Kang Gosol

The evolution of 3D NAND memory had enabled storage device makers to offer rather unprecedented capacities. To that end, this week at Mobile World Congress, Micron and Western Digital their first 1TB microSDXC cards, marking the point where the pint-sized storage cards have become too big to be measured in mere gigabytes. Besides offering loads of storage space, the cards also feature SD Association’s A2 capabilities and support running Android applications directly from the card. The c200 1 TB microSDXC card from Micron and the SanDisk Extreme 1 TB microSDXC card from Western Digital are based on 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory from the respective companies as well as controllers designed in-house. Both cards are also compatible with existing SDXC hosts. While Micron confirms that its card uses 3D QLC NAND, Western Digital is somewhat reluctant to disclose the type of memory it uses. It is logical to assume that the SanDisk card also uses the company’s second -generatio...

With the upcoming ratification of the Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard expected in August, a number of companies are gearing up with Wi-Fi 6 ‘ready’ routers and end-points to get the jump on the market. The idea is that the standard won’t change much between now and full ratification, and most companies developing chipsets expect to sail through without issues – the only difference between the companies will be on the ‘optional’ portions of the specifciations. With that, as we saw at Qualcomm’s Tech Day at the end of 2018, the company will be pushing its latest Wi-Fi 6 solutions onto the market. Today is the launch of one of the chipsets, the QCA6390, which also incorporates BlueTooth 5.1.

Entry-level Android-based tablets are a relatively minor market, which is why companies offering such products tend to aim them at a specific geographical markets in a bid to avoid head-to-head competition with other makers. These devices tend to address very specific needs without trying to make a one-size-fits-all kind of device. This is exactly what the Alcatel 3T 10 tablet is all about.

We are at HMD Global’s annual press conference at Mobile World Congress where the company shares information about its success in the past year and introduces new flagship models. Today we expect the company to launch its new flagship model, the Nokia 9, with a never-before-seen camera.

LG recently announced that it has a range of new technologies ready for its upcoming ThinQ branded smartphones. We're here at the press event to find out all the details.

Xiaomi this week formally announced its new flagship smartphone, the Mi9, at an event in China. The new handset looks like a range-topping 2019 Android-based device from top to bottom: it is powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 855 SoC enhanced with Xiaomi’s Game Turbo technology, it also features an AMOLED display from Samsung with a small central notch, and has a triple-sensor main camera. Interestingly, apart from demanding smartphone users, the Mi 9 is clearly after mobile gamers.

A number of European retailers have started listing new Celeron and the Pentium Gold-branded processors, which indicates that the world’s largest CPU supplier is about to formally announce the products. Topping the list of new processors is the Pentium G5620, which happens to be Intel's first Pentium-branded CPU clocked at 4 GHz. The list of budget-focused dual-core processors includes seven SKUs: the Pentium Gold G5620, the Pentium Gold G5420, the Pentium Gold G5420T, the Pentium Gold G5600T, the Celeron G4950, the Celeron G4930, and the Celeron G4930T. The key selling points of the new processors are their higher clockspeeds when compared to predecessors. At this point we don't know what architecture Intel is using – if it's Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, or Coffee Lake Refresh – however the distinction between the three is largely academic, since these are locked processors with few active cores. Coffee Lake Refresh would be ideal, since ...

Samsung's 983 ZET is a high-end enterprise SSD and the first retail drive to feature Samsung's low-latency SLC Z-NAND flash memory. Designed for highly performance-bound workloads that favor IOPS and minimal latency above all else, the 983 ZET is designed to compete with the likes Intel's Optane SSDs and their underlying 3D XPoint memory. Meanwhile, by building a drive with some of the best flash memory ever designed, Samsung is giving us an up-close look at the answer to a very interesting question: just how fast can flash memory get?

Samsung today introduced its new mid-range Google Android-based tablet. Despite its formal positioning for consumers, the Galaxy Tab S5e features a rather large 10.5-inch sAMOLED display, a decent SoC, plenty of memory as well as storage, an advanced audio sub-system, a USB Type-C connector, and even compatibility with Samsung’s DeX platform for productivity applications. In general, the new tablet from Samsung brings together a decent performance, a good display, compatibility with productivity apps, compact dimensions, and a relatively low price - a rather interesting combination that we have not encountered before. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e is powered by an unidentified SoC that integrates two 64-bit high-performance cores, six 64-bit energy-efficient cores, and an unknown iGPU. It is possible that the application processor was developed by Samsung itself, but at this point this is a speculation. The SoC is accompanied by 4 or 6 GB of DRAM and 64 or 128 GB of NAND fla...

