Last month, Sony Japan announced an upcoming retirement of Blu-ray Disc media and other physical media formats. On January 23, the company's Recording Media department addressed its "valued customers" via a short press release. At some point in February (2025), production of "Blu-ray Disc media, MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes" will cease. Reports from late January suggest that the Recording Media division's last factory will face closure in the coming weeks, signalling the end of commercial supplies. Additionally, Sony disclosed that no "successor models" will be released. Naturally, fans of optical media formats did not welcome Sony's announcement regarding the retirement of these products.

Rival manufacturers have taken the opportunity to offer their fares—fresh news reports have pointed to an interesting Verbatim Japan office-issued press release. The Taiwanese storage specialist and I-O Data pushed out a joint statement, assuring that they: "will live up to the trust of customers through stable supply and continued sales of optical discs in the Japanese market." The two companies appear to be seizing the moment, but their announcement did not name or shame Sony: "the domestic optical disc market is currently at a major turning point, with some manufacturers withdrawing from manufacturing and sales businesses and other trends that are shrinking the supply system. Under these circumstances, Verbatim Japan is working closely with I-O DATA to continue to provide high-quality optical discs to the Japanese market, with stable supply as its top priority."

AMD is always in development mode and just when they launch a new product, the company is always gearing up for the next-generation of devices. Just a few months ago, back in November, AMD has launched its Zen 3 core, and today we get to hear about the next steps that the company is taking to stay competitive and grow its product portfolio. In the AnandTech interview with Dr. Lisa Su, and The Street interview with Rick Bergman, the EVP of AMD's Computing and Graphics Business Group, we have gathered information about AMD's plans for Zen 4 core development and RDNA 3 performance target.

Starting with Zen 4, AMD plans to migrate to the AM5 platform, bringing the new DDR5 and USB 4.0 protocols. The current aim of Zen 4 is to be extremely competitive among competing products and to bring many IPC improvements. Just like Zen 3 used many small advances in cache structures, branch prediction, and pipelines, Zen 4 is aiming to achieve a similar thing with its debut. The state of x86 architecture offers little room for improvement, however, when the advancement is done in many places it adds up quite well, as we could see with 19% IPC improvement of Zen 3 over the previous generation Zen 2 core. As the new core will use TSMC's advanced 5 nm process, there is a possibility to have even more cores found inside CCX/CCD complexes. We are expecting to see Zen 4 sometime close to the end of 2021.

PROMISE Technology Inc., the leading storage solutions provider, declared a breakthrough in data storage today, with the development of PegasusPro. The world's first data storage solution to solve the incompatibility of block-based Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) and file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS).

PegasusPro is set to revolutionize the data storage industry by offering unprecedented convenience for users as they click to convert, collaborate and transfer data at lightning speed. With FileBoost technology, PegasusPro leaps over technological hurdles to deliver a true Thunderbolt 3 DAS and NAS fusion system for a major improvement in workflow efficiency for digital media collaboration. PegasusPro is designed to enable rapid data transfer from DAS to NAS and vice-versa, a huge time saving performance improvement that is unique in the industry. Multiple team members can connect directly to PegasusPro via Thunderbolt 3, on 4K or even 8K productions; and simultaneously share their work with other team contributors over 10G NAS; all done using a simple, intuitive user interface 'PROMISE Utility Pro' after a quick and easy one-time setup procedure.

PROMISE Technology today announced that its Pegasus2 M4 and SANLink2 10G are both now globally available through PROMISE's network of distributors and value added resellers. Unveiled earlier this month at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, the new storage solutions are specifically engineered for creative professionals, and make up part of the world's first end-to-end Thunderbolt 2 to shared storage solution.

The new, small form factor Pegasus2 M4 offers a perfect combination of portability, capacity, performance, and cost. Featuring an innovative and compact design, the 2.5" HDD/SSD Thunderbolt 2 Pegasus2 M4 external RAID solution works with the new Mac Pro and is an ideal solution for professionals working both offsite and in-studio. The Pegasus2 family supports OS X Mavericks and will add support for Windows-based Thunderbolt hosts in Q2.

