Something is happening at AMD. After a few years of pushing products into the market that were just ok, there is a flurry of activity surrounding new products. New designs like the Propus a.k.a. Athlon II X4 are extremely attractive solutions not only in the mid-range but also in the lower market segment. For situations where a quad core still may be overkill when it comes to the bare minimum of an energy-conservative set-top box as the center of a home theater PC new dual cores are available. In this case, low power is all the rage, as long as there is enough horse power to run home theater application in whatever format, including blue ray. This is where the “Regor” core used in the new dual core Athlon II X 2 250 already created a rush of excitement.

Aside from power, there are other considerations, the most important one potentially being the pricing. At an introductory price of roughly US$ 70.-, the ‘250 is already a bargain chip, but at the same time, there are still improvements possible, both with respect to the TDP of 65 W and also, to dispel the latest doubts regarding who might be the undisputed king of the budget performers when it comes to a price/power/performance ratio. The latest release from AMD targets exactly this type of metric by carpet bombing the shelves with a solution for anybody regardless of where the preferences are. Changes in the line up include optional lowering of the TDP to 45W and the suggested pricing to US$ 60.-. But, you can't have both, the low power edition with the coveted "e" suffix does command a price premium.

And the performance .. the default core frequency has been lowered to 2.8 GHz but we’ll talk about the ramifications in just a little bit. The other thing creating some kind of a buzz for AMD has been the introduction of triple-core processors. Give them whatever code name may float around in the form and shape of celestial bodies, Toliman, Heka, it really doesn’t matter since the hardware is exactly the same as in the comparable quad-core equivalent of Agena or Deneb or Propus, in which case the triple core is code-named Rana. Rana is an interesting choice of name, though, ever seen a frog with three legs? Exactly!

Solid State Drives have entered the market and are capturing market share not only in the desktop segment but also in the enterprise market. This is true especially in data centers where access latencies, reliability and power consumption easily offset the initial cost overhead.

The predominant SSD storage medium at this moment is NAND flash memory and this is not likely to change in the near future even though new technologies such as phase change memory, magnetoresistive memory, resistive memory, organic memory, nanotube-based memory and finally NOR flash are on the horizon. NAND flash memory has some peculiarities; some of them are making it the media of choice in the current technology landscape, others, though, are posing some severe limitations with respect to the applicability of NAND flash as a drop-in replacement for rotatable media, at least for those unaware of the possible pitfalls.

In the first installment of this series, we'll take another technology deep dive into NAND technology and in the following articles apply the insights into the NAND idiosyncrasies to Solid State Drive management in order to optimize performance, minimize wear, and most importantly, maintain performance over the live of an ageing drive.