Mobility

Taiwanese hardware maker Giga-byte Technology Co. Ltd. has stumbled upon a faster way to boot up PCs based on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system. Giga-byte's iRam is a PC add-in card with four DDR DRAM (double data rate dynamic RAM memory) slots that's designed to be used as a PC drive. Because the iRam uses DRAM rather than a hard-disk to store information, data can be retrieved from the drive up to 60 times faster than is possible with a hard drive, according to Giga-byte, which showed the board at the Computex exhibition in Taipei this week.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. launched its dual-core Athlon 64 processor at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Tuesday. Like one launched last week by Intel Corp., the chip contains two processors on a single piece of silicon and represents one of the biggest changes in PC processor architecture for several years. Dual-core chips offer users higher performance because tasks can be balanced between the two cores.

Japan will begin research in June to build a supercomputer capable of crunching numbers about 30 times faster than IBM Corp.'s Blue Gene/ L, the world's current fastest supercomputer, the Japanese government said Tuesday. Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has established a program with NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., and several Japanese universities to develop a supercomputer by as early as 2011.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has started producing its first NAND flash memory chips on an advanced process, a move that will help lower the cost of memory cards for consumers in time for the year-end shopping season, according to an analyst.

Hoping to take a larger share of the global market for computer processors, Via Technologies Inc. announced that its latest chip, the C7, will soon go into mass production. The C7 will initially be available in 1.5GHz and 1.8GHz versions and offer substantially more processing power than the company's existing C3 chips.

At least four things will be on the minds of many attendees at next week's Computex trade show in Taiwan: the dual cores of Intel Corp.'s Pentium D processor and the dual cores of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Athlon 64 X2 processor.

Spam-filtering technology may soon save millions of lives, thanks to the technology

Intel Corp.'s forthcoming Pentium D, the company's first dual-core processor for desktop PCs, was already on display in a small electronics shop in Tokyo on Tuesday.