Tag: Reviews

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. this week released its financial results for Q1 2024. Due to a rebound in demand for semiconductors, the company garned $18.87 billion in revenue for the quarter, which is up 12.9% year-over-year, but a decline of 3.8% quarter-over-quarter. The company says that in increase in demand for HPC processors (which includes processors for AI, PCs, and servers) drove its revenue rebound in Q1, but surprisingly, revenue share of TSMC's flagship N3 (3nm-class) process technology declined steeply quarter-over-quarter. "Our business in the first

This week ASML is making two very important announcements related to their progress with high numerical aperature extreme ultraviolet lithography (High-NA EUV). First up, the company's High-NA EUV prototype system at its fab in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, has printed the first 10nm patterns, which is a major milestone for ASML and their next-gen tools. Second, the company has also revealed that it's second High-NA EUV system is now out the door as well, and has been shipped to an unnamed customer. "Our High-NA EUV system in Veldhoven printed the first-ever 10 nanometer dense lines," a statement by ASML reads. "Imaging was done after optics, sensors and stages completed coa

While neuromorphic computing remains under research for the time being, efforts into the field have continued to grow over the years, as have the capabilities of the specialty chips that have been developed for this research. Following those lines, this morning Intel and Sandia National Laboratories are celebrating the deployment of the Hala Point neuromorphic system, which the two believe is the highest capacity system in the world. With 1.15 billion neurons overall, Hala Point is the largest deployment yet for Intel’s Loihi 2 neuromorphic chip, which was first announced at the tail-end of 2021. The Hala Point system incorporates 1152 Loihi

Samsung today has announced that they have developed an even faster generation of LPDDR5X memory that is set to top out at LPDDR5X-10700 speeds. The updated memory is slated to offer 25% better performance and 30% greater capacity compared to existing mobile DRAM devices from the company. The new chips also appear to be tangibly faster than Micron's LPDDR5X memory and SK hynix's LPDDR5T chips. Samsung's forthcoming LPDDR5X devices feature a data transfer rate of 10.7 GT/s as well as maximum capacity per stack of 32 GB. This allows Samsung's clients to equip their latest smartphones or laptops with 32 GB of low-power memory

Iceberg Thermal Inc. is one of the newer players in the PC cooling market. The company was founded in 2019 by an experienced team of designers and engineers setting off on their own, aiming to deliver a wide range of PC cooling products to industrial and commercial users alike. They only have a handful of retails products currently available, with the vast majority of them being CPU air coolers, but they have just launched their first liquid cooler products, the IceFLOE Oasis series. In today’s review, we are having a look at the IceFLOE Oasis 360mm AIO (All-In-One) CPU cooler, the larger of the company's two recently-released liquid coolers. The IceFLOE Oasis CPU cooler targets the high-performance PC cooling market with a sub-$100 price point, aiming to deliver the performance needed to effectively cool a power-hungry processor without being a drain on the wallet in the process. This cooler features a 360mm radiator for an ample heat dissipation area, as well

Samsung Electronics this week was awarded up to $6.4 billion from the U.S. government under the CHIPS and Science Act to build its new fab complex in Taylor, Texas. This is the third major award under the act in the last month, with all three leading-edge fabs – Intel, TSMC, and now Samsung – receiving multi-billion dollar funding packages under the domestic

With NVIDIA’s Turing architecture turning six years old this year, the company has been retiring many of the remaining Turing products from its video card lineup. And today that spirit of spring cleaning is coming to the entry-level segment of NVIDIA’s professional visualization lineup, where NVIDIA is introducing a pair of new desktop cards based on their low-end Ampere hardware. The new RTX A1000 and RTX A400 cards will be replacing the T1000/T600/T400 lineup, which was released three years ago in 2021. The new cards slot into the same entry-level category and finally finish fleshing out the RTX A series of proviz cards, offering NVIDIA’s

