OLED panels have a number of advantages, including deep blacks, fast response times, and energy efficiency; most of these stemming from the fact that they do not need backlighting. However they also have drawbacks, as well, as trying to drive them to be as bright as a high-tier LCD will quickly wear out the organic material used. Researchers have been spending the past couple of decades developing ways to prolong the lifespans of OLED materials, and recently LG has put together a novel (if brute force) solution: halve the work by doubling the number of pixels. This is the basis of the company's new tandem OLED technology, which has recently gone into mass production.
The Tandem OLED technology introduced by LG Display uses two stacks of red, green, and blue (RGB) organic light-emitting layers, which are layered on top fo each other, essentially reducing how bright each layer needs to individually be in order to hit a specific cumulative brightness. By combining multiple OLED pixels running at a lower brightness, tandem OLED displays are intended to offer higher brightness and durability than traditional single panel OLED displays, reducing the wear on the organic materials in normal situations – and by extension, making it possible to crank up the brightness of the panels well beyond what a single panel could sustain without cooking itself. Overall, LG claims that tandem panels can hit over three-times the brightness of standard OLED panels.
The switch to tandem panels also comes with energy efficiency benefits, as the power consumption of OLED pixels is not linear with the output brightness. According to LG, their tandem panels consume up to 40% less power. More interesting from the manufacturing side of matters, LG's tandem panel stack is 40% thinner (and 28%) lighter than existing OLED laptop screens, despite having to get a whole second layer of pixels in there.
In terms of specifications, the 13-inch tandem OLED panel feature a WQXGA+ (2880×1800) resolution and can cover 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. The panel is also certified to meet VESA's Display HDR True Black 500 requirements, which among other things, requires that it can hit 500 nits of brightness. And given that this tech is meant to go into tablets and laptops, it shouldn't come as any surprise that the display panel is also touch sensitive, as well.
"We will continue to strengthen the competitiveness of OLED products for IT applications and offer differentiated customer value based on distinctive strengths of Tandem OLED, such as long life, high brightness, and low power consumption," said Jae-Won Jang, Vice President and Head of the Medium Display Product Planning Division at LG Display.
Without any doubts, LG's Tandem OLED display panel looks impressive. The company is banking on it doing well in the high-end laptop and tablet markets, where manufacturers have been somewhat hesitant to embrace OLED displays due to power concerns. The technology has already been adopted by Apple for their most recent iPad Pro tablets, and now LG is making it available to a wider group of OEMs.
What remains to be seen is the technology's cost. Computer-grade OLED panels are already a more expensive option, and this one ups the ante with two layers of OLED pixels. So it isn't a question of whether it will be reserved for premium, high-margin devices, but a matter of just how much it will add to the final price tag.
For now, LG Display does not disclose which PC OEMs are set to use its 13-inch Tandem OLED panel, though as the company is a supplier to virtually all of the PC OEMs, there's little doubt it should crop up in multiple laptops soon enough.
