Kang Gosol

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.

JEDEC still has not published the DDR5 specification officially, yet it looks like DRAM makers and SoC designers are preparing for the DDR5 launch at full steam. Cadence, which was vocal about the new technology back in 2018, and has since released provisional DDR5 IP (the DDR5 controller and PHY) commercially, this week presented some additional information about the upcoming DDR5 market release as well as the technology's progress. DDR5 Platforms Getting Ready On the SoC side of matters, we already know that AMD’s EPYC ‘ Genoa ’ as well as Intel’s Xeon Scalable ‘ Sapphire Rapids ’ will support DDR5 DRAM when they launch in the 2021 ~ 2022 timeframe. What is noteworthy, is that Cadence’s provisional DDR5 IP has ‘over a dozen design-ins’, so there are over 12 SoCs supporting DDR5 in various stages of development right now. Some of these system-on-chips will come earlier and some will be available later, but it is evident that there is a serious interest towards the technolo

Following the cancellation earlier this year of the 2020 Mobile World Congress trade show, GSMA, the organizer behind the even, has finally disclosed details regarding the compensation packages that it will provide to attendees and exhibitors who had already paid to attend the show.  The organization will refund price of tickets to individual visitors, while exhibitors will have two options, depending on how much they've spent.

In a second SSD snafu in as many years, Dell and HPE have revealed that the two vendors have shipped enterprise drives with a critical firmware bug, one will eventually cause data loss. The bug, seemingly related to an internal runtime counter in the SSDs, causes them to fail once they reach 40,000 hours runtime, losing all data in the process. As a result, both companies have needed to issue firmware updates for their respective drives, as customers who have been running them 24/7 (or nearly as much) are starting to trigger the bug. Ultimately, both issues, while announced/documented separately, seem to stem from the same basic flaw. HPE and Dell both used the same upstream supplier (believed to be SanDisk) for SSD controllers and firmware for certain, now-legacy, SSDs that the two computer makers sold. And with the oldest of these drives having reached 40,000 hours runtime (4 years, 206 days, and 16 hours), this has led to the discovery of the firmware bug and the need to quickly

Aimed at very specific audiences, Apple’s Mac Pro clearly does not come at a price point that seems reasonable for an average person. Nonetheless, the features it has are not present on an average workstation either. When launched back in December, one such exclusive was Apple’s Afterburner accelerator for video decoding, which was only available with a purchase of a new Mac Pro. Recently, however, the company has made the card available for purchase separately. The Apple Afterburner Card is a FPGA-based PCIe 3.0 x16 board that accelerates the decoding of video streams encoded using the ProRes and ProRes RAW video codecs. ProRes is commonly used throughout the Mac video editing ecosystem, including in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and numerous third-party programs. Once installed into Mac Pro’s PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, an Afterburner card can support playback of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW, or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW, which, suffice it to say, is incredibly useful

The mini-ITX form factor is an interesting one as it allows users to create a small form factor system with the ability to integrate some of the top-performing hardware from the desktop segment. Usually small form factor comes with a premium, but the GIGABYTE X570 I Aorus Pro WIFI looks to change that with a modest price of just $220, which is an aggressive price against the competition in the X570 market. With features including an Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 wireless interface, support for DDR4-4400 memory, and two HDMI 2.0 video outputs, this X570 motherboard looks to have the mid-range market in its sights.

Suoaki, a Japanese company, has released a semi-portable battery pack rated at 200,000 mAh or 720 Wh. With this battery, it should be capable of charging a laptop for 11 times or a Nintendo Switch for 36 times. This kind of battery pack could be needed for those who need to travel a long distance on car, work somewhere away from the power grid, somewhere with an intermittent power supply, or just ensure that there is some extra power at home or in a remote cottage where one might want to spend the coronavirus quarantine. The Suoaki S670 is rated at 720 Wh (200,000 mAh), which is why it is a complete overkill. You can't travel on a plane with it, because the legal limit for a battery on an aircraft is 100 Wh, but for those who need charging when travelling by car, or working from an isolated location, this is meant to be a tool to use. To put the 720 Wh capacity into perspective, this is enough to charge a modern laptop for 11 – 13 times, or an iPad Pro for 15 times, or a Ninten

In addition to launching its new MacBook Air and iPad Pro, Apple on Wednesday refreshed its Mac Mini lineup of ultra-compact desktops. This time around, the company doubled storage capacity on systems featuring standard configurations, so the cheapest Mac mini now features a 256 GB SSD.

