September 10, 2002

HARD DRIVE SHORTAGE

I mentioned a few weeks ago about hard drive prices going up.  Well they did it again.  IBM 40-80GB drives are going up almost every day and they are getting difficult to acquire.  If you look at the price list you will notice that Western Digital is already up to 200GB drives.  It is not going to be long before the smallest drive available will be a 60 or even 80GB.  It is becoming less and less cost effective to manufacture the small drives. 

PROCESSOR CLOCK SPEEDS TO DECREASE

AMD keeps putting Intel in their place.  For years Intel has been the clock speed leader but the performance leader was questionable.  As you already know AMD uses model numbers for their processors instead of clock speed.  They do this because the model number is their comparison to the equivalent Intel clock speed.

Intel recently announced that they will be releasing a new processor next year, code named Banias.  It will begin in the clock speed range of 1.4 to 1.6Ghz but will outperform current Pentium 4’s running at 2Ghz and above.  It is expected to be targeting the mobile processor market but could affect the desktop market as well. 

AMD ANNOUNCES POSSIBLE TEN-FOLD INCREASE

AMD announced another breakthrough in transistor technology.  They have been able to produce a transistor that is 6 times smaller than the smallest transistor produced today.  Currently there are about 100 million transistors on a CPU.  With this breakthrough it is possible for them to place 1 billion transistors in the same size area.  AMD developed double-gate transistors.  The double-gate transistor is capable of handling twice the flow of electrical current as a standard transistor therefore doubling its capacity.  This breakthrough continues the performance capabilities of our current silicon based processor technology.  It will give us another ten-fold or clock speeds of around 30 to 40 Ghz. Since processor manufacturers already have much higher speed processors on their shelves waiting for release, I would estimate those speeds to be closer to 60 Ghz.

NEW PRODUCTS

Just a quick note about a few new products we have.  We are stocking LG CDRW/DVD combo drives.  Intel has released the P4 2.6Ghz 400Mhz FSB and the P4 2.66 and 2.8Ghz 533FSB processors.  As previously stated Western Digital has released the 180GB and 200GB hard drives.  They are available with up to 8MB buffer on board.  The KT4 series of MSI motherboards are out.  These boards are the first we have seen with 8X AGP.  Many people have asked us about routers.  We sell many different brands including D-Link and Linksys.  We don’t list them yet but call us and we will help you. 

S&K