Kang Gosol

In the midst of all the X570 motherboard reveals at Computex 2019, ASUS has released an updated version of its Prime X299 model, the ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30. This new model celebrates 30 years of ASUS with revamped aesthetics and includes an onboard LiveDash OLED display, triple M.2, Wi-Fi 6, 5 G LAN, and a Thunderbolt 3 port. The ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30 comes packed with a whole host of features including three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots operating at x16, x16/x16, and x16/x16/x8 when used with an Intel Skylake-X processor with 44-lanes. With lower spec 28-lane processors, the lanes operate at x16, x16/x8, and the third slot at just x2. On the design, ASUS has gone with a white and silver-toned array of covers and heatsinks, with a new LiveDash OLED display which includes compatibility with Windows Hello, gesture control, and voice input. There's a total of three M.2 slots with two inclusive of integrated M.2 heatsinks, while the third is vertically mounted;

Toshiba has announced a new variant of their XG6 client NVMe SSD: the XG6-P that adds a 2TB option to the family. The previous XG5 generation of SSDs followed the same pattern, with the initial version offering mainstream capacities up to 1TB, and the later -P version offering just higher capacities with tuned firmware for better performance on heavier workloads. When the XG6 launched, its performance was enough to render the 1TB XG5-P obsolete, but the 2TB XG5-P didn't have a proper successor until now. The XG6-P doesn't bring any improvement to the top-line performance numbers compared to the original XG6. While the XG6 and XG6-P are both quite modern in their use of 96-layer 3D NAND, they are still using the same controller as the XG5 family, and there doesn't seem to be much room to squeeze more performance out of that chip. However, like the XG5-P, the XG6-P can be expected to offer some improvements for use cases that aren't quantified on the spec sheet, su

It’s been 4 years since Apple last updated the iPod lineup with the 6 th generation iPod Touch in 2015. Today Apple did the unexpected and released a hardware refresh of the dedicated media player. In an age where everybody uses their phones as music and media players, I think it’s fair to say that the market for dedicated devices such as iPods has shrunk quite a lot. Nevertheless, Apple wants to cover this niche with the new iPod Touch and advertises it as the cheapest iOS device one can get. The new iPod touch is now powered by Apple’s A10 chipset and features the same 4” 1136 x 640 pixel display as its predecessor, promising a relatively meagre 800:1 contrast ratio and a 500cd/m² maximum brightness. One great benefit of going for an iPod Touch is the fact that it’s almost half the weight of modern smartphones. At 88g it’s a relatively featherweight device. Other than the SoC, the only other apparent upgrade to the hardware is the addition of 802.11ac WiFi, altho

Another snippet of information from Intel today relates to the company’s future mobile platform CPU. We know it’s called Ice Lake-U, that it is built on Intel’s 10nm process, that it has Sunny Cove cores, and has beefy Gen11 integrated graphics. We’re still waiting on finer details about where it’s going to be headed, but today Intel is unloading some of its integrated graphics performance data for Ice Lake-U.

Update 05/20, 9pm : Following last week's ban and Google's suspension of business operations with Huawei, the U.S. Commerce Department has issued a new waiver for the company to continue purchasing limited goods from U.S. companies for maintenance purposes. Under the 90 day waiver, Huawei will be allowed to purchase hardware and software services to maintain current infrastructure as well as provide software updates for existing Huawei Android devices. As noted by Reuters , however, Huawei is still banned from buying parts and equipment for manufacturing new devices – meaning that as things currently stand, the company can only keep building affected products until their stockpiles run out. While the waiver itself is initially only for 90 days, it can be extended as necessary by the U.S. Government. Update 05/20 : Huawei this morning has responded to reports and the U.S. Commerce Department’s ban, issuing the following statement: Huawei has made substantial contr

HP has introduced its new premium Omen-branded premium gaming peripherals: the Omen Photon mouse as well as the Omen Outpost mousepad. Featuring a sensor with a precision range of up to 16,000 DPI, the ambidextrous wireless Omen Photon mouse promises to offer an ultimate precision for this class of device. Meanwhile, the Omen Outpost Qi-featuring charging mousepad promised to keep the Photon charged at all times. In addition, HP also announced its Omen line of clothing.

Viper Gaming, the  gaming peripheral arm of memory giant Patriot, has released two new gaming mice based on Pixart Optical sensors, the V550 and V551 . The V550 features an ambidextrous design, while the V551 makes use of a more ergonomic right-handed design.

In preparation for the launch of AMD's next generation of Ryzen processors, GIGABYTE has released a wave of firmware updates for its X470 and B450 AM4 socket motherboards. The new firmware adds listed support for AMD's Ryzen 3000 series (Matisse) processors prior to launch.

Last week Motorola announces a new addition to its product line-up: The One Vision. The “One” series is a higher mid-tier value series by the company targeting a better value proposition for users. The new One Vision updates the internals compared to last year’s one, and adds new interesting features such as a new 48MP camera sensor and a new Exynos SoC by Samsung.

