From Tom's Hardware: With no mechanical moving parts, no spinning platters, and just really fast flash memory, a SSD is likely the best upgrade that you can perform on your rig due to the storage subsystem being the slowest part of the typical computer system.

The majority of your responses pointed squarely at the high price of SSDs as being the main reason why most of you have yet to take the plunge. It’s certainly understandable, with 1 TB HDDs priced at sub-$100 points, who would want to pay hundreds more for just a fraction of the capacity?

Thankfully, prices are falling, though probably not fast enough for it to be the way we’d like it. Undoubtedly, our pick of the SSD litter are the Intel X-25 line as they are the fastest both for the enthusiast and the enterprise user. Sadly, their premium performance also comes at a premium price, being the most expensive SSD solution out right now.

Hopefully VR-Zone is correct, then, as it reports that Intel will next week be cutting the prices of its SSDs. According to the website: “Intel 80GB X18-M and X25-M will see their prices dropped from $385 to $335 while 160GB versions will be lowered from $760 to $660. However, the prices of the SLC models remain unchanged at $410 for 32GB and $790 for the 64GB.”

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From X-bit Labs: Symbian Foundation, an industry consortium that develops various versions of the Symbian operating system with the aim to create a more competitive open-source operating system, said that it had managed to port S60 operating system to Intel Atom platform. Potentially, this allows Atom to power smartphones and other mobile Internet devices (MIDs) powered by S60.

“The bright and capable guys in the SOSCO (S60 on Symbian Customer Operations) team have Symbian compiling via GCC and now running on an off the shelf Atom based motherboard from Intel. It would be most interesting to see what level of interest we can generate in this port, especially if that includes some major business partners willing to come in and invest in the development of a product solution, and one that enables some differentiators to come to market for consumers,” said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

The head of Symbian Foundation claims that it did not make sense to replicate netbooks or other types of personal computers with S60 + Atom platform. However, mobile technology providers could develop brand-new category of products powered by Symbian OS as well as Intel Atom processor.

It is questionable whether Symbian S60 platform actually needs x86 microprocessor. Software developed for the S60 is aimed at ARM processors and take their performance constraints into consideration. It is unlikely that any software maker will develop programs for one or two devices on the market powered by Intel Atom. Nevertheless, the head of Symbian Foundation claims that even interface of S60 works better on Atom.

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From InfoWorld: Advanced Micro Devices is designing a server chip with up to 16 cores, quadrupling the count of its current quad-core server chips, the company said Wednesday.

Code-named Interlagos, the chip will have between 12 and 16 cores and be released in 2011, the company said at a press conference that was Webcast. Interlagos will be a follow-up to the 12-core chip code-named Magny-Cours that AMD plans to release in the first quarter of 2010.

Increasing chip core counts is a way for AMD to improve performance while trying to reduce the power drawn by the processors. Adding more cores also squeezes more performance out of servers, which can reduce the total server count in datacenters. That helps cut hardware acquisition and energy costs, said Pat Patla, vice president of the server platform unit at AMD.

The 16-core chips could go into servers with between two to four sockets, which could mean a maximum of 64 cores per server. The chip will be part of the Opteron 6000 series of chips, which the company said will likely be used in datacenter servers.

The chips will be more for servers that handle a variety of applications -- including simulations and databases -- that need plenty of processing power, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

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From PC World: Apple has landed in hot water with children's groups and angry parents after temporarily approving the Baby Shaker game in the iPhone App Store on Monday. Under pressure and criticism, Apple has now removed the application from its store.

The Baby Shaker iPhone app, developed by Sikalosoft, featured multiple drawings of a baby. The player had to stop the baby from crying by shaking the phone until red X marks showed up over the baby's eyes. Baby Shaker reportedly appeared in the App Store on Monday and cost 99 cents. The app was later removed on Wednesday night.

Child advocates were at the core of the app's removal, claiming the Baby Shaker game is saying that killing babies is acceptable. Apple caved in to requests to remove the app from its store. But the surprising thing is that Apple actually allowed this app to make it in the AppStore, while other less offending apps have been previously banned -- see South Park and many more.

