Sunday, June 5, 2016

[NEWS] Samsung Mass Producing Industry’s First 512-Gigabyte NVMe SSD in a Single BGA Package



Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass producing the industry’s first NVMe* PCIe solid state drive (SSD) in a single ball grid array (BGA) package, for use in next-generation PCs and ultra-slim notebook PCs. The new BGA NVMe SSD, named PM971-NVMe, features an extremely compact package that contains all essential SSD components including NAND flash memory, DRAM and controller while delivering outstanding performance.



“Samsung’s new BGA NVMe SSD triples the performance of a typical SATA SSD, in the smallest form factor available, with storage capacity reaching up to 512GB,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering Team, Samsung Electronics. “The introduction of this small-scale SSD will help global PC companies to make timely launches of slimmer, more stylish computing devices, while offering consumers a more satisfactory computing environment.”

Configuring the PM971-NVMe SSD in a single BGA package was enabled by combining 16 of Samsung’s 48-layer 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND flash chips, one 20-nanometer 4Gb LPDDR4 mobile DRAM chip and a high-performance Samsung controller. The new SSD is 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weighs only about one gram (an American dime by comparison weighs 2.3 grams). The single-package SSD’s volume is approximately a hundredth of a 2.5” SSD or HDD, and its surface area is about a fifth of an M.2 SSD, allowing much more design flexibility for computing device manufacturers.



In addition, the PM971-NVMe SSD delivers a level of performance that easily surpasses the speed limit of a SATA 6Gb/s interface. It enables sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,500MB/s (megabytes per second) and 900MB/s respectively, when TurboWrite technology is used. The performance figures can be directly compared to transferring a 5GB-equivalent, Full-HD movie in about 3 seconds or downloading it in about 6 seconds. It also boasts random read and write IOPS (input output operations per second) of up to 190K and 150K respectively, to easily handle high-speed operations. A hard drive, by contrast, will only process up to 120 IOPS in random reads, making the new Samsung SSD more than 1500 times faster than an HDD in this regard.



The PM971-NVMe SSD line-up will be available in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB storage options. Samsung will start providing the new SSDs to its customers this month worldwide.

As a leading SSD provider, Samsung has a history of introducing advanced SSDs ahead of the industry. In June 2013, Samsung introduced XP941 SSD in M.2 (mini PCI-Express 2.0) form factor (80mm x 22mm), which was also the industry’s first PCIe SSD for PCs. Now, Samsung plans to rapidly expand its market base in the next-generation premium notebook PC sector with the new high-performance, BGA package, NVMe SSD. Later this year, Samsung plans to introduce more high-capacity and ultra-fast NVMe SSDs to meet increasing customer needs for improved performance and greater density. 

Author : Anushk Keshri Rastogi

Source : Samsung Newsroom

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

[REVEALED] AMD announces $200 Polaris RX 480 card!

amd radeon rx 480 primary

A few hours ago AMD shook up the PC community when it announced the RX 480, which will be a -get this-,  $200 dollar graphics card that will rub shoulders with the much loved R9 390 and the GTX 980, and at a much lower price point., 

radeon 480 performance

The card will apparently run on a 256-bit bus, which as we posted according the rumours earlier will be the same as the GTX 1060. The power consumption is stated as 150 W which, though lower than the previous generation cards this matches in graphics power, is comparable to the GTX 1070 and it's expected that the 1060 should definitely be lower than this. 

radeon 480 stats

From the chart above, you can see that the card will come in 4 and 8GB variants. perfect for tackling VR requirements or gaming at 4k. The Radeon RX 480 will also expand the total overall market for virtual reality—a key new battleground for computing. AMD’s been beating the drum loudly with its LiquidVR development kit initiative and the Radeon Pro Duo, a dual-GPU beast of a graphics card devoted to VR game development.

As far as the form factor and aesthetics are concerned, the RX seems to be continuing the legacy of the Nano and the Fury X, slick, black and minimal. 



With the release of the 480, AMD has officially just steamrolled all over the mid-range graphics cards market. There's absolutely no reason to buy a 950, 960 or even a 970 now, and the same applies to the 370, 380 and their predecessors. The hype for the Vega family cards has also significantly increased.

Your move, Nvidia.

Author: Ishaan
Source: AMD livestream