PROMISE Technology today announced three new Thunderbolt 2 and shared storage devices engineered for creative professionals. These new solutions will be showcased at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB) in booth SL#5329.

Pegasus2 M4 builds on the success of Pegasus2, the world's first Thunderbolt 2 hardware RAID storage solution, by delivering performance and capacity in a new, portable form factor with 2.5" drives. Featuring an innovative and compact design, the 2.5" HDD/SSD Thunderbolt 2 Pegasus2 M4 external RAID solution works with the new Mac Pro and is an ideal solution for professionals working both offsite and in-studio. The Pegasus2 M4 will also be featured as part of a workflow process at the Intel Zone in the StudioXperience booth at NAB (SU#621D1). The Pegasus2 family supports OS X Mavericks and will add support for Windows-based Thunderbolt hosts in Q2.

PROMISE Technology Inc., a leader in providing high-performance storage solutions for the rich media market and the leader in designing cutting-edge Thunderbolt enabled devices, is proud to announce creative professionals and power users on PCs can now leverage the unparalleled performance of the award-winning Pegasus J2 to power them through their creative projects. The ultra-portable PROMISE Pegasus J2, one of the first storage devices with Thunderbolt technology to be certified for PC by Intel Corporation, can deliver up to 750 MB/s of performance, yet it's pocket-sized, enabling users to harness high bandwidth to transfer, playback, or edit media directly from the Pegasus J2 from anywhere.

PROMISE Technology Inc., a leader in providing high-performance storage solutions for the rich media market and the leader in designing cutting-edge Thunderbolt enabled devices, today announced the availability of the PROMISE Pegasus J4, the first Thunderbolt enabled storage solution supporting four 2.5" hard disks and SSDs. Designed from the ground up for creative professionals and multimedia enthusiasts, the Pegasus J4 benefits from its incredible flexibility, amazing transfer speeds, and compact design which makes it stackable with a Mac mini. This makes the Pegasus J4 perfect for videographers, graphic artists, photographers and content creators for instantly backing up and editing content and moving high resolution video and graphic files that take up a lot of space at stunningly high speeds.

PROMISE Technology Inc., a leader in providing high-performance storage solutions for the rich media market and the leader in designing cutting-edge Thunderbolt enabled devices, today announced the immediate availability of the Pegasus J2, the world's smallest and fastest ultra-portable Thunderbolt storage device. Powered in AC mode the J2 will be able to achieve a blistering 750 MB/s in a device the size of a smartphone. Pegasus J2 brings an unparalleled level of performance in a small form factor to the market enabling both consumers and media professionals to manage the explosion of unstructured data and digital assets critical to their creative projects.

Compatible with all Thunderbolt enabled Macs, the PROMISE Pegasus J2 is a pocket-sized, blazing fast external storage device that offers up to half a Terabyte of storage and is available in 256GB and 512GB capacities. The Pegasus J2 is flash-based making it the ideal solution for anyone who craves extreme performance in the consumer and professional post-production markets. This addition to its internationally award winning Pegasus line boasts a cutting edge, compact product design with an emphasis on reducing the footprint coupled with reduced environmental noise. The J2 is the perfect complement for MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

PROMISE Technology today announced Pegasus, the industry's first-high performance hardware RAID solution designed to unleash the raw speed of the all-new Thunderbolt technology. Designed from the ground up for media and entertainment customers, Pegasus offers superior speed and throughput in a form factor small enough for a desktop, and is available in 4-bay and 6-bay aluminum enclosures with up to 12TB of raw storage.

"Intel is excited about the superior performance and simplicity Thunderbolt technology and PROMISE's Pegasus family of products will bring to consumers and media professionals trying to keep up with the explosion of digital media," said Jason Ziller, Director, Thunderbolt Planning and Marketing, Intel Corporation.