Kang Gosol

Today MediaTek is announcing the new Dimensity 1000 SoC – the company’s new 5G flagship SoC for 2019 and early 2020. The announcement really isn’t too much of a surprising new reveal, as the “5G SoC” was announced some time ago in May with the company describing its 5G capabilities as well as the inclusion of the new Cortex-A77 and Mali-G77 IPs. What MediaTek does today however is to officially name the new chipset, and go into a few more details on the specifications.

Huawei is among a few manufacturers who still competes on the market of high-end tablets against Apple and Samsung. This week the company introduced its MatePad Pro, a high-end tablet which is being positioned to rival Apple’s iPad Pro as well as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S6. The tablet features a large display with a punch hole camera for selfies as well as Huawei’s top-of-the-line SoC. Huawei’s MatePad Pro comes in an aluminum chassis that is 7.2 mm thick with 4.9-mm bezels, holding a 10.8-inch, 16:10 aspect ratio AMOLED display with a 2560x1600 resolution. The display has a punch hole for an 8 MP selfie camera, whereas the main camera on the backside of the tablet has a 13 MP CMOS sensor and a LED flash. The tablet is based on Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 990 application processor paired with 6 GB or 8 GB of RAM as well as 128 GB or 256 GB of NAND flash storage. Meanwhile, Huawei will initially offer the tablet in Wi-Fi only configurations as well as a Wi-Fi with 4G/LTE version, with a

The most profitable process node in the history of Intel has been its 14nm process. Since 2014, the company has been pumping out CPUs built on a variety of configurations of its 14nm – slowly optimizing for power and frequency. We used to call these variants 14+ and 14++, but as the next process node isn’t yet ready, rather than draw attention to a soon-to-be 6-year old process, Intel just calls it all ‘14nm class’. The latest launch on 14nm is Intel’s new Cascade Lake-X processors: high-end desktop hardware that gives a slight frequency improvement over Skylake-X from 2017 but it also has the first round of hardware mitigations. Today we’re testing the best CPU of the new list, the Core i9-10980XE.

Huawei this morning has introduced its latest-generation MateBook D laptops. The laptops, which use processors from both AMD and Intel, as well as discrete graphics from NVIDIA, will be offered with both Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system, as well as Linux on certain SKUs. Huawei’s latest MateBook D14 and MateBook D15 notebooks come in an aluminum chassis that houses a 14-inch and 15.6-inch IPS Full-HD display panels respectively. The displays offer a max brightness of 250 nits and a 800:1 contrast ratio. Inside many of the systems is Intel’s quad-core 10 th Generation Core i5/i7 (Comet Lake) processor paired with NVIDIA’s GeForce MX 250 GPU, 8 GB or 16 GB of DDR4 memory, as well as an a 256 GB or 512 GB PCIe SSD. Meanwhile, Huawei will also offer SKUs powered by AMD’s Ryzen 5 3500U processors with built-in Radeon Vega graphics, possibly in a bid to reduce risks associated with tight supply of processors by Intel. When it comes to connectivity, the Huawei MateBo

Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. SSDs are yet to achieve the low $/GB metric that makes HDDs attractive in that market segment. From a gaming perspective, install sizes of 100s of GBs are increasingly common for modern games. Despite the falling flash prices, high-capacity SSDs still tend to carry a price premium, making hard drives attractive in this market segment. This guide will help readers choose the appropriate hard drive based on their workload, while also keeping the price factor in mind.

Apple and Intel this week filed a new lawsuit against Fortress Investment Group, a patent assertion entity controlled by SoftBank, in response to patent infringement lawsuits brought by the firm against the two technology giants in recent years. The companies are accusing Fortress of anticompetitive stockpiling of patents in a bid to enforce them, and have asked the court to ‘remedy the harms that they had already suffered’ from Fortress and unravel Fortress’s operations. Intel already filed a lawsuit against Fortress in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California back in October. In that lawsuit, Intel contested the legality of Fortress’s massive patent aggregation business through a network of patent assertion entities (PAEs) in a bid to license them (usually in packages) to Intel and other high-tech companies. In particular, Intel said that it had to license patents originally owned by NXP Semiconductors after the latter were acquired by Fortress. That lawsu