Following an exclusive report from SemiAccurate, and confirmed by Intel through ServeTheHome, the news on the wire is that Intel is set to can wide-spread general availability to its Cooper Lake line of 14nm Xeon Scalable processors. The company is set to only make the hardware available for priority scale-out customers who have already designed quad-socket and eight-socket platforms around the hardware. This is a sizeable blow to Intel’s enterprise plans, putting the weight of Intel’s future x86 enterprise CPU business solely on the shoulders of its 10nm Ice Lake Xeon future, which has already seen significant multi-quarter delays from its initial release schedule.

Seagate was one of the first vendors to introduce SSDs targeting the consumer / SMB / SME NAS markets with the IronWolf SSD 110 series at the 2019 CES . Western Digital put up their offerings in the market segment in the form of the WD Red SA500 in Q4 2019 . Both SSD families are SATA-based - however, while the WD Red SA500 comes in both 2.5" and M.2 form-factors, the IronWolf 110 family comprises of 2.5" drives only. Seagate is again taking the lead with the launch of the IronWolf 510 SSD series today. This is a M.2 NVMe with a 1 DWPD rating - significantly higher than other SSDs targeting the market segment today. Key confirmed specifications are captured in the table below. We are in the process of gather more information to fill up the pending entries in the table. The Seagate IronWolf 510 SSDs for NAS Capacity 240 GB 480 GB 960 GB 1920 GB Model Number ZP240NM30011 ZP480NM30011

With Apple’s iPadOS 13.4 bringing trackpad support to the operating system, it was just a matter of time before third-party accessory manufacturers created new keyboards with a touchpad. Logitech with its Combo Touch keyboard cases turned out to be the first. Logitech’s Combo Touch folios are full-sized keyboards designed for iPads, so they have all the iPadOS shortcut keys, a touchpad that supports all the gestures the operating system does (including swipe, scroll, switch apps, pinch, double-tap, and more), and has a kickstand supporting various angles. The keyboards use 18 mm keys featuring a scissor mechanism with a 1 mm travel distance and backlighting, so from this standpoint the Combo Touch behave exactly like Apple’s latest Magic Keyboards. Logitech’s keyboard cases can work with the company’s Control app that can adjust lighting as well as make firmware updates. The biggest selling feature of the Logitech Combo Touch keyboard cases is their compatibility with

Apple’s iPad Pro has always been about bringing tablets closer to laptops, in a bid to cater professional users and satisfy their requirements. Today, Apple announced its 4 th Generation iPad Pro, that on one hand further blurs the gaps between tablets and notebooks, but on the other hand uses the key advantage of the former over the latter — portability — to enable new use cases. Among the highlights of the 2020 iPad Pro are its improved camera with a depth sensor (which Apple for describes as a LiDAR module, more on that later), trackpad support (which requires a new keyboard), and faster connectivity. The new Apple iPad Pro 2020 resemble the company’s previous-generation professional tablets introduced 1.5 years ago: the latest iPad Pros feature the same design with relatively thin bezels, coming in Space Gray or Silver aluminum chassis, and featuring 11-inch (2388×1668) or a 12.9-inch (2732×2048) Retina display with a smooth 120 Hz refresh rate, 600 nits brightness. Since

USB Type-C is slowly but surely taking over the display market as the connector of choice. At first, it was added primarily to mainstream office models, but recently manufacturers started to use it on other SKUs too. This month EIZO introduced its new ColorEdge CS2740 professional display with a USB-C connector, one of the first monitors in this class to feature a USB-C interface. The EIZO ColorEdge CS2740 is a 27-inch 10-bit IPS LCD featuring a 3840×2160 resolution, a typical brightness of 350 nits, a 1000:1 contrast ratio, a 10 ms GtG response time, a 60 Hz maximum refresh rate, and 178°/178° viewing angles. The monitor is aimed at graphics professionals with color critical workloads, so it has a 16-bit lookup table (LUT) for smooth color gradations and covers 99% of the Adobe RGB color gamut. Furthermore, the display is factory calibrated and supports EIZO’s digital uniformity equalizer (DUE) that corrects nonconformities of color tones on the entire LCD. In addition to

