Not that it comes as much of a surprise, but Nintendo’s growing market value doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of letting up, with the company now crossing the 10 trillion yen mark (or roughly $85 billion). That magic number now makes Nintendo Japan’s third biggest company (up from fifth place just a few months ago), with only Toyota and Mitsubishi edging it out for first and second place, respectively. As Reuters points out, the new value is nearly triple what the company was worth before it launched the Wii late last year (although the DS no doubt had a fair bit to do with that as well), and a fivefold increase over what it was worth two years ago.

[Via TG Daily]
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While the HD DVD camp is busy with its 51GB disc, the Blu-ray side has a new creature of its own to talk about. Co-developed by Pioneer and Mitsubishi, the LTH (Low to High) BD-R reportedly utilizes an “organic dye recording layer,” and is said to be a recognized format within the Blu-ray Disc Recordable Format v1.2 standard. Additionally, the two companies boast that this disc won’t require “large-scale plant investments” to manufacture, which is music to the ears of anyone who enjoys lower costs. Regrettably, it sounds like existing Blu-ray drives won’t play nice with the LTH BD-Rs as-is, but here’s to hoping that firmware updates could fix that. Click on for a shot of a prototype drive gettin’ cozy with one of the new discs.

[Via CDRInfo]
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Intel’s announced USB 3.0 specification could push throughput beyond 4Gbps (300MBps) at the application level while introducing Quality of Service in support of HD video streams. Besides supplanting Firewire once and for all, a clear goal of the new “SuperSpeed USB” is to keep up with the transfer speeds of flash chips. “We don’t want to be the bottleneck in the system,” says Intel’s Jeff Ravencraft who is overseeing the 3.0 initiative. Intel, HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP, and TI will present the initial spec for a design review in November with first silicon to be stamped in “early 2009.” While the new interconnect (pictured) will remain backward compatible with USB 2.0 and prior devices, new cables laced with an optical link and a max length of 2-meters will be required to take advantage of those high speeds according to a senior engineering manager with NEC. Meanwhile, a 1Gbps throughput is being targeted with Ravencraft’s other baby: Wireless USB 1.1. Sounds great, but with existing 480Mbps Wireless USB silicon only achieving about 40Mbps in practice, Intel would be wise to focus on efficiency, not theory. Of course, it’s all just a lot of smack-talk ’til they deliver, but with Apple running Intel inside now, Sony putting USB in their camcorders, and eSATA proliferating for external disks… well, Firewire’s days sure seem numbered.

[Via EETimes and The Inquirer]
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2009 may be the year when we finally see a unified memory format, that is, if Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson have their way. The “Universal Flash Storage specification” would see memory cards travel between cellular devices, digital cameras and other memory hungry devices without the need for adapters — and it’ll likely save us some coin, too. Some big name memory manufacturers are purportedly onboard, with names like Micron Technology Inc., Spansion LLC, STMicroelectronics NV, and Texas Instruments Inc., being bandied about. We look forward to that magical day, when our stacks of memory cards can be reduced to a stack of one type of card, ahhh… progress.

from engadget

[From Eric Mann] Eric spotted this, Treo’s are good enough for NASA apparently, “Jeff Stephens gave a status on new PDA devices. The Apple iPhone has been determined not to be enterprise ready by the NASA ODIN Program Office. The next release of hardware (8800 Blackberry and 750 Treo) will be in conjunction with Agency Attachment R process which will be submitted to HQ prior to September 1, 2007. The standard units are Blackberry 8700c, Blackberry 8703e, Treo 680 and Treo 700p. International options are available on the Blackberry 8700c and the Treo 680.”
NASA Document [Word Doc] / msmobiles
from palmaddict

Earlier this year, Toyota was reportedly mulling the idea of crafting its own in-car OS, but now the firm — along with nine other Japanese companies — will be collaborating with the Economy, Trade, and Industry Ministry to develop “an operating system for automotive electronics.” The initiative is supposedly in reaction to similar joint developments going on with a number of European car outfits, and will aim to “create a global standard in the field.” Dubbed JasPar (Japan Automotive Software Platform Architecture), the venture will include big shots such as Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Denso, and Toshiba, and you can look for a prototype version to reach completion in 2009.

[Via The Raw Feed]
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With as much AMD fanfare as there was leading up to this release, you’d think they would’ve managed to drum up a bit better showing. After running up against a battery of benchmark tests, AMD’s Quad FX dual CPU platform has been throughly trounced by Intel’s QX6700 2.66GHz processor. While things looks great on paper for AMD, with exciting amounts of bandwidth between the two processors, and dedicated memory for each chip, in practice the Quad FX platform is an utter power hog (double that of the QX6700), and only squeezed by Intel in a handful of tests, while for the most part racking up loss after loss, trailing from 10 to 40 percent behind the Intel’s 65nm quad-core chip. Price is also a concern, since even though AMD is pricing the actual chips aggressively, you’ll still have to spring around $480 for the only motherboard that can handle ‘em, and those 1000W power supplies don’t really come cheap. Of course, AMD does have 65nm chips on the way, which should do better against Intel on a clock-to-clock basis, and Windows Vista will include lots of mult-thread enhancements to “even the playing field,” but there’s still no denying that AMD got spanked in this round, and we don’t suppose Intel will just be sitting around while AMD plays catch up.

[Via ZDNet]

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