The Great Symbian

Toshiba 240GB 1.8-inch HDD

When many of us think of hard drives, we immediately think of notebook and desktop computers where storage capacities can reach into the terabyte level. Storage capacities are equally important for smaller devices like MP3 players and camcorders.

Toshiba has announced a new 1.8-inch hard drive today that is the world’s first dual disc 1.8-inch 240GB HDD and the world’s first 120GB single platter hard drive. The new 240GB HDD is Toshiba part number MK2431GAH. The drive spins at 4200 RPM and offers a 33% improvement in energy consumption compared to Toshiba’s 160GB 3600 rpm 1.8-inch drive.

ATI is doing better recently with competing with NVIDIA’s video card offerings. ATI’s performance gains have forced NVIDIA to drop prices to compete, which is a good thing for gamers. Today ATI announced its latest video card aimed at games on a budget.

The ATI Radeon HD 4830 was introduced today with a MSRP of under $150. The card is DirectX 10.1 compatible as well. Support for ATI’s Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.0) is built-in for decoding HD video content and the card supports 7.1-surround sound.

Toshiba's 18.4-inch Qosmio G55 laptop uses a quad-core processor--but not the Intel or AMD variety.

The "Quad-Core HD Processor" used in the Qosmio G55--due mid-July--is based on the SpursEngine which is derived from the Cell Broadband Engine, a multicore chip architecture jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The Cell architecture, in turn, is derived from IBM's Power Architecture. Today, IBM uses the Cell processor in a line of blade servers.

The four processing elements inside the chip have a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while boasting a relatively low power envelope of 10 to 20 watts. Typical mobile Intel processors have a power envelope of 35 watts.

The SpursEngine can deliver up to 48 GFlops (billion Floating point operations per second) or 12GFlops per processing element. Every element has 256KB of integrated memory, according to Toshiba. And the processor excels at high-definition video encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 (MPEG-4) streams.

ASUS P5QL PRO Socket 775 ATX Motherboard, Intel P43 Chipset, Supports Intel 45nm Multi-Core CPU, Dual DDR2 1066, 1600FSB, PCIe 2.0, w/ PCIe Gigabit LAN and 8-ch HD Audio

This motherboard supports the latest Intel Core 2 processors in LGA775 package. It also can support Intel 45nm Multi-Core CPU. With new Intel Core microarchitecture technology and 1600/1333/1066/800MHz FSB, Intel Core2 processor is one of the most powerful and energy efficient CPU in the world.

The new ASUS EPU - the world's first power saving engine, has been upgraded to a new 4-engine version, which provides total system power savings by detecting current PC loadings and intelligently moderating power in real-time. The EPU automatically provides the most appropriate power usage for the CPU, VGA card, hard drives and CPU cooler fan - helping save power and money.