DisplaysMicron: U.S. Fabs Will Start Operating in 2026 - 2029 When Micron announced plans to build two new fabs in the U.S. in 2022, the company vaguely said both would come online by the decade's end. Then, in 2023, it began to optimize its spending, which pushed production at these fabrication facilities. This week, the company outlined more precise timeframes for when its fabs in Idaho and New York will start operations: this will happen from calendar 2026 to calendar 2029. "These fab construction investments are necessary to support supply growth for the latter half of this decade," a statement by Micron in its Q3 FY2024 financial results report reads. "This Idaho fab will not contribute to meaningful bit supply until fiscal 2027 and the New York construction capex is not expected to contribute to bit supply growth until fiscal 2028 or later. The timing of future [wafer fab equipment] spend in these fabs will be managed to align supply growth with expected demand growth." Micron's fiscal year 2027 starts in September 2026, so the new fab near Boise, Idaho, is set to start operations between September 2026 and September 2027. The company's fiscal 2028 starts in September 2027, so the fab will likely begin operations in calendar 2028 or later, probably depending on the demand for DRAM memory in the coming years. That said, Micron's U.S. memory fabs will begin operations between late 2026 and 2029, which aligns with the company's original plans. Construction of the fab in Idaho is well underway. In contrast, construction of the New York facility has yet to begin as the company is working on regulatory and permitting processes in the state. Micron's capital expenditure (CaPex) plan for FY2024 is approximately $8.0 billion, with a decrease in year-over-year spending on wafer fabrication equipment (WFE). In Q4 FY2024, the company will spend around $3 billion on fab construction, new wafer fab tools, and various expansions/upgrades. Looking ahead to FY2025, the company plans a substantial increase in capex, targeting a mid-30s percentage of revenue to support various technological and facility advancements. In particular, it expects its quarterly CapEx to average above the $3 billion level seen in the fourth quarter of FY2024, which means that it plans to spend about $12 billion in its fiscal 2025, which begins in late September. Half or more of the total CapEx increase in FY2025 (i.e., over $2 billion) will be allocated to constructing new fabs in Idaho and New York. Meanwhile, the FY2025 CapEx will significantly rise to fund high-bandwidth memory (HBM) assembly and testing and the construction of fabrication and back-end facilities. This increase also includes investments in technology transitions to meet growing demand. "Fab construction in Idaho is underway, and we are working diligently to complete the regulatory and permitting processes in New York," said Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive officer of Micron, at the company's conference call with investors and financial analysts (via SeekingAlpha). "This additional leading-edge greenfield capacity, along with continued technology transition investments in our Asia facilities, is required to meet long-term demand in the second half of this decade and beyond. These investments support our objective to maintain our current bit share over time and to grow our memory bit supply in line with long-term industry bit demand." Memory
Antec's 'Performance 1M' Mini-ITX Chassis Can House a GeForce RTX 4090 With the highly integrated nature of PCs these days, the Mini-ITX form-factor has become a very viable option for high-performance gaming system. With plenty of motherboards available for both AMD and Intel's latest platforms, equipping an ITX system with a CPU is easy enough. But the small size of the form factor means that housing an ultra-wide flagship-level graphics card remains an issue. For this year's Computex trade show, Antec was showing off their solution to the problem of giant video cards: the Performance 1M case, a Mini-ITX case with a separate chamber just for a large video card. Antec's Performance 1M is a dual-chamber Mini-ITX chassis that splits off the video card from the rest of the system. The primary chamber houses a Mini-ITX motherboard and an SFX power supply, while the secondary chamber houses a huge graphics card. Notably, the two chambers are bridged using a PCIe riser cable, allowing the motherboard chamber to be far shorter than even a half-height PCIe card, while the video card chamber can hold a triple-slot video card parallel to the motherboard chamber, cutting down on wasted space. For Antec's Computex demo, the company had a triple-slot ASUS GeForce RTX 4090 installed to showcase how this worked. Antec's decision to allocate most of the case's volume to th video card chamber does come with a slight catch, however: it doesn't leave much space for a CPU cooler in the motherboard chamber. The short motherboard chamber means that system builders will have to use a low-profile cooler; these are readily available, but it does leave less thermal headroom overall for high-end CPUs. So there are still trade-offs for being able to accommodate a high-end video card. Otherwise, the Performance 1M chassis from Antec look very stylish and are traditionally well built from stainless steel and aluminum. The chassis can be equipped with two 120-mm or two 140-mm coolers for extra airflow (which will help performance), one 2.5-inch SATA SSD, and even some RGB bling. To make the PC built inside a Performance 1M case more convenient to use, there are two USB Type-C ports on the front. Of course, housing a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card in a Mini-ITX chassis has its peculiarities when it comes to dimensions and Antec's Performance 1M measures 424×175×260mm, which is pretty large. On the other hand, for an ultra-high-performance gaming system, this is pretty compact. Antec's Performance 1M Mini-ITX chassis will be available in gunmetal gray and matte black colors sometimes later this year. Pricing is something that the company is thinking about now, though keep in mind that we are talking about unique premium products. Cases/Cooling/PSUs
G.Skill on Tuesday introduced its ultra-low-latency DDR5-6400 memory modules that feature a CAS latency of 30 clocks, which appears to be the industry's most aggressive timings yet for DDR5-6400 sticks. The modules will be available for both AMD and Intel CPU-based systems.
