CES: The deluge begins
Perpendicular-recording HDDs, multimedia processors, highlight pre-show announcements.
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor -- EDN, January 4, 2006
The news is already flowing fast and furious in Las Vegas, one day before Bill Gates' kick-off keynote, and the announcements nicely follow the video-centric show predictions I made earlier.
I expected HDD vendors to announce drives based on bit-packing perpendicular recording technology at this CES. Yesterday, Seagate pulled the trigger on its first perpendicular-based Momentus 2.5-in. HDD, a 160-Gbyte model that, according to the vendor, "provides 30% more capacity than comparably sized drives." I'll quibble a bit with Seagate's math. The company is now shipping a 120-Gbyte Momentus HDD based on conventional recording. But this is a notable first in what will undoubtedly be a flood of perpendicular-based HDD announcements in the coming months.
Cornice doesn't yet employ perpendicular recording (although it is demonstrating a proof-of-concept at the show), but the company was still able to more than double the maximum capacity of its 1-in. HDD line. How? The latest-generation 8- and 10-Gbyte Dragon HDDs, in a first-time move for Cornice, employ dual heads, one for each side of the platter, thus doubling the prior generation's 4-Gbyte capacity. The drives also incorporate Agere's latest TrueStore chipset (specifically, an improved preamplifier) to squeeze an additional 1 Gbyte of capacity onto each side of the platter. Cornice has also shrunk the drives' volume by 30% and has made reductions in power consumption. I suspect, as I first wrote after the 2004 CES, that the majority of PMR activity, for all HDD vendors, will occur with form factors of 2.5-in. and below. After all, the largest available 3.5-in. HDDs, with 500-Gbyte capacities, enable the storage of more than 50 hours' worth of HDTV content.
Finally, LSI Logic has unveiled a new multimedia processor architecture it calls ZEVIO. No specific products based on ZEVIO have yet been announced, and many of the architecture details at this point aren't yet public, so stay tuned for future reports. It's a flexible approach that LSI Logic claims can translate concepts into prototypes in as little as six months, and it mixes and matches various cores: ARM CPUs, ZSP DSPs, video codecs, 2D and 3D graphics, and 2D and 3D sound processors. Its performance will be moderate in comparison with the company's current DoMiNo-based consumer line, but the company touts it as, for the first time, enabling multimedia devices with sub-$100 price tags, representing a total available market that will grow from 300 million units in 2005 to 400 million units in 2009.
I've got a five-plus hour drive ahead of me, so I'm going to pack up and hit the road. Stay tuned for my next report after tonight's keynote.