ASUS has introduced one of the industry’s first Wi-Fi 6 cards for desktops. The ASUS PCE-AX3000 dual band PCIe 3.0 x1 adapter promises to provide up to 2.4 Gbps data transfer rates over 160 MHz channels when used with an appropriate router. The ASUS PCE-AX3000 card is essentially an adapter carrying an M.2-2230 Wi-Fi 6 card for laptops. The actual radio that powers the card is unknown, however it supports all key features of the Wi-Fi 6 specification, including 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, 80 MHz and 160 MHz channels, MU-MIMO, OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access) for allowing different devices to be served by one channel, and WPA3. Besides Wi-Fi 6, the card also supports Bluetooth 5.0 technology allowing desktops to connect to various mobile and peripheral devices. The PCE-AX3000 Dual Band PCI-E Wi-Fi 6 has two large antennas to ensure strong signal and fast connectivity in various situations. The adapter should be compatible with all existing desktops that use

Over the last several weeks there’s been increasing discussions in the AMD enthusiast community about how the company’s new Ryzen 3000 processors interact with Windows, and in particular on how the new CPUs’ boost behaviour behaves in relation to a discrepancy between what tools such as Ryzen Master showcase as the best CPU cores, and what operating systems such as Windows interpret as being the best CPU cores. Today AMD is officially commenting on the situation and why it arises, whilst also describing what they’re doing to remedy the discrepancies in the data.

It’s difficult to overstate how important the XPS 13 is to Dell’s lineup, and to the industry as a whole. This is the device that reshaped the entire market with the advent of the InfinityEdge display back in 2015 which transformed the laptop landscape in an instant, rendering all other devices as dull and out of date. But other manufacturers are relentless, and Dell’s early design lead was never going to last forever. Other laptops have arguably caught, and even surpassed the XPS 13 over the last couple of generations. But Dell’s latest model of their flagship 13-inch laptop hopes to take the reins back.

Deciding between building a mainstream PC and a high-end desktop has historically been very clear cut: if budget is a concern, and you're interested in gaming, then typically a user looks to the mainstream. Otherwise, if a user is looking to do more professional high-compute work, then they look at the high-end desktop. Over the course of AMD’s recent run of high-core count Ryzen processors that line has blurred. This year, that line has disappeared. Even in 2016, mainstream CPUs used to top out at four cores: today they now top out at sixteen.

MSI has introduced one of the industry’s first ultra-compact desktops powered by Intel’s 10 th Generation ‘Comet Lake-U’ processors, the Cubi 5 10M. With Comet Lake-U available in up to 6 core configurations and supporting up to 64 GB of memory, the Cubi 5 10M is powerful enough that it can be used for a wide variety of applications, including productivity, photo editing, design, and multimedia playback. Measuring 124×124×53.7 mm and weighing 550 grams, MSI’s Cubi 5 10M compact PCs are quite literally palm-sized. Under the hood, they pack one of Intel’s 10 th Generation Core i3/i5/i7 processors with two, four, or six cores as well as Intel's UHD 630 Graphics. The CPU is cooled down using an active cooling system, so the processors should be able to turbo fairly often. The SoC is accompanied by two SO-DIMM memory slots supporting up to 64 GB of DDR4-2666 memory, an M.2 slot for an SSD, and a 2.5-inch bay for additional storage. On the wireless connectivity side of mat

Prior to the annual Supercomputing conference, Intel hosts its HPC Developer Conference a couple of days before. This year's HPC Devcon keynote talk is from Intel SVP, Chief Architect and General Manager of Architecture, Raja Koduri, with promises to cover Intel's efforts as it relates to Graphics and Software in HPC. We're here with the live blog of Raja's presentation. It starts at 4pm Mountain Time (11pm UTC), so come back then to follow along.