With every new generation of DDR memory comes an increase in data transfer rates and an extension of relative latencies. While for the vast majority of applications, the increased bandwidth offsets the performance impact of higher timings, there are applications that favor low latencies. However, shrinking latencies is sometimes harder than increasing data transfer rates, which is why low-latency modules are rare.
Nonetheless, G.Skill has apparently managed to cherry-pick enough DDR5 memory chips and build appropriate printed circuit boards to produce DDR5-6400 modules with CL30 timings, which are substantially lower than the CL46 timings recommended by JEDEC for this speed bin. This means that while JEDEC-standard modules have an absolute latency of 14.375 ns, G.Skill's modules can boast a latency of just 9.375 ns – an approximately 35% decrease.
G.Skill's DDR5-6400 CL30 39-39-102 modules have a capacity of 16 GB and will be available in 32 GB dual-channel kits, though the company does not disclose voltages, which are likely considerably higher than those standardized by JEDEC.
The company plans to make its DDR5-6400 modules available both for AMD systems with EXPO profiles (Trident Z5 Neo RGB and Trident Z5 Royal Neo) and for Intel-powered PCs with XMP 3.0 profiles (Trident Z5 RGB and Trident Z5 Royal). For AMD AM5 systems that have a practical limitation of 6000 MT/s – 6400 MT/s for DDR5 memory (as this is roughly as fast as AMD's Infinity Fabric can operate at with a 1:1 ratio), the new modules will be particularly beneficial for AMD's Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000-series processors.
G.Skill notes that since its modules are non-standard, they will not work with all systems but will operate on high-end motherboards with properly cooled CPUs.
The new ultra-low-latency memory kits will be available worldwide from G.Skill's partners starting in late August 2024. The company did not disclose the pricing of these modules, but since we are talking about premium products that boast unique specifications, they are likely to be priced accordingly.
MemoryAt FMS 2024, the technological requirements from the storage and memory subsystem took center stage. Both SSD and controller vendors had various demonstrations touting their suitability for different stages of the AI data pipeline - ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inference. Vendors like Solidigm have different types of SSDs optimized for different stages of the pipeline. At the same time, controller vendors have taken advantage of one of the features introduced recently in the NVM Express standard - Flexible Data Placement (FDP).
FDP involves the host providing information / hints about the areas where the controller could place the incoming write data in order to reduce the write amplification. These hints are generated based on specific block sizes advertised by the device. The feature is completely backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working just as before with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa.
Silicon Motion's MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was announced back in 2022. Since then, Silicon Motion has been touting the flexibility of the platform, allowing its customers to incorporate their own features as part of the customization process. This approach is common in the enterprise space, as we have seen with Marvell's Bravera SC5 SSD controller in the DapuStor SSDs and Microchip's Flashtec controllers in the Longsys FORESEE enterprise SSDs.
At FMS 2024, the company was demonstrating the advantages of flexible data placement by allowing a single QLC SSD based on their MonTitan platform to take part in different stages of the AI data pipeline while maintaining the required quality of service (minimum bandwidth) for each process. The company even has a trademarked name (PerformaShape) for the firmware feature in the controller that allows the isolation of different concurrent SSD accesses (from different stages in the AI data pipeline) to guarantee this QoS. Silicon Motion claims that this scheme will enable its customers to get the maximum write performance possible from QLC SSDs without negatively impacting the performance of other types of accesses.
Silicon Motion and Phison have market leadership in the client SSD controller market with similar approaches. However, their enterprise SSD controller marketing couldn't be more different. While Phison has gone in for a turnkey solution with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the white label route for this generation, and instead opting to get the SSDs qualified with different cloud service providers themselves), Silicon Motion is opting for a different approach. The flexibility and customization possibilities can make platforms like the MonTitan appeal to flash array vendors.
Storage
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