Samsung has announced launch dates for its Galaxy S10 5G smartphone in the UK. The handset will be available for pre-order a week from now and will ship to customers in early June. The flagship phone from Samsung will be sold by two local operators and the company website.

Lenovo has unveiled its new family of AR headsets designed primarily for business applications. Lenovo’s ThinkReality head mounted displays will feature software and hardware developed by Lenovo for workers who can take advantage of AR in various industries.

Large displays as well as dual-monitor setups clearly improve productivity of office workers and creative professionals. Applying this to broader markets, HP thinks that gamers could also benefit from two displays by accessing messaging or media services, or even tweak performance of their components without quitting their games. To that end, HP is rolling out a new dual-screen laptop, the gaming-focused Omen X 2S 15. In addition to a typical 15.6-inch LCD as a main display, it also sports a secondary, 5.98-inch multitouch screen. Meanwhile, the system itself is powered by crème-de-la-crème gaming hardware including Intel’s eight-core CPU as well as NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU.

Lenovo has introduced its second-generation ThinkPad X1 Extreme laptop for performance demanding professionals. It comes equipped with a faster CPU and GPU when compared to the current generation 15.6-inch notebook. In addition, the new machine may be equipped with an OLED display. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 comes in the same chassis as the first-generation machine introduced last summer, but its internals have been completely changed. The new ThinkPad X1 Extreme is based on up to Intel’s 9 th Gen Core i9 processor that is paired with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1650 in a Max-Q design. The notebook can be equipped with up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory, and up to two M.2-2280 NVMe SSDs (of up to 4 TB capacity in total). The new ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 will be available with multiple 15.6-inch display options that include a 4K OLED screen with multi-touch support. To offer premium multimedia experience, the upcoming ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 is also equipped with Dolby Atmos-

Today we are taking a look at one of SeaSonic’s mid-tier power supply units: the Focus Plus Gold 750FX. As the name suggests, it is an 80Plus Gold efficiency certified ATX PSU with a maximum power output of 750 Watts. SeaSonic's latest mainstream PSU boasts impressive performance figures and is backed by their 10-year warranty..

Samsung and Verizon on Thursday officially started sales of the Galaxy S10 5G smartphone in the US. The handset is immediately available exclusively with a Verizon contract whether it is bought from the carrier or from the manufacturer itself. The retail price of the Galaxy S10 5G 512 GB, which has finally been revealed for the first time, is $1399, which is $150 higher than the equivalent Galaxy S10+.

Team Group's MP34 is a high-end NVMe SSD based on the familiar combination of the Phison E12 controller and Toshiba 3D TLC, but the price drops enabled by the current oversupply of flash memory and Team's decision to offer a shorter warranty period makes the MP34 an affordable drive that is helping push NVMe SSDs further into the mainstream.

In an interesting release from the professional arm of the manufacturer ASRock, ASRock Rack has quietly come out with a mini-ITX LGA-3647 motherboard designed for Intel's Xeon Scalable platform. The EPC621D4I-2M has to make do with quad memory channel support, but offers a full PCIe 3.0 x16 with BMC in a very efficient package.

SK Hynix recently started sampling of its 1 Tb 96-layer NAND flash memory devices featuring its PUC 3D QLC architecture. The new 1 Tb chip will enable SSD makers to build ultra-high density drives featuring leading-edge performance. Silicon Motion has already started development of turn-key SSDs featuring the new type of memory, whereas SK Hynix itself is working on its own datacenter drives based on QLC. SSDs using the new devices will be available sometimes next year.

Marvell on Monday announced that it had reached an agreement to buy the networking specialist firm Aquantia for $452 million. The acquisition will allow Marvell to significantly augment their current networking capabilities, with the company intending to use Aquantia's technology in future PC, enterprise, and especially in-vehicle applications.

Google’s Pixel smartphone line-up has been a mainstay of the industry for a few years now. We’re all familiar with devices such as the latest Pixel 3 which is Google’s latest entry in the high-end flagship market. In particular Google puts a lot of emphasis on the cameras of the Pixel devices, and last year in particular, Google, along with Huawei, have raised the bar in terms of what is possible to achieve thanks to computational photography. While the Pixel devices definitely have their strengths, one inarguable competitive weakness of the phones is their pricing. At an official MSRP and current Google store price of $799 for the Pixel 3 and $899 for the 3 XL, Google demands quite a lot, especially in view of other newer possibly more attractive options from the competition. In an attempt to widen its product range and adhere to a more price-sensitive audience, today we see the introduction of the new Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL. The two new phones are very much placed at more

Continuing the march of progress in the HDD industry, Seagate has revealed that they have started shipping their 16 TB PMR hard drives. In a quarterly earnings call last week, the company reported that the drives have been shipping since late March, with current shipments coming ahead of high volume production of the drives. Seagate in turn expects to kick off mass production in the second half of 2019, and by Q2 2020 the new 16 TB drives will be its highest revenue SKU. What is particularly noteworthy here, besides the capacity of course, is that these drives do not use next-generation heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Instead, they're based around conventional magentic recoding (which is a new way to call perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), which is being boosted by two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

