Samsung teams up with Microsoft on Xbox 360, Longhorn

Samsung said it will promote the Xbox 360 on Samsung high definition televisions since the XBox 360 will pump out the pixels in a format to support HDTV.

A senior Samsung Veep in ths US said Samsung had "selected Microsoft Xbox as the best next-generation game console and a key driver in the global HDTV revolution."

Microsoft will return the favour by plugging Samsung in some games on the console, we learned.

Earlier, Samsung said its OneNAND Flash memory had been incorporated into the design of Microsoft prototype Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD), which the Vole is plugging into Longhorn, its upcoming Windows revamp.

Samsung said the hybrid hard drive architecture incorporates a small OneNAND device from Samsung that works within the hard disk's architecture. The hybrid device will introduce magnetic storage and solid state storage without compromising the cost of the computer housing it, the company said.

A hybrid hard drive prototype using 1 Gigabit OneNAND Flash as both the write buffer and boot buffer was shown off at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle.

Samsung reckons that while the cost of hybrid disk drives may increase with the addition of OneNAND, any increase would be mitigated by factors such as lower maintenance costs, 95 percent power savings when the disk is not spinning, faster boot time and substantially increased reliability. µ