The Wii U continues to disappoint

It looks as though Nintendo just can’t catch a break this decade, having just reported its third straight full year of losses. For fiscal 2013, Nintendo had an operating loss of $457 million and net loss of $228 million as sales of its Wii U continue to sputter in the marketplace.

Even more disappointing is that the operating loss figure is actually worse than the already reduced forecast that Nintendo gave back in January. At the time, Nintendo forecast fiscal year operating losses of $394 million.

Since its lukewarm introduction in late 2012, Nintendo has only managed to sell 6.17 million Wii U consoles. Nintendo was only able to sell 2.72 million Wii U consoles during fiscal 2013.

For comparison’s sake, Sony managed to sell 6 million of its pricier PlayStation 4 consoles in just four months.

Nintendo acknowledges that it “still faces a challenging sales situation?" and that it “will focus on efforts that seek to stimulate the platform?"

Looking forward, Nintendo is banking on the success of the two upcoming titles to reinvigorate the platform: Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. Mario Kart 8 alone should be enough to delight existing Wii U owners, but it remains to be seen how many fresh Wii U customers it can bring in with the title.

But while Wii U numbers were definitely disappointing, Nintendo was definitely more upbeat about the performance of the 3DS. Nintendo was able to move 12.24 million units of the popular handheld console and 67.89 million 3DS games during the fiscal year.

Source: Nintendo [PDF]


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Inheriting the legacy of core-memory, ST-MRAM promises 10x bandwidth, 10x density, and 1/3rd the power vs. NAND

According to a story published by The Nihon Keizai Shimbun's (Nikkei) "Asian Review" section, more than twenty major American and Japanese semiconductor firms have formed a new collaborative alliance, which will work together to develop next generation memory technologies. The group's aim is to develop consumer-ready magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM). MRAM is a technology that some are hoping will replace both long term storage devices (e.g. magnetic hard disc drives and Flash storage) and volatile memory (e.g. DRAM).

More info at source: The Nihon Keizai Shimbun



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OCZ launches new enterprise class SSD

OCZ has updated its Deneva 2 enterprise SSDs by incorporating 19nm toggle mode NAND. The SSD uses 19 nm NAND flash. The new 2.5??? SSD family continues to use a 2.5??? form-factor and features a SATA III interface.

OCZ says the new Deneva 2 SSDs also use a completely new power architecture design to optimize server backplane functionality. This optimized power architecture also offers enhanced management of in-rush current and power fluctuations. Those features increase the drives performance and give it better endurance, reliability, and better quality.

Deneva 2 uses the LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller that and promises up to 550 MB/s read speeds and up to 520 MB/s write speed. The drive also has random read throughput with 4K blocks of over 45,000 IOPS.

The SSD is available in 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB capacities, however pricing for the SSD's is unannounced at this time.

Source: OCZ
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