It's standards day at Nordic PC, with the ratification of two new standards: "Serial ATA International Organization: Serial ATA Revision 3.0" and HDMI 1.4. Here's what you need to know:

Serial ATA International Organization: Serial ATA Revision 3.0

First off, SATA Revision 3.0 is not SATA 3, nor is it SATA III or anything else that would make sense. According to the SATA-IO: "For marketing and product naming purposes, the technology itself is to be referred to as 'SATA 6Gb/s.' A product using this standard should be called the 'SATA 6Gb/s [product name].'" I personally think this is ridiculous, but hey, what do I know. I'm going to call it SATA Revision 3.0, because there's a lot more to it besides just the speed.

SATA Revision 3.0 does bump the signaling speed to a whopping 6Gb/s, or 768 Megabytes every second. If you could saturate the entire pipeline, you could copy a 40GB Blu-Ray disk in less than a minute. That's quickness. There are currently no products that will be able to touch that kind of speed, with the fastest SSDs only moving at about 250MB/s, but the pipeline will be there once drives catch up.

Possibly more importantly, SATA Revision 3.0 also brings enhancements to the way that drives process data. Native Command Queuing has been there since SATA 3Gb/s, but now the drives can even more efficiently arrange data to be written. While this doesn't really help SSDs, it should give a nice boost to mechanical drives. The folks over at the Register put it beautifully saying "Think, for example, of an elevator. It doesn't matter in which order an elevator's floor buttons are pushed, it'll stop at each floor in sequence. So with NCQ." Even more so, NCQ has been tweaked for better video streaming support, which should help those of us with really fragmented drives.

Another addition to the specification is a mechanical one. A new Low Insertion Force connector has been designed for use with little drives in little netbooks. No more will we need PCI-Express SSDs or 1.8" IDE drives, we can have SATA 1.8" SSDs that perform.

Lastly, power management features have been uped, which should also help out netbooks and notebooks, as well as data centers that rely on cheap, consumer-grade, mechanical drives for storage. Google does this, if you didn't know.

HDMI 1.4

HDMI 1.4 is a much easier specification to read and type, and as the number would suggest, this is a fairly minor revision to the spec. They have bumped the speed which will now allow for the insane resolution of 4096 x 2160 at 24hz. That's 4096i in TV terms. This is the resolution that digital theaters use, so don't expect to be seeing 9 megapixel LCDs anytime soon. Conveniently, this speed is also fast enough to send two 1080p streams, which will allow for alternate-frame 3D. That means 120hz 1080p LCDs that become 3D with a pair of stereoscopic glasses.

HDMI 1.4 also brings in the ability to run Ethernet traffic through the cable, although only at 10/100 speeds. The piece I read about it claims this is more for the automotive industry, but I'd love to see an AV receiver that takes in a piece of CAT-5e to an internal switch that then makes any device plugged up over HDMI online. Currently, there is an extra Ethernet switch in most AV racks, but that could go away with this advancement.

And lastly, there is a new connector that, like SATA Revision 3.0's, is all about small devices. This new mini connector is roughly half of the size of the previous one, and is looking to show up in digital cameras for direct-to-TV picture viewing. If someone thinks of it, you could also upload your pictures through your TV over the Ethernet connection, but we'll see if anyone is smart enough to put the two together.

Well, that's about it for me today. Take care everyone.