Toshiba and Fujitsu recall batteries
I guess things are getting out of hand lately for Sony, with the much delay in PlayStation 3 and the competition between Blue-ray and HD-DVD war, not to mention the recall of batteries made by Sony. With their reputation going down the drain, Sony has a lot of image brushing up to do. This must have gone down in history as the biggest battery recall in history, to the extend that some airlines are banning the use of laptop while on board the plane. If only a laptop explode on board, would Sony be liable of the damange not to the laptop alone but to the plane and the safety of the passagers?
Toshiba is recalling 840,000 batteries across a wide swath of their laptop lines, in addition to the 340,000 they recalled a couple of weeks ago for an unrelated power-loss issue. Fujitsu is recalling Sony-made batteries from 19 of its laptop models, but no word on exact quantity of laptops.
Intel quad-core with 70% performance boost
Call this soon to be release intel quad-core a AMD killer, with AMD announcing their release of a quad core chip early 2007, intel manage to hit the rot when it is hot. With a 70% boost interm of performance, this quad-core is a killer chip.
Unlike AMD “real” quad-core that has four processor in a chip, intel quad-core comes with two sets of dual-core processor. Meaning to say that instead of putting 4 processor in a chip, intel decided that two dual-core processor would be the ideal marketing strategy. AMD has been caught by surprise and they seems to be unhappy with the fact that intel is “cheating” in the processor race. It doesn’t really matter, as long as the end results is good.
However, Intel CEO Paul Otellini has a point when he says that consumers don’t care whether they’re getting four cores on a single die or four cores spread across two chips. What they care about is performance.
AMD has a lot of catching up to do, on the development of production, intel has a leading advantage in manufacturing processor, the year 2007 could be seen as a year where intel shift their production from 65nm to 45nm development, with the ability to produce 45nm chips, more chips can be squeeze out from a single waffer thus lowering the cost of each chip. AMD needs a 45nm production plant badly.