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From CNET News.com: MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe is stepping down from his post, but will remain on the board and serve as a "strategic adviser," parent company News Corp. announced Wednesday.

In a press release, News Corp. said DeWolfe's contract would not be renewed by "mutual decision," and that the company was in talks with MySpace President Tom Anderson to assume "a new role in the organization."

The company did not immediately name a replacement, and a company spokesperson declined to comment, but some speculate that former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta is a leading candidate.

MySpace has gone through a number of executive shakeups over the past year, including a big one late last July that saw five new executive hires at the same time as a number of departures. Three key executives announced their departure from the social-networking site in March, including Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur.

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From DailyTech: When it comes to Apple, the thing most fresh in most peoples' minds have been Microsoft's "Laptop Hunter" ads. Microsoft's three ads took direct aim at Apple's "cool" but expensive laptops and compared them to Windows Vista-based laptops which offered similar specs for hundreds less.

Despite the back and forth that has been brewing on the internet with Microsoft's fresh attack on Apple, the boys from Cupertino have something else on their minds today: Q2 2009 results for the period ending March 29. Despite the downturn in the economy, Apple as a company managed to post revenue of $8.16 billion and profit of $1.21 billion which represented earnings of $1.33 per diluted share. Apple's results for the same period last year were $7.51 billion, 1.05 billion, and $1.16 respectively.

While Microsoft's Laptop Hunter ads came too late in the quarter to personally do any serious damage to Apple's momentum with Mac sales, it appears that the slowing economy and consumers' penchant for lower-priced netbooks was the motivating factor for the three percent slide in Mac sales to 2.22 million compared to a year ago.

On the other hand, iPod sales grew a modest three percent to 11.01 million units while iPhone sales were up a whopping 123 percent from a year ago to 3.79 million units.

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From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices said Tuesday that it would cut the prices of its central processing units (CPUs) aimed at enthusiasts. The move will popularize AMD’s platforms aimed at experienced users and will also clean the way for new processors due to be introduced shortly.

According to the company, it would decrease the price of AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition chip from $225 to $150 - $200 in an attempt to “tap into a significantly larger total available market”. Besides, the company also plans to reduce the price of AMD Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition central processing unit in order to “drive an outstanding product in a key market price band with a clear competitive victory”.

AMD’s the Black Edition processors have unlocked clock multiplier, which allows enthusiasts to clock the chip higher than default frequency without any hassles that are associated with overclocking. The customizable clock multiplier and auto-adjustable memory frequency of the new chip enables amateurs and value-conscious enthusiasts to maximize the performance of their desktop computers without substantial problems. Typically enthusiasts have to increase base HyperTransport bus speed from default 200MHz, which eventually causes not only CPU clock-speed boost, but also alters HT bus and memory frequency, meaning that other components apart from the microprocessor also should be able to handle increased speeds.

The Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker plans to release new AMD Phenom II and other microprocessors with higher default clock-speeds shortly, therefore, price-cuts will clear the path for novelties.

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From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday said that in a bid to boost sales of its lucrative microprocessors for servers it would start to ship its six-core AMD Opteron central processing units code-named already in May, 2009. The company needs the new chips as although it managed to improve sales of its microprocessors in Q1 2009, the company is still deeply unprofitable.

“I am pleased to announce that because of our strong engineering execution, we are pulling in revenue shipments of Istanbul into May, with systems availability in June,” said Dirk Meyer, president and chief executive officer of AMD, during conference call with financial analysts.

AMD’s six-core Opteron processors code-named Istanbul feature 6MB of L3 cache, dual-channel DDR2 memory controller and are compatible with socket F infrastructure. The only tangible improvement over the quad-core Shanghai processors that the Istanbul chips have (besides increased amount of cores) is HyperTransport Assist feature, which works the same way as Intel’s snoop filter inside high-end chipsets for Intel Xeon processors (keeps cache coherency traffic between the two sockets from appearing on the external bus).

Drop-in compatibility of Istanbul processors with existing infrastucture allows makers of current-generation servers to install higher-performance chips into existing machines and increase their performance-per-watt without any substantial investments into development. It should be noted that since Istanbul chips are still made using 45nm fabrication process, they will not be able to reach the same clock-speeds as quad-core chips.

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