Surprisingly for the electronics titan, Samsung has not released any new Blu-ray or Ultra HD Blu-ray players for the US market since 2017. And now in 2019 it looks like their development of Blu-ray players has ceased entirely, as the company recently confirmed that it has no plans to release any new Blu-ray players. Sales of movies on physical media have been on the decline for years now as streaming services have been gaining market share. To make the matters particularly worrying, sales of Ultra HD Blu-ray discs are considerably behind sales of Blu-ray and DVD movies. In fact, despite being technologically obsolete, DVD is still the most popular format, according to a report from MediaPlayNews that cites NPD VideoScan. On the week ended on February 9, DVD commanded 55.2% of unit sales, Blu-ray captured 39.8%, whereas Ultra HD Blu-ray only had a 5% unit share. Whether this is entirely consumer-driven however is up for debate; some believe that the lion’s share of DVDs ar...

Reports have emerged this week that SMIC, the largest foundry in China, is set to start mass production using its in-house developed 14 nm FinFET manufacturing technology in the first half of this year. Notably, this comes at least a couple of quarters earlier than was initially expected, indicating that SMIC is apparently ahead of schedule. Meanwhile the company is already working on its post-14nm processes, as development of its 10 nm and EUV-enabled 7 nm fabrication processes are currently underway.

It’s been a less than a year since Motorola released its g6 line-up late last April , but today we see the company announcing new refreshes and a brand new generation of phones, introducing the new Moto g7s. The new line-up continues what seems to have become a quite established formula for Motorola, with the new phones each respectively having updated hardware and features to keep pace with the ever evolving mid-range smartphone segment. A big change over last year’s setup is that the new Moto g7 plus and the regular Moto g7 now both come in the same form-factor, a marked difference to last year’s models where the g6 plus was a notably larger phone. The new Moto g7 power adds a new variant alongside the g7 play in terms of lower priced positioning – offering a similarly lower specced model, but which focuses on battery longevity. Going over the specification of the new phones: Motorola Moto g7 variants   Moto g7 ...

HOYA Corp., an optical glass maker from Japan, announced this week that it had started construction of its new production facility for hard drive platter glass substrates. These substrates could be used to make conventional 2.5-inch HDD platters as well as next-generation platters for hard drives that use energy-assisted magnetic recording technologies (HAMR, MAMR).

This week, AMD released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q1 WHQL. Headlining this release, on the heels of the launch of the prosumer-oriented Radeon VII , AMD is introducing Radeon Pro Software compatibility for many of their consumer parts. Under the program, certain Radeon consumer cards, including R5 300, R7, and RX series products will be able to install the Radeon Pro drivers. These products, in turn will be able to access certain professional features of the Radeon Pro drivers, but lack the all-critical certifications and optimizations that typically set the Pro drivers apart. Meanwhile for the new Radeon VII, AMD has announced that support is due soon, but isn't available at lanch. More on enterprise matters, similar to the continual push for day-0 video game support in AMD's regular Radeon Software, the company is stressing their efforts in day-0 ISV certification for professional applications. By AMD’s count, 431 application/OS/device configu...

Despite AMDs resurgence to kick it with the high end of mainstream processors, the biggest volume sales occur more in the mid-range where the parts are often competitively priced. In the segment, AMD currently has the Ryzen 5 2600 and the 2400G at retail, but OEMs can use two others: the 2500X and the 2300X. We don't know if we'll ever see these at retail, but we obtained both CPUs for a review.

Seagate this week reiterated that the company is on track to launch two crucially important technologies later this calendar year. Firstly, the company plans to start ramping up its 16 TB hard drives featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology in 1H 2019. Secondly, the manufacturer intends to launch its first 14 TB HDDs featuring two actuators, up to 500 MB/s sequential read speed, and up to 160 IOPS later this year. Also the company is already testing its next iteration of HAMR that will enable hard drives with capacities up to 24 TB.

In a publicly available document, found by an eagle-eyed user on Twitter, Cisco has revealed some details about the future Whitley Platform and Barlow Pass: the set of technologies on which Cooper Lake and Ice Lake Xeon Scalable will be based.

Asetek has introduced one of the industry’s first closed-loop liquid cooling solutions specifically designed for Intel’s 28-core Xeon W-3175X processor for extreme workstations. The 690LX-PN cooler can dissipate up to 500 W of heat and therefore enables owners to overclock the CPU beyond its stock frequency.

