Kang Gosol

Palit Microsystems, which owns a number of GPU brands, entered SSD market a little more than two years ago with entry-level offerings to simplify product development and avoid competition. While Palit mainly sells ultra-high-end video cards and has loads of performance-minded clientele, for these customers the company is now rolling out its high-end GALAX Hall of Fame SSDs based on an advanced controller and featuring a sophisticated cooling system.

When Samsung introduced its new family of flagship Galaxy S10 smartphones in February, the company disclosed prices and launch timeframes for all models except one, the Galaxy S10 5G. Based on two reports citing industry sources and Samsung, the manufacturer will release its first 5G handset in South Korea in early April.

Oculus VR has introduced its new Oculus Rift S virtual reality PC-powered headset. The new head mounted display (HMD) features an inside-out tracking and does not require any external sensors. In a generational update, it has a higher-resolution screen when compared to the original Oculus Rift. The new unit will ship this Spring.

EKWB has introduced its new water blocks designed for AMD’s reference design Radeon VII GPUs. The EK-Vector series water blocks for AMD Radeon VII will enable owners to use custom liquid cooling systems and either run cooler, or overclock more.

Black Box, a leading maker of pro AV cables and equipment, has unveiled active optical cables that can extend DisplayPort 1.4 or HDMI 2.0 signals for more than 200 meters. The maximum bandwidth supported by the DP cables is 32.4 Gbps and the maximum resolution they support is 7680×4320 at 60 Hz.

ASUS and GIGABYTE have issued BIOS updates for their Intel 300-series chipsets-based motherboards that enable the platforms to work with Intel’s upcoming 9 th Gen Core processors featuring a new stepping. The new CPUs will reportedly be available in the coming weeks.

Apple on Wednesday introduced its 2 nd Generation AirPods. The new AirPods supports hands-free ‘Hey Siri’ functionality, a longer battery life for coversations, and faster connect times. The new headset will be available in both wireless and wired charging cases.

The mainstream motherboard market is still predominantly focused on gamers and gaming features. From the useful to the inane, saying a device is 'gaming' is clearly bringing in the sales, and it becomes an all out marketing war. Each company is clearly trying to build a gaming brand beyond the company name, even if it means always being confused at how to pronounce it (Ay-orus, or Or-us?). Nonetheless, it is clear that each motherboard company is piling on the R&D dollars, as well as the design dollars, to ensure that it can convince users to part with some hard earned money in their next build. GIGABYTE's latest attempt is the Z390 Aorus Master, a motherboard that on paper sets its sights on features, aesthetics, and capability.

Samsung has completed development of its 3 rd -generation 10 nm-class manufacturing process for DRAM as well as the first 8 Gb DDR4 chip that uses the technology. The 1z-nm process technology is said to be the world’s smallest process node for memory, and will enable Samsung to increase productivity without needing to go to extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) at this time. The company plans to start volume production using the technology in the second half of 2019.

Samsung has introduced the industry’s first memory that correspond to the HBM2E specification. The company’s new  Flashbolt memory stacks increase performance by 33% and offer double per-die as well as double  per-package capacity. Samsung introduced its HBM2E DRAMs at GTC, a fitting location since NVIDIA is one of the biggest HBM2 consumers due to their popular GV100 processor.

While it was never an official NVIDIA codename as far as roadmaps go, the name “Einstein” came up in rumors a few times earlier this decade. At the time, Einstein was rumored to be the architecture that would follow Maxwell in the NVIDIA lineup . And while we sadly didn’t find out anything new about NVIDIA’s future roadmap at this year’s show – or any sign of Ampere or other 7nm chips – I did inadvertently find out that the rumors about Einstein were true. At least, from a certain point of view. While talking with NVIDIA’s research group this morning about some of their latest projects (more on this a bit later this week when I have the time), the group was talking about past research projects. And, as it turns out, one of those former research projects was Einstein. Rather than just being a baseless rumor, Einstein was in fact a real project at NVIDIA. However rather than being an architecture, per-se, it was a research GPU th...

HP on Tuesday introduced its new 15.6-inch convertible notebooks based on AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 3000-series APUs. The new HP Envy x360 15 are positioned as inexpensive 15.6-inch-class laptops for productivity applications. In addition, the company announced its new Intel-based HP Envy x360 15 PCs. HP’s AMD Ryzen 3000 and Intel Core i5/i7-based Envy x360 15 convertibles use exactly the same sand-blasted anodized aluminum chassis and thus have the same dimensions (17 mm z-height) and weight (~ 2 kilograms). The only visual difference between AMD and Intel-powered Envy x360 15 PCs is the color: the former features HP’s Nightfall Black finish, whereas the latter features HP’s Natural Silver finish. Overall the new 15.6-inch Envy x360 convertible laptops feature a 28% smaller bezel when compared to the previous generation according to the manufacturer. Meanwhile, all the HP Envy x360 15 machines introduced today also use the same 15.6-inch Full-HD IPS touch...