One of the bright sides of sad situations such as event cancellations like MWC, is that vendors don't have to compete for attention against other vendors announcements within a short timeframe, instead choosing their own launch dates and events. Last week Oppo did exactly this, having unveiled its new top-of-the-range handsets: the Find X2 and the Find X2 Pro. Both models rely on the latest Snapdragon 865 platform from Qualcomm, and come with support for 5G connectivity, with the Pro model also sporting the company’s signature periscope camera that supports 5X optical zoom and ability to shoot 12 MP RAW images. As expected for this year’s flagship smartphones, the Oppo Find X2 series uses the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC that is paired with 8 GB of DRAM, as well as 128 GB, 256 GB, or 512 GB of UFS 3.0 storage. Both the regular Find X2 and Find X2 Pro smartphones are equipped with a 6.7-inch FullVision AMOLED display with a 3168×1440 resolution, a corresponding 19.5:9 a

Update (03/16/2020) : What a difference a week makes. Citing the latest developments in the now coronavirus pandemic, NVIDIA has altered its GTC plans once again. The company is now postponing its GTC announcements entirely . A new date will be scheduled "once the situation stabilizes." Given the much lower-key nature of NVIDIA's previously planned news releases, I was not expecting the company to bring out its biggest announcements to begin with. But now the matter is settled entirely, as there will not be any NVIDIA announcements at all. Meanwhile, Digital GTC will still be occurring as scheduled, with NVIDIA offering online workshop content as well as streaming presentations supplied by participating speakers. NVIDIA Axes GTC Digital Keynote In Favor Of News Releases; Fate Of Major Announcements Unknown Original Article (03/09/2020) : Last week, in light of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, NVIDIA opted to scale down their plans for their annual trade

The Arm server ecosystem is well alive and thriving, finally getting into serious motion after several years of false-start attempts. Among the original pioneers in this space was Cavium, which went on to be acquired by Marvell in 2018. Among the company’s server CPU products is the ThunderX line; while the  first generation ThunderX  left quite a lot to be desired, the  ThunderX2 was the first Arm server silicon that we deemed viable and competitive  against Intel and AMD products. Since then, the ecosystem has accelerated quite a lot, and only last week we saw how  impressive the new Amazon Graviton2 with the N1 chips ended up . Marvell didn’t stop at the ThunderX2, and had big ambitions for its newly acquired CPU division, and today is announcing the new ThunderX3. The ThunderX3 is a continuation and successor to then-Cavium’s custom microarchitecture found in the TX2, adopting a lot of the key characteristics, most notably the capability of 4-way SMT. Adopting a new microarchitec

Micron this week has announced that it has started sampling the industry’s first multichip package (MCP) that integrates LPDDR5-6400 DRAM and 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory. The uMCP5 device is aimed at midrange 5G smartphones that require fast DRAM as well as high-performance storage. Micron’s uMCP5 device packs 12 GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory in a dual-channel arrangement, 256 GB of 96-layer 3D TLC NAND storage with a UFS interface, as well as an onboard controller. The LPDDR5 dies are made on the company's 2 nd Generation 10nm process technology, while the company hasn't commented on the NAND. Combined, the complete uMCP5 chip uses a 297-pin standard BGA package. Overall, uMCP packages that integrate both DRAM and 3D NAND enable smartphone manufacturers to reduce the footprint that is needed for RAM and storage. Micron says that its uMCP5 uses 40% less space than two (separate) memory chips, while also providing a 50% increase of memory and storage bandwidth when compare

Today we are having a look at the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, the most overconfident and expensive mechanical keyboard that has ever found its way into our labs. Developed with IT professionals in mind, the keyboard is designed to maximize productivity and ease a tough workday, utilizing a rather unique 60% layout that can even be split in two. Coupled with the manufactuer's excellent software, it's an incredibly powerful keyboard. But be warned: the price tag for that power is even higher.

