Samsung, Hynix to Create Nett-Gen Memory Joint-Venture

World's largest memory chip providers, Samsung and Hynix, announced that they will collaborate for achieving the next generation of semiconductors. Both chip manufacturing companies will invest a share
of $9.46 million, as part of a South Korean research and development program that is backed by the South Korean government and the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy.

According to the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy, this investment is more than an educational or a research initiative. It is primarily aimed at helping South Korean firms to fend off the Japanese challenge and the rivals in the next generation memory market.

This kind of market is based on commodities, meaning that the memory chip manufacturers are charging only a few cents above the production costs for each sold chip. The profits are made through volume sales and not through higher selling prices.

Such markets are prone to frequent crashes out of the blue. Moreover, huge profits can only be achieved by the companies who are fast enough to deliver the firs working units of newer technology. After the market is saturated by multiple players offering the same product, the companies are less likely to post profit.

The program will run for seven years and will help South Korea design and produce spin torque transfer magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) as well as some other non-volatile memory devices. The South Korean government has announced that it will invest 28.45 billion won in order to use the new technologies for snatching 40 percent of the non-volatile memory chip market until 2012.

As for the technological aspects, the new memory type will play a significant role in the flash memory development, by helping researchers to overcome the nowadays' current capacity limits. At the same time, the initiative is extremely important, as Japan's Toshiba, NEC and Fujitsu have signed an agreement too in order to jointly develop STT-MRAM devices.

Sony VAIO TZ Notebook: Steve Job's Idea of Portability

The Sony Vaio TZ model has been mentioned several times during Steve Jobs’ MacWorld 2008 keynote, when the Apple founder unveiled the ethereal MacBook Air notebook. Sony's notebook was quoted
almost each time Jobs needed a reference for ultra-portability.

He was not wrong in his choice, as the Vaio TZ model is Sony's flagship ultra-portable laptop PC. This is understandable, since Sony has become famous for its notebook designs. Apart from its portability, the notebook features an impressive hardware specifications set that perfectly reflects its pretty consistent price tag.

The Sony Vaio TZ weighs less than 1.3 kilograms and comes with a 11.1-inch LCD-backlit display with XBRITE-HiColor that can display a maximum resolution of 1366×768. It is built around an Intel ULV U7500 Core 2 Duo processor with a core clock of 1.06GHz, and comes with 1GB DDR2 (that can be expanded up to 2GB), 100 GB of storage on a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard disk drive, but the users can opt for a more expensive, SSD-enabled version. The notebook comes with a built-in DVD+-RW optical drive.

The built-in optical drive makes it the favorite among the other high end ultraportables, such as Toshiba’s R500 and Panasonic’s W7. Its neat and cool design is another strong point: the notebook is extremely thin, almost ethereal, and features spaced-out keys, just like the MacBook air model. The green LED on the side power button adds a plus of elegance to the already-good looking notebook.

The notebook, however, has some limitations. The 1.8-inch disk would offer lower performance than a standard 2.5-inch notebook hard-disk. Replacing it with a 64 or 32 GB of solid-state drive will help a lot, but will blast the buyer's budget way beyond the already-high price tag. Moreover, the Vaio TZ model comes with a single DDR2 memory slot that allows the user to enjoy a maximum of 2 GB (which is not quite enough if you plan to run Windows Vista, for instance).