Western Digital said at OCP Global Summit last week that over half of hard drives for data centers will use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology in 2023. At present Western Digital is the only supplier of SMR HDDs managed by hosts, but the technology is gaining support by hardware, software, and applications. SMR technology to boost capacity of hard drives fairly easily but at the cost of some performance trade-offs due to the read-modify-write cycle introduced by shingled tracks. Since operators of datacenters are interested in maximizing their storage capacities, they are inclined to invest in software that can mitigate peculiarities of SMR. As a result, several years after Western Digital introduced its first host-managed SMR HDDs, more and more companies are adopting them. Right now, the vast majority of datacenter hard drives are based on perpendicular magnetic recording technology, but WD states that in four years SMR HDDs will leave PMR drives behind. Obviou...

Kicking off a very busy week for tech events in California, my first stop for the week is NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. As always, CEO Jensen Huang will be kicking off the show proper with a 2 hour keynote, no doubt making some new product announcements and setting the pace for the company for the next year. The biggest question that's no doubt on everyone's minds being what NVIDIA plans to do for 7nm, as that process node is quickly maturing. Hopefully we'll find out the answer to that and more, so be sure to check-in at 2pm Pacific to see what's next for NVIDIA.

We're once again back with our quarterly look at the PC motherboard market. For the first quarter of this year there has been a lot of buzz around impending AMD releases such as Zen 7nm, but for the motherboard market, the big shift has come in the higher end of the market. At CES a few of higher-end models dominated proceedings (literally), with the announcements of the ASUS ROG Dominus Extreme and the ROG X399 Alpha and X299 Omega models. But, by no means ignored, we're also blessed with no shortage of good motherboard options in all other product segments as well, ranging from the premium to the budget to the SFF markets.

In the process of assimilating SanDisk, Western Digital has been re-using their hard drive branding on consumer SSDs: WD Green, Blue and Black can refer to either mechanical hard drives or SSDs. The WD Blue brand is used for the most mainstream products, which for SSDs meant SATA drives. The first WD Blue SSD introduced in 2016 used planar TLC NAND and a Marvell controller with the usual amount of DRAM for a mainstream SSD. The next year, the WD Blue was updated with 3D TLC NAND that kept it competitive with the Crucial MX series and Samsung 850 EVO. 2018 passed with no changes to the WD Blue hardware, but prices were slashed to keep up with the rest of the industry: the 1TB drive that debuted with a MSRP of $310 is now selling for $120. SanDisk's 64-layer 3D TLC NAND is nearing the end of its product cycle, but they and other NAND flash manufacturers aren't in a hurry to switch over to 96L NAND, so it's not quite time for another straightforward refresh of the WD Blue....

Small form-factor PCs and gaming systems have emerged as bright spots in the mature PC market over the last decade or so. Intel's NUC form-factor introduction was the turning point in the SFF segment, though it came with a few limitations for DIY enthusiasts. While mini-ITX systems are quite flexible and compact, Intel realized that the market could do with an option between the NUC and the mini-ITX systems. The mini-STX (5-inch by 5-inch, known as '5x5') form-factor was launched in 2015. ASRock and ECS have introduced a number of mini-STX form-factor boards and systems. Today, we are taking a look at a low-cost H310 chipset-based mini-STX system from ASRock: the DeskMini 310.

Western Digital is working on its own low-latency flash memory that will offer a higher performance and endurance when compared to conventional 3D NAND, ultimately designed to compete against Optane storage.

One of the things that caught our eyes at Mobile World Congress in 2018 and 2019 were new, high-end smartphones coming from China-based manufacturers that are better known for their value handsets. Ulefone is one such company that is trying to break into the market for advanced smartphones by relying on MediaTek's premium, sub-flagship SoC offerings. Last year Ulefone demonstrated its T2 Pro 6.7-inch handset designed for demanding customers. This year the company showcased its T3 smartphone the promises to be even more impressive.

As one of the leading makers of mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, for several years now Netgear has offered a comprehensive lineup of such products. So for this year's Mobile World Congress the company took to the show to demonstrate its latest 4G and 5G hotspots, as well as share their plans for the future. Netgear was among the first vendors to offer a Gigabit LTE mobile hotspot, when it launched the Cat 16 DL-capable Nighthawk M1 two years ago. Recently the company introduced its Nighthawk M2 (MR2100), a 2 Gbps LTE mobile hotspot powered by Qualcomm’s X24 modem. The M2 supports 5 CA (carrier aggregation) for downloads, 2 CA for uploads, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi for clients. This high-end router is currently available only in Australia, one of the only markets where there are LTE networks advanced enough to keep up with the lightning-fast router. Eventually the M2 will hit other markets, but in many cases it will inevitably compete against 5G routers where new-gen networks are available....