Intel this week initiated its product discontinuance plan for its remaining Xeon Phi 7200-series processors codenamed Knights Mill (KML), bringing an end to the family of processors that have now been superceded by the likes of Intel's 56-core Xeon Platinum 9200 family. Xeon Phi parts have been used primarily by supercomputers during its lifetime. Customers interested in final Intel Xeon Phi 7295, 7285 and 7235 processors will have to place their final orders on these devices by August 9, 2019. Intel will ship the final Xeon Phi CPUs by July 31, 2020. Intel’s Knights Mill processors feature 64, 68, or 72 upgraded Silvermont x86 cores paired with AVX-512 units and MCDRAM. The parts were essentially Knights Landing parts optimized for Deep Learning applications. Intel launched several generations of Xeon Phi over the years, including Knights Ferry, Knights Corner, Knights Landing, Knights Hill (never released), and Knights Mill. The product started off as the Larrabee pr

Today at Microsoft’s Build developer conference, the Redmond company announced some major changes to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, as well as some improvements to Windows 10 command line with the Windows Terminal. Both expand the already robust ways to develop on Windows, and offer some fantastic features and additions.

Lenovo is gearing up to launch a new series of notebooks aimed at mainstream users. The new ThinkBook laptops were recently showcased at a trade show in China and are currently listed by at least two European retailers. Meanwhile, based on model numbers, it looks like that when they launch in the coming weeks, the new ThinkBooks will succeed certain IdeaPad models within Lenovo's laptop product stack.

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, tucked inside of a larger blog post about announcements relating to this week’s FMX graphics conference, Intel has made its first official comments about hardware ray tracing support for their upcoming Xe GPUs. In short, the company will be offering some form of hardware ray tracing acceleration – but this announcement only covers their data center GPUs. The announcement itself is truly not much longer, so rather than lead into it I’ll just repost it verbatim. “I’m pleased to share today that the Intel® Xe architecture roadmap for data center optimized rendering includes ray tracing hardware acceleration support for the Intel® Rendering Framework family of API’s and libraries.” Past that, there’s little concrete to be said, especially given the high-level nature of the announcement. It doesn’t specify whether ray tracing hardware support will be coming to the first generation of data center Xe GPUs, or if being on the road map means

One of HP’s key announcements this spring was its revamped security initiative for PCs that includes hardware, software, and deep learning-based approaches. The software and DL parts of the things were discussed earlier this month, but the hardware-based Endpoint Security Controller remained more or less a mystery. This is why we asked HP to talk about it in more detail. When it was announced, the company said that the HP Endpoint Security Controller is indeed a separate piece of silicon that sits inside HP’s PCs and performs certain security-based tasks. The ESC features a general-purpose processor core, HP’s custom hardware IP blocks, and embedded software. What is interesting is that HP has been installing the controller into its laptops since the EliteBook 800 G1 series launched in 2013, but has been very secretive about it until recently. Initially, HP used the Endpoint Security Controller only for its Sure Start technology that can 'heal'/recover the system BIOS.

Western Digital has been continuing to ramp up production of its 96-layer BICS4 3D NAND, and the company has already been using this flash memory for various retail storage devices for about a year now. At this point BICS4 is in good supply, and in the second half of the year it is expected to become Western Digital's highest volume flash memory. And with so much of WD's capacity now shifted over to BICS4, the company is finally gearing up to ship consumer SSDs based on their latest NAND. Formally introduced in 2017, Western Digital’s (and Toshiba’s) BICS4 is a lineup of 3D NAND flash devices featuring 96 active word lines (or layers). The family includes TLC and QLC 3D NAND devices with capacities ranging from 256 Gb to 1 Tb. Initially Western Digital produced 256 Gb 3D TLC NAND for various retail storage devices (e.g., USB drives, memory cards, etc.), but by now the company has expanded its BICS4 lineup. What is particularly important is that the memory is now qualified f

This afternoon, Intel announced their earnings for Q1 of their 2019 fiscal year. Revenue for the first quarter came in at $16.1 billion, which is flat compared to Q1 2018, but margins were down 4% to 56.6%. Due to this, operating income was down 7% to $4.2 billion, and net income was down 11% to $4.0 billion. Earnings-per-share for the quarter were $0.87, down 6% from $0.93 a year ago. Intel Q1 2019 Financial Results (GAAP)   Q1'2019 Q4'2018 Q1'2018 Revenue $16.1B $18.7B $16.1B Operating Income $4.2B $6.2B $4.5B Net Income $4.0B $5.2B $4.5B Gross Margin 56.6% 60.2% 60.6% Client Computing Group Revenue $8.6B -12% +4% Data Center Group Revenue $4.9B -20% -6% Internet of Things Revenue $910M +11%