Tag: Reviews

Optical connectivity – and especially silicon photonics – is expected to become a crucial technology to enable connectivity for next-generation datacenters, particularly those designed HPC applications. With ever-increasing bandwidth requirements needed to keep up with (and keep scaling out) system performance, copper signaling alone won't be enough to keep up. To that end, several companies are developing silicon photonics solutions, including fab providers like TSMC, who this week outlined its 3D Optical Engine roadmap as part of its 2024 North American Technology Symposium, laying out its plan to bring up to 12.8 Tbps optical connectivity to TSMC-fabbed processors. TSMC's Compact Universal Photonic Engine (C

TSMC has been offering its System-on-Wafer integration technology, InFO-SoW, since 2020. For now, only Cerebras and Tesla have developed wafer scale processor designs using it, as while they have fantastic performance and power efficiency, wafer-scale processors are extremely complex to develop and produce. But TSMC believes that not only will wafer-scale designs ramp up in usage, but that megatrends like AI and HPC will call for even more complex solutions: vertically stacked system-on-wafer designs. Tesla Dojo's wafer-scale process

While the bulk of attention on TSMC is aimed at its leading-edge nodes, such as N3E and N2, loads of chips will continue to be made using more mature and proven process technologies for years to come. Which is why TSMC has continued to refine its existing nodes, including its current-generation 5nm-class offerings. To that end, at its North American Technology Symposium 2024, the company introduced a new, optimized 5nm-class node: N4C. TSMC's N4C process belongs to the company's 5nm-class family of fab nodes and is a superset of N4P, the most advanced technology in that family. In a bid to further bring down 5nm manufacturing costs, for TSMC is implementing several changes for N4C, including rearchitecting their standard cell and SRAM cell

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. provided several important updates about its upcoming process technologies at its North American Technology Symposium 2024. At a high level, TSMC's 2 nm plans remain largely unchanged: the company is on track to start volume production of chips on it's first-generation GAAFET N2 node in the second half of 2025, and N2P will succeed N2 in late 2026 – albeit without the previously-announced backs

With the arrival of spring comes showers, flowers, and in the technology industry, TSMC's annual technology symposium series. With customers spread all around the world, the Taiwanese pure play foundry has adopted an interesting strategy for updating its customers on its fab plans, holding a series of symposiums from Silicon Valley to Shanghai. Kicking off the series every year – and giving us our first real look at TSMC's updated foundry plans for the coming years – is the Santa Clara stop, where yesterday the company has detailed several new technologies, ranging from more advanced lithography processes to massive, wafer-scale chip packing options. Today we're publishing several stories based on TSMC's different offerings, starting with TSMC's marquee announcement: their A16 process node. Meanwhile, for the rest of our symposium stories, please be sure to check out the related reading below, and check back for additional stories.

Seagate Technology has reportedly notified its customers abouts its plans to raise prices on new hard drive orders and for demands that exceed prior agreements, echoing a similar move by Western Digital, which increased its prices earlier this month. These changes come in response to a surge in demand for high-capacity HDDs and constraints in supply due to decreased production capabilities of both Seagate and Western Digital, reports TrendForce. According to industry insights reported by TechNews, the sector anticipates that the scarcity of high-capacity HDD products will persist throughout the current quarter and possibly extend over the entire year. It is forecasted that HDD

As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance. As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite performance tier. As of today, this will be a single configuration. But if the Snapdragon X lineup is successful and demand warrants it, I would not be surprised to see Qualcomm expand it fu

As Seagate ramps up shipments of its new heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)-based Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, the company is both in the enviable position of shipping the first major new hard drive technology in a decade, and the much less enviable position of proving the reliability of the first major new hard drive technology in a decade. Due to HAMR's use of temporal heating with its platters, as well as all-new read/write heads, HAMR introduces multiple new changes at once that have raise questions about how reliable the technology will be. Looking to address these matters (and further promote their HAMR drives),

Samsung Electronics has started mass production of its 9th generation of V-NAND memory. The first dies based on their latest NAND tech come in a 1 Tb capacity using a triple-level cell (TLC) architecture, with data transfer rates as high as 3.2 GT/s. The new 3D TLC NAND memory will initially be used to build high-capacity and high-performance SSDs, which will help to solidify Samsung's position in the storage market. Diving right in, Samsung is conspicuously avoiding to list the number of layers in their latest generation NAND, which is the principle driving factor in increasing capacity generation-on-generation. The company's current 8th gen V-NAND is 236 layers – similar to its major competitors – and word on

Lexar has a long history of serving the flash-based consumer storage market in the form of SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. After having started out as a Micron brand, the company was acquired by Longsys which has diversified its product lineup with regular introduction of new products. Recently, the company announced a number of portable SSDs targeting different market segments. The Lexar SL500 Portable SSD is one of the moderately priced 20 Gbps PSSDs in that set. The SL500 is able to achieve its price point thanks to the use of a native USB flash controller - the Silicon Motion SM2320. The unique aspect is the use of YMTC 3D TLC NAND (compared to the usual Micron or BiCS NAND that we have seen in previous SM2320-based PSSDs). Read on for a detailed look at the SL500, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

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 […]