According to AMD and nVIDIA, Intel is not sharing their specs for the USB 3.0 open host controller. It is officially expected to appear on the market in 2009 and comes with a lot of bandwidth upgrade when compared with the USB 2.0 so we are dealing with something special here. The possibility of going ahead in this market could lead to a lot of money and there is a big chance that both AMD and nVIDIA think that Intel is trying to do this.

USB-IF was founded in 1995 by Intel in collaboration with others like HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP Semiconductors and Texs Instruments. USB-IF is now working together to bring USB 3.0 to life (it is also being called “PCI Express over cable” so you might also find it under this name). Bandwidth will be increased 10 times as compared with USB 2.0 and transfer will be at around 5 gigabits per second. A lot of the intellectual property behind this new technology was not created by Intel but nVIDIA and AMD think that the company is currently holding a lot of information to itself. They claim that Intel is working silicon so the open host controller is working but they are not giving specifications to chipset and processor Read more »

Recent news in show that Sony is getting ready to release a small laptop (low cost of course) that is based on Via Technologies. A prototype was announced last week and shown by Quanta Computer (contract manufacturer) at WiMax Expo in Taipei. The mini laptop is based on the open source Via OpenBook reference design and will start shipping during the third quarter of this year.

Going into specs we see that the laptop will feature a 1.6 GHz C7-M processor (from Via,of course) and is listed with Sony as manufacturer. What is interesting is that Quanta is currently the largest laptop maker for laptop computers in the world although Sony was listed as manufacturer at the official showing. The truth is that Quanta is currently under contract for many big brands in the industry and they are not allowed to discuss customer facts with anyone. This might be the case with Sony as well and we do expect Sony to be officially listed as manufacturer. We must keep in mind that if Sony is in fact Read more »