This & That

This & That

Nehalem coming

The next processor family from Intel (www.intel.com
) will be Penryn, the first 45-nm CPU, due out this month. Intel made a second announcement at the recent Intel Developers Forum: the Nehalem processor, the generation coming after Penryn. This chip will feature a new high-speed point-to-point serial bus called QuickPath that will connect memory to its eight cores.

Intel’s use of QuickPath indicates the approach AMD (www.amd.com
) began with its multiport HyperTransport interconnect technology was a pretty good idea, at least now that we need to connect multiple cores. Nehalem wiil feature scalable performance of 1 to 16+ threads, 1 to 8+ cores, scalable cache sizes, scalable and configurable system interconnects and memory controllers, and a high-performance graphics engine. It has 731 million transistors and is said to be on track for production in the second half of 2008.

Remote access with a twist

Buffalo Technology’s (www.buffalotech.com) TeraStation Live NAS devices are standard external storage devices, available in capacities of 1, 2, and 5 Tbytes. An interesting addition is its Web Access feature, which allows users to easily access and share digital files at any time, from anywhere in the world.

The TeraStation includes its own dynamic DNS server so users simply log onto www.buffaloNAS.com
, enter their user name and instantly have access to all of their files. Because there is no need to download software, setup is a breeze. Web Access uses UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) and requires no firewall configuration for seamless communication to any Web browser. And there are no recurring service fees. The 1-Tbyte model costs $699.