IDF Wrapup: Catching Up With Gigabyte and OCZ

From DailyTech: OCZ Technology Group Inc. (OCZ) has consistently vied for the title of fastest solid state drives, with a broad product line spanning from budget SSDs to the high-end. Fresh off a recent power supply family rollout, OCZ at IDF was primarily focused on its SSD product.

While a refresh of the premium Vector SSD family is expected late this year, for now the product mix was mostly the same as the lineup we saw at the 2013 CES in January.

An exception was AEON, a rare 3.5-inch form factor SSD. We've seen hybrid hard disk and NAND drives in the past, but AEON offers a new twist, featuring a mixture of embedded NAND and DRAM for dramatically reduced latencies. OCZ refers to the drive as "nonvolatile memory" (NVM), a kind of all-encompassing term for this hybrid drive.

Gigabyte Technology Comp., Ltd. (TPE:2376) showed off a mixture of chic mini-ITX PCs and its latest motherboards.

My personal favorite among its product lineup was the appropriately named "Iris" mini-PC, which fits in the palm of your hand and features gorgeous supercar-esque styling, with red and yellow trim colors. The box supports various Haswell chips up to an Intel Corp. (INTC) Core i7 4770R (3.2 GHz (3.9 GHz turbo), quad-core, Iris Pro graphics). There's support for up to two monitors, a single 2.5-inch internal hard drive/SSD, a pair of mini-PCI express slots, and external USB 3.0 ports galore.

It's pretty incredible what Haswell is allowing in terms of design factors, given its cool operation and drastically improved onboard graphics.

Gigabyte also highlighted its use of the Killer NIC chip from Qualcomm, Inc. (QCOM) (see the little "K" lettered chip near center below). You may recall that originally this startup debuted in PCI-express Ethernet card form factors and was met with much skepticism.

View: Article @ Source Site