Hynix Unveils Fast Memory Chip for Games

Hynix Semiconductor, South Korea's second largest memory chip maker, has launched the speediest memory chip aimed at game consoles and PC graphics cards available so far.

The graphics double data rate 4 (GDDR4) chips are high bandwidth DRAM memory able to process heavy volumes of gaming and video images far faster than normal PC memory chips. They're a step up from the GDDR3 generation of chips currently used on the highest performing graphics cards today. Hynix said its GDDR4 chips are also ideal for 64-bit computing.

The company on Sunday announced the availability of a 512-megabit density GDDR4, an ultra high speed memory chip that Hynix says improves data processing speed by close to two times over GDDR3.

Hynix's GDDR4 chips operate at 2.9 gigabits per second and can process 11.6GB of data in one second, the company says. It will begin shipping samples to customers soon and plans to start mass production of the chips in early 2006. By the second half of next year, the company says it will improve the speed of the chips to 14.4GB.

The fastest graphics memory chips had been limited to a speed of just 1.6 gigabits per second before the launch of GDDR4.

The density and speed of Hynix's GDDR4 improves over a similar chip released by rival Samsung Electronics in late October.

At the time Samsung was able to claim first place in the race to ship GDDR4 to customers for testing. Samsung's GDDR4 is a 256-megabit chip that runs at 2.5 gigabits per second, both smaller in density and slower in speed than Hynix's offering, based on the specifications each company has released.

Samsung plans to introduce a 2.8Gbps GDDR4 chip by the end of this year. The company said it expects the high performance graphics card market to grow significantly in the second half of next year.

For its part, DDR maker Rambus has developed a technology called XDR2 that boosts data rates in and out of DRAMs. Rambus claims speeds of 8GHz, compared to 1.6GHz for GDDR3.

Overall, it has been a tough year for proponents of DDR2, who expected the new DRAM technology to take off faster than it has.

The Web sites of other major memory chip makers, including Micron Technology, Infineon Technologies, and Elpida Memory, do not carry any announcements regarding the release of GDDR4 products.

IBM makes Workplace suite ODF-ready

IBM has thrown some its weight behind the Open Document Format (ODF) for the Office Applications standard. The exact force of that support is IBM Workplace Managed Client, which will support the newly ratified standard.

Specifically, word processing, presentation graphics and spreadsheets within version 2.6 of the IBM client software, will support the import, export and rewrite of files in the ODF standard.

ODF is currently a hot topic, with Massachusetts leading the way in calling for public bodies to avoid the limitations of proprietary formats and adopt open standards. Microsoft has tried to counter this line of argument by putting its Office XML up for standardisation, but Sun has repeated its backing for current open standards.

The OpenDocument XML format is also the basis for the open source OpenOffice suite, now at version 2.0. Sun's rival to Microsoft's Office is Star Office, which itself is based on Open Office.

The Workplace Managed Client software works in conjunction with the IBM WebSphere Everyplace Deployment server and is designed to provide an interface for enterprise applications on server-managed laptop and desktop systems. It is scheduled to be available in early 2006.

Start with Microsoft

These days Microsoft's inspiration is Google. And its not recently that Microsoft started copying google. Its been going on for a while. Maybe you will remember MSN Search. When it was launched it used to look and feel just like Google. Thought it has been changed a bit, but still its nothing much different. Now Microsoft has come up with a service called start. If you check it you will won't be surprized that it also looks and feels just like My Google. Don't think of it as a conincidence. After all Microsoft is quite (in)famous for plagiarism. Earlier it was Apple and IBM; and now its Google.