While smartphone vendors have been able to cut power consumption dramatically in the past 10 years, most of those power savings has gone into making thinner phones with smaller batteries. So for heavy phone users that need a phone that can still last all day – or even longer – the best option has often been to pair a thin smartphone with a battery case in order to make up for the difference. Every now and then, however, we still see someone release a phone with a large integrated battery, and this year at Mobile World Congress that someone was Avenir Telecom. The company, which licenses the Energizer brand for smartphone use, was showing off its prototype Energizer Power Max P18K Pop handset, a premium-tier smartphone with a whopping 18,000-mAh battery. Unabashed about its size, Avenir says that the big-batteried phone will be able to sit in standby for 50 days or play videos for two days straight, all of which is far longer than today's typical smartphones. ...

This morning the crew over at FanlessTech has picked up on the release of a new Intel processor list from Fujitsu. In it, Fujitsu has published what appears to be the complete list of all of Intel’s planned 9 th Gen "Coffee Lake-Refresh" Core processors. The catalogue includes some unannounced-yet-highly-anticipated 35 W TDP CPUs with up to 8 cores, new processors without integrated graphics, as well as upcoming Xeon E-2200-series products. Intel has been rolling out its Coffee Lake-Refresh products relatively slowly so far. To date, the company has introduced nine 9 th Gen Cores CPUs for desktops that use the architecture, with these chips aimed primarily at higher-performance PCs used by enthusiasts. As it appears from Fujitsu's document , the whole series will be considerably broader and will include CPUs designed for entry-level workstations, mainstream desktops, small form-factor desktops, and entry-level PCs. According to the list, Intel is altogeth...

The USB Promoter Group has announced the upcoming release of the USB4 specification. The new standard is based on Intel’s Thunderbolt protocol and supports a range of features, including data transfer rates of up to 40 Gbps, display interfaces, and power delivery. The detailed USB4 specification will be published in the middle of 2019. The USB4 specification will be based on the Thunderbolt protocol that Intel has contributed to the USB Promoter Group. The new interface will use USB Type-C connectors and will maintain backwards compatibility with USB 2.0, USB 3.2, and Thunderbolt 3 interfaces.  The maximum data transfer rate supported by the new USB4 interface is 40 Gbps over 40 Gbps-certified cables. Also, USB4 will support various display protocols, and power delivery. The USB4 standard will be officially ratified in the middle of 2019. At present over 50 companies are actively participating in the final stages of development of the draft USB4 specification. ...

It will be very difficult to look at mobile connectivity news in 2019 and not see buzzwords like ‘5G’ being used everywhere. Everyone wants to talk big about 5G, however the core of the technology relies on end-points being able to pick up the signal, whether it is the ‘Sub 6 GHz’ flavor of 5G or the mmWave flavor. For now, six companies have put their hat into the ring with confirmed announcements of consumer oriented 5G modems, set to be ready either in 2019 or 2020. We’re going to go through them all.

When smartwatches emerged several years ago, they were good enough to work as pedometers or count calories burned when their owner used an elliptical strider. However they were not water-proof, so even as basic fitness trackers, they couldn't monitor you during activities like swimming. Modern smart watches have taken this a step further and can be used in pools, but they are still not protected enough for anything deeper. Fortunately, there is a company called Catalyst that has protective covers and cases for many devices, including deep diving with Apple Watch.

EKWB has introduced its EK-Annihilator Pro water block, a new, high-end water block that's designed for use with Intel's Xeon W-3175X extreme workstation processor. As the company is intending to cover a range of scanrios with their new water block, it's available for both square and narrow ILM (Independent Loading Mechanism) socket mountings, which are typically used by workstations and servers respectively.

The imaging capabilities of mobile phones’ primary cameras have come a long way since the early 2000s, when the first camera phones hit the market. Today premium handsets can offer picture quality in line with higher-end digital cameras, to the point where even some DSLRs are threatened. Meanwhile, selfie cameras have usually been behind the curve as far as resolution and lenses are concerned, owing to their more limited use cases. However it would seem that ZTE has decided to change this with its Blade V10 smartphone. The new handset from ZTE features a 32 MP selfie camera using a display flash to capture all the beauty of its owner without any pixel or atom of the anatomy missed. The company does not disclose optics it pairs with the advanced sensor for some reason. Meanwhile, the main camera comprises of a 16 MP (f/1.8, 1.12µm) RGB module, a 5 MP (f/2.4) depth sensor, and a dual-LED dual-tone flash. With the 32 MP selfie camera being the key element of the dev...

GIGABYTE has just lifted the lid on its latest entry into the workstation space with an extreme flavor: the GIGABYTE C621 Aorus Extreme. The new board is one of just two boards which officially supports the 28-core Intel Xeon W-3175X processor . Back at Computex last year, when Intel unveiled its 5 GHz 28-core demo , GIGABYTE was the motherboard supplier for the demo with a prototype board called the A1X-C621. We now that this monster workstation model will now be called the C621 Aorus Extreme, thanks to a Chinese event as reported by ZOL .  While the official specifications haven't been released yet, the new GIGABYTE C621 Aorus Extreme is built around Intel's C621 Lewisburg chipset and has some notable features. On the PCIe side of things, a total of seven full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with metal armor take up most of the bottom left. Towards the top is twelve slots with support for hex-channel DDR4 memory flanking the socket area in two banks ...