Intel this week revealed the first details concerning its fab expansion plans in Oregon. As it turns out, the company intends to build the third phase of its D1X fab, and that the latest expansion (mod) will be similar in size to each of the first two phases of D1X. Intel plans to start construction later in 2019, so the new fab will be ready in the coming years. As a part of its preparations to begin construction, Intel had to notify local residents about its intentions. On Monday the company contacted 50 residents living near its Ronler Acres campus about its intention to build a third phase of its D1X manufacturing facility. Just like the previous two buildings, the new fab will be approximately 1.1 million square feet (~102 thousand square meters) in size, according to a media report, but Intel yet has to disclose its official numbers. In addition to the factory, the company will have to build a new technology building with emergency generators, and utilities. The processo...

One of the comments we got from Intel about the new unlocked 28-core Xeon W-3175X processor was that it would only be available through boutique system integrators or OEMs, like Dell or HP. It now transpires that Intel is intending to sell these processors with full retail packaging. As spotted on Twitter, the parts have already been showing up in the Tokyo Tech Plaza in Japan, for an eye-watering $3880 (plus 8% JPY sales tax).

Retail drives based on the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller have arrived. The ADATA SX8200 Pro and HP EX950 are nearly identical drives that are replacing last year's flagship models from both brands.

Following the launch of a late-generation product refresh in November, in the form of the Radeon RX 590 , we had expected AMD's consumer side to be done for a while. Instead, AMD made a rather unexpected announcement at CES 2019 last month: the company would be releasing a new high-end consumer card, the Radeon VII (Seven). Based on their aforementioned server GPU and positioned as their latest flagship graphics card for gamers and content creators alike, Radeon VII would once again be AMD’s turn to court enthusiast gamers. Now launching today – on the 7th, appropriately enough – we're taking a look at AMD's latest card, to see how the Radeon VII measures up to the challenge.

Samsung said it had started mass production of its eUFS 2.1 storage solution featuring a 1 TB capacity for smartphones. Apart from its massive capacity, the drive offers a sequential read performance that is two times faster when compared to a typical SATA SSD. Samsung expects the device to be used by high-end smartphones “soon”.

TSMC on Monday said that some of the wafers it has processed recently have lower yields because of a chemical it uses during production. The company began investigation and is in talks with affected customers, thought to include NVIDIA and Huawei, regarding counteractive actions.

In the recent years LG has introduced a number of high-end Ultra-HD 31.5-inch displays, many of which have received a lot of publicity due of their features and innovative technologies. As of late, the company has also expanded into midrange and entry-level segments with its 31.5-inch monitors. And to that end, this week LG has begun selling its 32UL750-W Ultra-HD LCD, a midrange 4K display for customers who want something better than the company's mainstream offerings, but are not ready to invest in a high-end model. The LG 32UL750-W is based on a 31.5-inch VA panel that offers a 3840×2160 resolution, 400 nits typical brightness, a 3000:1 contrast ratio, 178° viewing angles, a 60 Hz refresh rate (with FreeSync), and a 4 ms response time. The DisplayHDR 600 badge that the monitor carries obviously points to 600 nits peak brightness along with HDR10 processing capabilities, but LG is not publishing any information about local dimming and LUTs (look-up-tables) for H...

Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series (codenamed Kittson) processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture. The current-generation octa and quad-core Itanium 9700-series processors were introduced by Intel in 2017, in the process becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson for its part was a clockspeed-enhanced version of the Itanium 9500-series ‘Poulson’ microarchitecture launched in 2012, and featured a 12 instructions per cycle issue width, 4-way Hyper-Threading, and multiple RAS capabiliti...

ASML said last week that it planned to ship 30 extreme ultraviolet scanners in 2019, up significantly from 2018. The plan is not surprising, as demand for EUV lithography tools is rising and semiconductors manufacturers are building new fabs. In addition, ASML indicated plans to introduce a new EUV scanner that will offer a higher production throughput, the NXE: 3400C.

Today AMD is announcing some realignment of its executive team along with some promotions. The idea behind the changes boils down to AMD wanting to focus its efforts on bringing the CPU and GPU strategy together, for future AMD+AMD combinations. The goal is that users should want to pair Ryzen with Radeon, or EPYC with Instinct, and by aligning the hierarchy behind that goal, it should be easier to manage and achieve.