OCZ Talks About The Future
Our last stop before heading out of Vegas back toward sunny southern California was OCZ’s suite in the Bellagio, where it had set up small kiosks with existing and upcoming products.
One corner of the suite featured a Hypersonic PC with four of OCZ’s SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration saturating the limits of the PCIe interface linking the SATA controller to the southbridge logic. Up against the opposite wall was a mock-up of a chassis that the company plans to start selling under the OCZ brand.
Next to that was a 1,500VA battery backup unit with a pure sine wave output—the ideal waveform for a UPS to generate, as it most closely matches the AC signal you’d get from a wall. Apparently, customers running the company’s high-end power supplies have been encountering problems when plugging in to a less-expensive battery backup unit and then trying to run on battery backup. The resulting square wave wreaks havoc on the signal, shutting down the power supply. UPSes with pure sine wave output are already available, but they’re much more expensive. The model that’ll be coming from PC Power and Cooling should hit a much more enthusiast-friendly price point and still maximize the output of a single 15 A wall socket.
The opposite end of the room was all about Hypersonic’s notebooks—specifically an experimental new design with a slide-out LCD called Sonic Boom ATS, yielding two screens. I use three displays to work, so shifting over to a 12.1” notebook on the road makes it hard to acclimate. Obviously, expanding to a pair of screens would have serious ramifications on power consumption and battery life, but on a mobile workstation primarily drawing power from wall outlets, we think the concept is great.
Finally, we managed to catch OCZ’s vice president of product development (and the brains behind lostcircuits.com), Dr. Michael Schuette, toying with what he calls his latest invention: the Neural Impulse Actuator in wireless form. The project is interesting because it not only makes using OCZ’s NIA more convenient, but it also eliminates the ground loop noise that’d interfere with signals read from the previous model. The new iteration will be easier to calibrate and purportedly more precise in operation.
