performance and powerful data security is something that we couldn't wait to provide to our customers."

Go here to read all available information, including the capacities, encryption types and prices.

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Flickr Gets an HTML5 Uploader with Drag and Drop

Flickr may not be the hottest thing around, but it's all that Yahoo's got at the moment. And, while the photo-sharing herds have moved on to greener pastures (maybe it's all the colored filters that make them seem so) like Instagram, there are still plenty of people using Flickr.

And if you're seriously interested in photography, it's still the best place around, though Google+ is becoming an interesting alternative.

In any case, Flickr is doing its best to, at least, hang on to the users it has, if not add new ones, and it has been introducing quite a few new features and improvements lately.

It's now debuting a brand new HTML5 uploader that's a significant improvement over the previous one. The photo uploader is one of the most important tools for a photo site, especially one that expects users to upload images in batches.

"We’re utilizing some advanced HTML 5 browser technology to bring you a completely new uploading experience on Flickr. You can now add photos by dragging them into the browser," Yahoo explained.

"We also show preview thumbnails, where supported, so you can use the intuitive drag and drop interface to manage and reorder photos before they hit your photostream. You can also easily zoom, rotate or sort your photos by title," it added.

The new uploader also makes it easier to add metadata to your photos, titles, descriptions and so on and also enables users to organize their uploads into sets.

The tool is also significantly faster, Yahoo says upload speeds should be 20 to 30 percent faster on average and even as high as 50 to 60 percent faster in some cases. International users should feel the improvement the most, indicating that Yahoo is making better use of its worldwide data centers.

Finally, free users can now upload photos as large as 30 MB, Pro users as large as 50 MB, which allows for some huge jpegs. The tool is rolling out to all users over the next couple of weeks, so you may not be able to use it just yet.

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Nikon D600 DSLR Camera Rumored

Even though it supposedly doesn't have enough D800 cameras to go around, Nikon is reportedly preparing a sort of successor/sibling to it. 

Nikon Rumors says that a DSLR camera called D600 will appear sooner or later. 

It will be an “entry-level” full frame camera, but that doesn't mean the price will be all that low compared to the D800 (around $3,000 / 2,898 Euro). 

Alas, the specs are only partially known, and the sensor is not among them. 

Still, even learning of the dual SD card slots, the Auto DX crop mode and in-camera RAW editor is better than nothing. 

GPS integration may be present as well, but no HDR will be available, nor an external battery grip. 

The report suggests that shipments will begin at some point during this summer (2012).

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Netgear Launches the First 1 Gbps Wireless Router

Netgear may have dug itself a gold mine when it created the R6300 router.

Sure, it'll cost $199.99 when it goes up for sale in the United States, in May, and probably just as many Euro whenever it gets to the old continent.

Nevertheless, the simple fact is that the item really does deliver on its promises: it is the fastest wireless router to date.

Not only does it communicate over two bands, but it can reach 450 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz and a massive 1,300 Mbps on the 5 GHz frequency.

Sure, obstacles and distance will have an impact, but the R6300 is still expected to be about three times faster than 802.11n routers, thanks to its support for 802.11ac.

Netgear installed the genie app on the router too (users can monitor and test networks via smartphones), plus MyMedia (streams video and photos, DLNA supported). Parental controls are part of the feature set too.

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