SK hynix is one of the few vertically integrated manufacturers in the flash-based storage market. The company is well-established in the OEM market. A few years back, they also started exploring direct end-user products. Internal SSDs (starting with the Gold S31 and Gold P31) were the first out of the door. Late last year, the company introduced the Beetle X31 portable SSD, its first direct-attached storage product. In February, a complementary product was introduced - the Tube T31 Stick SSD. The Beetle X31 is a portable SSD with a Type-C upstream port and a separate cable. The Tube T31 is a take on the traditional thumb drive with a male Type-A interface. The size of the Beetle X31 makes the use of a bridge solution obvious. Our investigation into the Tube T31 also revealed the use of the same internal SSD, albeit with a different bridge. Read on for a detailed look at the Tube T31, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power

Corsair has introduced a family of registered memory modules with ECC that are designed for AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 and Intel's Xeon W-2400/3400-series processors. The new Corsair WS DDR5 RDIMMs with AMD EXPO and Intel XMP 3.0 profiles will be available in kits of up to 256 GB capacity and at speeds of up to 6400 MT/s. Corsair's family of WS DDR5 RDIMMs includes 16 GB modules operating at up to 6400 MT/s with CL32 latency as well as 32 GB modules func

Western Digital this week is previewing the industry's first 4 TB SD card. The device is being showcased at the NAB trade show for broadcasters and content creators and will be released commercially in 2025. Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC 4 TB SD card complies with the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity standard (SDUC, which enables up to 128TB). The card uses the Ultra High Speed-I (UHS-I) interface and is rated for speed Class 10, therefore supporting a minimum speed of 10 MB/s and a maximum data transfer rate of 104 MB/s when working in UHS104 (SDR104) mode (there is a catch about performance, but more on that later). WD's SD card is also rated to meet Video Speed Class V30, supporting a minimal sequential

According to a recent report by Digitimes, Intel’s CPU supply shortage will continue to worsen through the 2H2019 as demand for entry level and mainstream notebooks such as Chromebooks and Core i3-based notebooks continue to increase without the proper increase in supply to sustain the growth. Supply shortages in 3Q2018 began impacting major notebook vendors […]

The CPU, or Central Processing Unit, along with the motherboard is generally considered the most important core component of any PC. The reason for this is that the combination of the CPU and the motherboard determines what other components can be used with the system. As a result, this makes the decision of which CPU […]

At CES 2019, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa SU spoke on several products at their keynote and while many users were disappointed that AMD did not announce a rumored $250 GPU that would give GTX 1080 class performance, AMD did surprise the world by announcing the world’s first 7nm GPU for the consumer market. Rather than […]

In a stunning move from Nvidia earlier this week, the GPU company announced that they would finally begin supporting adaptive sync functionality on AMD FreeSync monitors. Previously, Nvidia graphics cards were only compatible with their proprietary G-Sync system, which is technically a slightly better implementation of adaptive sync monitor technology when compared to FreeSync however, […]

With the launch of Nvidia’s 20-series GPUs seemingly an eternity ago, Nvidia has finally announced a January 15th release date for their Geforce RTX 2060. The new graphics card uses the same GPU core as the GTX 2070, the TU106, though is cut down featuring 1920 CUDA cores, 240 tensor cores, 30 RT cores, 120 […]

Generally speaking, always being up to date on the latest Windows patches is a pretty good thing. Updating your system will not only fix bugs and add new features, it also includes security patches that prevent hackers from having their way with your system. While there are plenty of benefits to having the latest updates, […]

CES 2019 is chock-full of weird hardware, but the ASUS ROG Mothership GZ700 is definitely takes the cake as one of the craziest gaming laptops available. Name ROG Mothership GZ700 Processor Intel® Core™ i9-8950HK Operating system Windows 10 Home Windows 10 Pro (ASUS recommends Windows 10 Pro) Display 17.3” FHD (1920×1080) IPS-level panel, 144Hz, 3ms, […]

Following Nvidia’s announcement of the new mobile GeForce RTX 20-series GPUs, Razer wasted no time announcing updates to their Blade 15 gaming laptop. Starting at $1,599, the Razer Blade 15 packs either an 15-inch Full HD (1920×1080) 144Hz display or a 4K (3840×2160) touch display with full 100% Adobe RGB color support. The laptop also […]

If you’re a T-Mobile OnePlus 6T owner, good news! T-Mobile has recently released a new software update, Android 9.0 Build Number: A6013_34_181228. According to the software version details, the new update “Enables support for additional domestic roaming partners”. In order to update, simply swipe up from the Home screen and tap Settings. From there, scroll […]