Last week, in light of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, NVIDIA opted to scale down their plans for their annual trade show, the 2020 GPU Technology Conference. At the time the company announced that they would take the show entirely digital, including offering webinars, pre-recorded talks, and of course, CEO Jensen Huang’s annual keynote. However a week later, and those digital offerings are now getting a whole lot slimmer, as NVIDIA is announcing that they have canceled the keynote altogether. Citing the current coronavirus situation and the potential for it to impact their ability to produce a keynote presentation, the company is “deferring plans to deliver a webcast keynote”. But rather than give up on making any announcements altogether, in place of that NVIDIA now intends to issue a series of news announcements on March 24 th that had previously been scheduled to be shared in the keynote. So while NVIDIA has scaled things back even further, there will still be some news comin

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has already caused the cancellation several major trade shows and will have other kinds of impacts on the high-tech industry. And while the full repercussions are far from over, we're now seeing what may be the oddest of them all: warranty extensions. Citing this outbreak and a desire to give its customers some peace of mind, MSI this week announced a complimentary extension of its product warranties. As long as owners meet certain conditions, warranties originally set to expire this month have now been extended by two months. All told, MSI is issuing two month warranty extensions on all its all-in-one (AIO) desktops, desktops, motherboards, monitors, as well as cases (and PC cabinets). This covers many of its consumer products, but notably leaves the company's popular laptops out of the program. As previously mentioned, the warranty extension is being offered on products with original warranties set to expire by March of 2020 – o

While AMD’s Financial Analyst Day is first and foremost focused on the company’s financial performance – it’s right there in the title – this doesn’t stop the company from dropping a nugget or two of technical information along the way, to help excite investors on the future of the company. One such nugget this year involves AMD’s forthcoming RDNA 2 family of client GPUs. The successor to the current RDNA (1) “Navi” family, RDNA 2 has been on AMD’s roadmap since last year. And it’s been previously revealed that, among other things, it will be the GPU architecture used in Microsoft’s forthcoming Xbox Series X gaming console. And while we’re still some time off from a full architecture reveal from AMD, the company is offering just a few more details on the architecture. First and foremost, RDNA 2 is when AMD will fill out the rest of its consumer product stack, with their eye firmly on (finally) addressing the high-end, extreme performance segment of the market. The extreme high

Sharp has filed a lawsuit for patent infringement against Oppo and Oppo Japan. Sharp is accusing Oppo of infringing several of its 4G/LTE patents covering communication technologies used in smartphones. The lawsuits were filed in the District Court Munich I, the District Court Mannheim, and the Tokyo District Court. Sharp has not disclosed which of its patents have been infringed and which damages and remedies it seeks. Meanwhile, many patent infringement cases are filed in order to eventually settle them and sign a broad cross-licensing agreement. One noteworthy thing about the lawsuit — and that is perhaps an important one for the story in general — is who sues who. Sharp belongs to Foxconn Electronics, the world’s largest contract producer of electronics based out of China. Oppo is a part of BBK Electronics, another Chinese company, which owns brands like OnePlus, Vivo, and Realme. In fact, BBK is one of the world’s largest makers of smartphones in the world, well ahead of A

UNISOC, formerly Spreadtrum Semiconductor, has announced its first mobile application processor with an integrated 5G modem. Dubbed the T7520, the SoC also happens to be one of the world’s first chips to be made using TSMC’s 6 nm process technology, which uses extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) for several layers. The UNISOC T7520 application processor packs four high-performance Arm Cortex-A76 cores, four energy-efficient Arm Cortex-A55 cores, as well as an Arm Mali-G57 GPU with a display engine that supports multiple screens with a 4K resolution and HDR10+. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a new NPU that is said to offer a 50% higher TOPS-per-Watt rate than the company’s previous-generation NPU. In addition, the chip features a four-core ISP that supports up to 100 MP sensors and multi-camera processing capability. Finally, the AP also features the company’s latest Secure Element processor that supports ‘most of crypto algorithms’ and can handle compute-intensive security scen