Week in hardware: Netbooks, SSDs, ARM, and Atom

March traditionally roars in like a lion, and we’ve got a meaty gazelle’s worth of hardware goodness to share with you this week. If your own prowl across the savannah was less than fruitful, feel free to indulge in ours.

The 32″ OLED TV: A possible downturn victim: This is one story that I hope isn’t true, even if our feature editor wrote it (sorry, Jon). OLED televisions don’t interest me much, but an OLED monitor is something I’d really love to own. Jon digs into why OLED displays are currently stuck at 14.1″, and how the current economic downturn could push the introduction of larger screens out past the 2010 timeframe.

SSDs likely to help 6.0Gbps SATA3 to reach speed potential: On the brighter side of things, AMD and Seagate demonstrated hard drives running on the 6.0Gbps SATA3 standard this week. Despite their own impressive results, standard hard drives won’t benefit that much from the interface—no mechanical hard drive can keep that interface saturated in a sustained test—but SSDs will be a different story. With additional power management features and better NCQ support, SATA3 could be a worthwhile feature on your next motherboard purchase.

Analyst projects ARM in 55 percent of netbooks by 2012: Could ARM overturn Atom’s dominance in the nascent netbook market? At least one analyst thinks so, and the entire sub-notebook sector is new enough to make an upset possible. Intel, on the other hand, isn’t exactly going to roll over and go away just because a few upstart manufacturers with a viable product wave it in a vaguely threatening manner.

NVIDIA launches investment arm to stimulate GPGPU demand: NVIDIA is serious—very serious—about convincing consumers and companies alike that the ~~stream processors~~ CUDA processing units at the heart of every GeForce are built for far more than video card performance. The company has launched a separate investment branch to create business opportunities and fund ventures aimed at doing so.

Sun hammering away at solid-state market, system bottlenecks: More SSD news this week, this time from Sun. The company has been blowing the SSD trumpet hard for over a year and continues to introduce what it calls “hybrid storage” products, or storage systems built on a mixture of DRAM, SSD, and conventional enterprise HDDs.

The Foundry Company now armed, fully operational, and on the prowl for customers: A bit of double-coverage on the new Globalfoundries this week as the company unveils its new name, spins into existence, and heads to Taiwan for customers. This could pose problems for AMD’s long-term relations with rival foundries like TSMC, particularly if Globalfoundries begins attempting to poach the former’s clients.

Intel X25-E to be deployed in Pillar SAN: Pillar Data Systems announced it would begin using Intel X25-E SSDs in its SAN products this week, making it the second major storage provider to announce products based on Intel’s new enterprise SSD. Pillar believes these drives aren’t just faster than the Fibre channel hardware they’d replace, but are more power efficient and ultimately more economical as well.

New VIA VX855 promises new features on older technology: VIA’s latest Media System Processor is meant as an all-in-one solution for ultra-low-power sub-notebooks, but will the tiny chip be able to provide enough oomph to give users the features they want? Ars investigates.