Seagate Cuts Warranty Even Further

Seagate had just sent a letter to authorized distributors where they've said:

Effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from a 5 year to a 3 year warranty period for Nearline drives, 5 years to 1 year for certain Desktop and Notebook Bare Drives, 5 years to 3 years on Barracuda XT and Momentus XT, and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics.

The details on the new warranty periods are as follows:

Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives: 3 years
Barracuda and Barracuda Green 3.5-inch drives: 1 year
Barracuda XT: 3 years
Momentus 2.5-inch (5400 and 7200rpm): 1 year
Momentus XT: 3 years
SV35 Series - Video Surveillance: 2 years
Pipeline HD Mini, Pipeline HD: 2 years

Seagate stated that they are standardizing warranty "to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries. By aligning to current industry standards Seagate can continue to focus its investments on technology innovation and unique product features that drive value for our customers rather than holding long-term reserves for warranty returns".

Western Digital Cuts Warranty

Western Digital sent out a letter to its channel partners informing them that Caviar Blue, Caviar Green, and Scorpio Blue drives will have their warranties slashed from three years to two years. Caviar Black and Scorpio Black will remain unaffected.

Channel partners have received a letter from SelectWD about this:

This new warranty policy will be effective for drives shipped from January 2nd, 2012. It is important that you take a moment to update your website(s) and collateral to reflect this change for effected drives shipped after January 1st, 2012.

All drives shipped to distributors prior to Jan. 2nd 2012 will retain the current warranty terms. Because of existing inventory in the distribution channel there will be a short period of time when some drives with a 3-year warranty will be sold at the same time as drives with a 2-year warranty.

If you have any doubt about the warranty of a drive you purchased, you can go to support.wdc.com, select Warranty and RMA Services and proceed to the Warranty Check page.

The letter goes on to say "In the near future we will be unveiling an extended warranty offering with special pricing." At this time, there's no explanation why WD is reducing its warranty term.

AMD and nVidia Refresh Mainstream Mobile GPUs

AMD and nVidia have both introduced their next-generation mobility GPUs, the Radeon HD 7000M and GeForce 600M, but initially only for mainstream.

AMD refreshes include Radeon HD 7600M, 7500M and 7400M. The HD 7400M series is based on the same Seymour XT chip powering HD 6400M. The same applies for HD 7600M, based on Whistler, which powered HD 6600M/6700M. However, in both cases, the HD 7000M parts should end up faster due to higher clocks. HD 7600M should end up performing more like HD 6700M. HD 7500M is now based on 480SP Whistler, over 400SP Capilano for the HD 6500M, and also introducing GDDR5 memory with a 64-bit memory bus. However, some SKUs in the HD 7500M series will continue to utilize DDR3.

nVidia's new products include GeForce GT 635M, GT 630M and 610M. There are no changes whatsoever and are direct rebrands of GeForce 500M GPUs. The GT 635M replaces all the variants of GT 555M, GT 540M is rebranded as GT 630M and GeForce 520MX is now GeForce 610M.

Those new GPUs are still manufactured with TSMC 40nm fab process. The true next-gen with 28nm will most likely find its way as HD 7700M, 7800M and 7900M, as well as GT 635M to GTX 690M, in 2012.

AMD Apologize for Incorrect Bulldozer Transistor Count

The company initially told everyone in the press, that Bulldozer/Zambezi chips were made up of two billion transistors. It turns out that the transistor count number AMD supplied to the press was incorrect. Today AMD made following statements:

We always strive to be proactive and open. Last week, AMD confirmed the transistor count in the AMD FX CPU line-up at 1.2 billion, a correction from the earlier count of 2 billion. The earlier figure of 2 billion transistors was unfortunately shared in error. This correction is not the result of a new revision to the Bulldozer design. The correct count of 1.2 billion applies to all recently introduced 8-core AMD processors that are based on the new Bulldozer core – AMD FX family of desktop CPUs and AMD Opteron™ family of server and HPC processors. We apologize for the confusion.