If you are a hardware engineer, system designer, driver developer, or business decision maker, you should be at WinHEC 2006 (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) that offers the best opportunity to partner in driving the future directions for the Windows hardware platform. It will be at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Seattle, USA from 23-25 May 2006.

Samsung also said that it plans to demonstrate a prototype of the first commercially available hybrid hard drive (HHD) at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle. The drive integrates NAND flash memory with the standard magnetic storage in today’s hard drives. The benefits, especially in the mobile space, are numerous. HHDs will be able to boot or resume operation up to twice as fast as a traditional hard drive, and are five times as reliable. Additionally, the drives provide an extra 20-30 minutes of battery life over their predecessors.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will demonstrate Microsoft Virtual Server enabled with an AMD virtualization processor. AMDV (formerly called Pacifica) is AMD’s virtualization firmware technology that works by adding commands to extend the basic instruction set of the hardware so it can communicate with virtualization software more efficiently, said Margaret Lewis, commercial software strategist at AMD in Sunnyvale, Calif.