Nixeus this week took the wraps off its latest curved ultrawide NX-EDG34 gaming display, which blends together a large size, a WQHD resolution, a 144 Hz maximum refresh rate, and AMD’s FreeSync dynamic refresh rate technology. At present, only a few monitors can boast the same combination of features that the EDG34 has to offer, so it will be in a rather unique position when it becomes available. The Nixeus NX-EDG34 display builds upon a curved VA panel with a 3440×1440 resolution, and is capable of reaching 350 nits typical brightness (400 nits in HDR mode), a 3000:1 contrast ratio, a 21:9 aspect ratio, 178°/178° viewing angles, and a 4 ms GtG response time. In terms of refresh rates, the monitor's maximum rate is 144 Hz, and in variable refresh mode it operates in a 48 Hz – 144 Hz range. The LCD can display 16.7 million colors and supports an HDR mode, which suggests a wider-than-sRGB color gamut. Because the Nixeus NX-EDG34 is designed for gamers, it naturally featu

Alongside today's 16-inch MacBook Pro announcement, Apple has also confirmed that their long-awaited redesign of the Mac Pro, which has been due this fall, will be launching next month. Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro desktop will be the company’s highest-performing desktop in years and will address the key issues of the cylindrical Mac Pro, namely insufficient graphics performance as well as limited expandability. The Mac Pro systems will be based on Intel’s Xeon W processors with up to 28 cores paired with up to 1.5 TB of DDR4-2933 as well as up to 4 TB of solid-state storage (using two SSDs based on the T2 controller). To offer its customers a whopping compute and graphics performance, Apple will equip its Mac Pro with up to two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics cards in MPX form-factor with a total of 16384 stream processors (4096 SPs per GPU) and 128 GB of HBM2 memory (32 GB per GPU). Furthermore, the systems may be equipped with the Afterburner ProRes and ProRes RAW FPGA-based

When LG introduced its 43UD79 monitor over two years ago, it quickly gained popularity both among gamers and among office workers mainly due to its combination of size, connectivity options, and image quality. Now the tTime has come to improve the product, and to that end LG has unveiled its successor, the 43UN700. The new display is positioned both for work and mainstream gaming; it adds support for HDR10, higher brightness levels, and features 60 W USB-C power delivery.

Over the second-half of this year, AMD has been gearing up to cascade their latest Radeon graphics architecture to successively cheaper and more mainstream products. Last month we saw the announcement of the mid-tier Radeon RX 5500 and RX 5500M series for desktop and mobile respectively. And now this morning the company is adding a third tier of Radeon mobile discrete graphics to their lineup, with the addition of the Radeon RX 5300M series. Revealed alongside today’s 16-inch MacBook Pro announcement – with Apple once again getting their own exclusive Radeon Pro SKUs – the 5300M represents the further proliferation of AMD’s Radeon RDNA architecture. Based on AMD’s Navi 14 GPU, AMD is tapping their (currently) smallest Navi chip to offer a lower performing and presumably lower priced graphics adapter for laptop use. AMD Radeon RX Series Mobile Specification Comparison   AMD Radeon RX 5300M AMD Radeon RX 5500M AMD Radeon Vega Pro

SK Hynix has been in the NAND and SSD business for a long time, but we haven't had the opportunity to review a drive with SK Hynix NAND in years. SK Hynix 3D NAND has been considerably more popular in mobile applications like smartphones and memory cards, and their client OEM SSDs are widespread but not sampled for review. This year, SK Hynix decided to start competing directly in the retail SSD market by introducing the SK Hynix Gold S31 SATA SSDs.  The Gold S31 showcases SK Hynix's vertical integration with the NAND, DRAM, controller and firmware all produced in-house. 

Intel has notified its partners about plans to discontinue its only 10nm small form factor NUC in the market. The NUC, which went under the code name of Crimson Canyon, is/was Intel's only 10nm device in this market - it used Cannon Lake processors made on its 10 nm technology, and paired with AMD’s Radeon 540 graphics.  The fate of Intel’s Cannon Lake processors has been, to put it mildly, 'dead on arrival'. Delayed by over a year because of problems with 10 nm fabrication process, the CPUs suffered low yields and had design selections made that resulted in a non-functioning integrated GPU, as well as high power consumption: the Core i3-8121U processor at the heart of Intel's first generation 10nm ended up in a few China-only laptops ( which we reviewed ), and in a small number of Crimson Canyon NUC devices. Intel advises parties interested in its Crimson Canyon NUC SFF PCs to make their final orders by December 27, 2019, or return them by that date. The f

