Samsung Shows Why Thin Is In for Chips, Hard Drives, HD TVs

by Chris Preimesberger

Samsung is one of the few IT hardware suppliers that produces hard disk drives and NAND- and NOR-based flash drives along with DVD and Blu-ray optical drives. The company has refreshed its entire line for 2010 in all those categories.

Like Hewlett-Packard with its notebooks and laptops, Samsung has heard from its customers that black, white and gray are boring. User want personalized colors and decorative enhancements for their personal computers. These compact external hard drives—with up to 640GB of capacity—come in a plethora of colors and can fit inside a coat pocket.

The new Samsung MP4 SATA drive features a swift 3G bps of throughput on a fast 7200 rpm spindle. The trend in enterprise data centers now is to replace older, slower 3.5-inch drives with new ones like this.

These Samsung G2 Series portable hard drives carry 640GB of content, come in four colors, and are only 3 inches wide and 0.6 inches thick.

Samsung showed off its latest 30-nanometer chips (2GB, DDR3) at the show. The company plans to keep shrinking chips down to the 10-nm class.

This 11.6-inch thin display for notebook computers gained a lot of attention. It’s as thin as a pencil, yet offers high-definition quality.

Samsung demonstrated wall-size, HD LCD television screens like this one, garnering plenty of attention from analysts and media folks. This one is made up of nine 46-inch panels that hook together in back and can go up to about 7 feet high. The picture quality is flat-out impressive. Samsung said it is working on making the partitions smaller so as to be less noticeable.

As you can see, the Samsung Wall TV is only about 4 inches thick. “Thin and light” were the key descriptors at this event. The company’s other thin-screen TV screens are now light enough that “They are like hanging a painting on the wall,” Samsung marketing executive Scott Birnbaum said.

There’s a real trend toward smaller, faster hard drives now, whether it’s for enterprise or consumer use. This portable media player features an embedded Samsung S2 500GB hard drive.

These tiny MovieNAND chips for smartphones and other connected devices feature a 17-die stack of 2GB multilevel NAND flash processors plus a controller. Entire package size: 14 by 18 by 1.4 nm.

The old standby, dynamic RAM, remains very important to new-generation devices but is often overlooked when companies talk about advances in NAND flash and HDDs. Samsung has been working quietly to cut power requirements for DRAM, which has always been a power hog.