Earlier this year, Alienware launched its Area 51m laptop, a high end desktop replacement (DTR) class laptop. Now, living up to the idea of being a proper replacement to a desktop, the company has started selling GeForce RTX 2070/2080 GPU upgrade kits for the laptop. The graphics modules come in Dell’s proprietary Dell Graphics Form-Factor (DGFF) and include a cooler as well as installation by the company’s technician. Upgrading laptops is always a challenge for many reasons, but upgrading notebooks that use proprietary components has always been particularly tricky, especially due to a lack of standardization. Early this year Alienware introduced its 17-inch Area 51m machine that can challenge many desktops in terms of performance and upgradeability as it uses a socketed desktop-class CPU, regular SO-DIMMs, standard storage devices, but it also a proprietary form factor GeForce RTX graphics module. Fortunately, this week Dell fulfilled its promise and started selling upgrade kits

One of the advantages of having a highly-integrated product stack is ability to fine tune performance of your devices when they work together. On the one hand, this allows to get higher performance while ensuring maximum compatibility and thus differentiate from rivals. On the other hand, this enables to sell more products per end user, sometimes at a premium. This is exactly what GIGABYTE is doing with its Aorus motherboards and Aorus Memory Boost feature of its Aorus RGB Memory modules. GIGABYTE, which introduced its first DIMMs in mid-2018, is a relative newbie on the market of memory, so its DDR4 product lineup is currently limited to seven SKUs conservatively rated for DDR4-2666, DDR4-3200, and DDR4-3600 operation (whereas faster kits announced at CES 2019 are yet to be launched commercially). Meanwhile, the company appears to have some kind of secret weapon in the form of a special SPD setting called Aorus Memory Boost (AMB) that slightly increases speed of its top-of-the-ra

Since it was launched earlier this decade, NVIDIA’s Jetson lineup of embedded system kits remains one of the odder success stories for the company. While NVIDIA’s overall Tegra SoC plans have gone in a very different direction than first planned, they’ve seen a lot of success with their system-level Jetson kits, as customers snatch them up both as dev kits and for use in commercial systems. Now in their third generation of Jetson systems, this afternoon NVIDIA is outlining their plans to diversify the family a bit more, announcing a physically smaller and cheaper version of their flagship Jetson Xavier kit, in the form of the Jetson Xavier NX. Based on the same Xavier SoC that’s used in the titular Jetson AGX Xavier , the Jetson Xavier NX is designed to fill what NVIDIA sees as a need for both a cheaper Xavier option, as well as one smaller than the current 100mm x 87mm board. In fact the new Nano-sized board is quite literally that: the size of the existing Jetson (TX1) Nano , whi

Last week NVIDIA introduced its latest GeForce GTX 1660 Super performance mainstream GPU. There are plenty of designs to chose from, and both ASUS and GIGABYTE are now set to offer small form factor designs.  ASUS has two new GeForce GTX 1660 Super boards that are 17.4 centimeters (6.9 inches) long. The ASUS Phoenix PH-GTX1660S-6G and Phoenix PH-GTX1660S-O6G cards are based on NVIDIA’s TU116 GPU with 1408 CUDA cores, carry 6 GB of GDDR6 memory, share the same PCB design with one 8-pin auxiliary PCIe power connector, feature three display outputs (DVI-D, DP 1.4, HDMI 2.0b), and use the same dual-slot cooling system with one dual ball bearing fan. The only difference between the two are their clocks and even they are pretty close: up to 1815 MHz vs 1830 MHz in OC mode. GIGABYTE has a more 'canonical' GeForce GTX 1660 Super Mini ITX OC 6G (GV-N166SIXOC-6GD) board that is exactly 17 centimeters long. The card has NVIDIA’s TU116 GPU clocked at up to 1800 MHz, 6 GB

AMD is set to close out the year on a high note. As promised, the company will be delivering its latest 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X processor, built with two 7nm TSMC chiplets, to the consumer platform for $749. Not only this, but AMD today has lifted the covers on its next generation Threadripper platform, which includes Zen 2-based chiplets, a new socket, and an astounding 4x increase in CPU-to-chipset bandwidth.

Google on Friday announced that that it had reached an agreement to buy Fitbit, a leading maker of advanced fitness trackers. Google stressed that data obtained and processed by Fitbit’s devices will remain in appropriate datacenters and will not go elsewhere. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will pay $2.1 billion in cash, valuing the company at $7.35 per share. In accordance with the deal, Google will become the sole owner of Fitbit, owning its IP and handling all hardware and software development and distribution. The takeover of Fitbit is the latest step in Google’s ongoing strategy to make its Android platform more attractive to consumers. Fitbit has more than 28 million of active users, and while the company is far from the lion's share of the wearables market, it has a significantly bigger presence than the small number of Wear OS devices that Google's partners have been able to sell. Overall, this is is the second major wearables-related acquisition f

The fate of Samsung's custom CPU development efforts has been making the rounds of the rumour mill for almost a month, and now we finally have confirmation from Samsung that the company has stopped further development work on its custom Arm architecture CPU cores. This public confirmation comes via Samsung’s HR department, which last week filled an obligatory notice letter with the Texas Workforce Commission, warning about upcoming layoffs of Samsung’s Austin R&D Center CPU team and the impending termination of their custom CPU work. The CPU project, said currently to be around 290 team members large, started off sometime in 2012 and has produced the custom ARMv8 CPU microarchitectures from the Exynos M1 in the Exynos 8890 up to the latest Exynos M5 in the upcoming Exynos 990 . Over the years, Samsung’s custom CPU microarchitectures had a tough time in differentiating themselves from Arm’s own Cortex designs, never being fully competitive in any one metric. The Exyno

Kicking off the first of a series of video card launches for this holiday season is NVIDIA, who is announcing their GeForce GTX 1660 Super. This is a relatively minor, but none the less interesting revision to the GTX 1660 family that adds a 1660 (vanilla) SKU with faster GDDR6 memory for improved performance. Along with the GeForce GTX 1650 Super (shipping in late November), these two cards are going to be the backbone of NVIDIA’s mainstream efforts to close out the year. And while NVIDIA’s other GTX 1660 cards aren’t going anywhere, as we’re going to see today, with its $229 price tag, the GDDR6-equipped GTX 1660 Super is pretty much going to make the other 1660 cards redundant.

Higher-than-expected demand for Intel’s server and PC processors has been an interesting topic of discussion since the middle of 2018, when Intel first informed investors of its backlogged status. Since then, the situation has continued to dog the company, as executives have noted in virtually every quarterly conference call since that they haven't been able to meet the demand that's already pushed the company to record revenues. Since mid-2018, Intel has invested billions of dollars to increase its output of CPUs made using its 14 nm fabrication process, its most widely used technology these days. And yet even with that increase in 14nm capacity, the company expects that in the coming quarters they will contine to struggle. The world’s largest supplier of processors boosted its 14 nm capacity in terms of wafer starts per month (WSPM) by 25% in 2019 as compared to 2018, Bob Swan, CEO of Intel, told analysts and investors during the company’s earnings conference call on Thur

In the last few year’s we’ve seen an increasing amount of talk about RISC-V and it becoming real competitor to the Arm in the embedded market. Indeed, we’ve seen a lot of vendors make the switch from licensing Arm’s architecture and IP designs to the open-source RISC-V architecture and either licensed or custom-made IP based on the ISA. While many vendors do choose to design their own microarchitectures to replace Arm-based microcontroller designs in their products, things get a little bit more complicated once you scale up in performance. It’s here where SiFive comes into play as a RISC-V IP vendor offering more complex designs for companies to license – essentially a similar business model to Arm’s – just that it’s based on the new open ISA. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in SiFive’s IP offering as the company is revealing its first ever out-of-order CPU microarchitecture, promising a significant performance jump over existing RISC-V cores, and offering competitive PPA metr

GlobalFoundries has announced that the company has teamed up with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and the National Research Foundation to develop resistive random access memory (ReRAM). The next-generation memory technology could ultimately pave the way for use as a very fast non-volatile high-capacity embedded cache. The project will take four years and will cost S$120 million ($88 million). Under the terms of the agreement, the National Research Foundation will provide the necessary funding to Nanyang Technological University, which will spearhead the research. GlobalFoundries will support the project with its in-house manufacturing resources, just like it supports other universities on promising technologies, the company says. Right now, GlobalFoundries (and other contract makers of semiconductors) use eFlash (embedded flash) for chips that need relatively high-capacity onboard storage. This technology has numerous limitations, such as endurance and performa