Kang Gosol

One of Intel’s more interesting products over the recent years was its range of Visual Compute Accelerator cards, designed to help cloud streaming and encoding/decoding of HD and UHD video. These cards were built on the QuickSync principle, using Intel’s integrated graphics to accelerate the process, but also using special Xeons with added eDRAM (known as Crystalwell) to help accelerate the process. These cards fit into a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, and used a switch to control them, as well as shuttling data across the PCIe bus. They were launched in 2017, and now Intel is putting them onto the End-Of-Life track for product discontinuance. These cards were geared towards the cloud video streaming market, and contained three E3-1585L v5 processors inside with Iris Pro P580 graphics. The card as a whole was rated for 235 W, which includes the switch inside, and through a host you could ssh into the CPUs similar to how Intel made Xeon Phi add-in cards. Intel’s SDK pacakages for the card revol

Memory manufacturer Golden Emporer International Limited, or known generally as GeiL, has announced its new memory line with support for Intel 10th Gen and AMD Ryzen 4000 series processors. Casually calling its new 64 GB product simply 'SO-DIMM', it will be available in a 2 x 32 GB DDR4-3200 kit. With mobile processor architecture improving at a steady rate, memory capacity limits have increased designed to give gamers and content creators more robust memory capabilities. Designed to support Intel's 10th generation and AMD's Ryzen 4000 mobile series, the GeiL SO-DIMM offers users to upgrade its notebooks with 64 GB of memory. Not only DDR4-3200, but the GeiL SO-DIMM series also includes DDR4-2666 and DDR4-2933 variants. With its black and simplistic design, the DDR4-3200 64 GB (2 x 32) kit has a CAS latencies of 22-22-22-52. GeiL states every kit is tested with its DYNA 4 SLT technology but doesn't state publically what that entails. The DDR4-2666 kit ha

Following the Graviton2's first official announcement back in December, as well as the preview period that has been going on for several months now, Amazon has today publicly launched new m6g instanced based on their new in-house Arm platform. We had a more in-depth look into the Graviton2 in our analysis article  back in March, and the Amazon silicon and Arm's Neoverse-N1 cores certainly delivered on its promises, showcasing competitive performance both in single-threaded as well as multi-threaded scenarios. Most importantly, on AWS, the m6g instances delivered better cost efficiency compared to competing Intel and AMD-based instances.  The new m6g instances in Amazon's main global regions, including US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) starting today. Related Reading: Amazon's Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute 80-Core

On the back of AMD’s successful Ryzen Mobile 4000 series launch for consumer laptops, the company today launching its range of commercial processors from the same family. These processors are designed for the standard commercial verticals typically associated with company contracts, education deployments, medical use cases and any environment that requires a level of manageability across its workforce. The new AMD processors have up to eight of the latest Zen 2 cores, up to Vega 7 compute graphics, and are built on the latest TSMC 7nm process node technology.

This morning Microsoft is announcing a refresh on a couple more of their Surface products that did not get updated back in October. The Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2 will be making their way onto the shelves of the Microsoft Store this month, with the updated Surface Go 2 available May 12 along with the new accessories, and the Surface Book 3 coming on May 21. Surface Go 2 The smallest member of the Surface family is getting some nice updates. Microsoft has shrunk the bezels slightly and were able to fit in a 10.5-inch display in the same size device as the original generation. The new 10.5-inch PixelSense display also gets a slight resolution bump to compensate, coming in at 1920x1280, keeping the 3:2 aspect ratio Surface is known for, and achieving 220 pixels per inch. Microsoft Surface Go 2   Surface Go Specifications CPU Intel Pentium Gold 4425Y (Amber Lake-Y) 2 core, 4 thread, 1.7 GHz base frequency

Today MediaTek announced a follow-up in its SoC line-up with the new Dimensity 1000+. This seems to be a binned or revisioned variant of the Dimensity 1000 announced last year, although we currently lack details on the exact changes. MediaTek SoCs SoC Dimensity 1000 Helio G90 (Helio G90T) CPU 4x Cortex A77 @ 2.6GHz 4x Cortex A55 @ 2.0GHz 2x Cortex A76 @ 2.0GHz (2.05GHz) 6x Cortex A55 @ 2.0GHz GPU Mali- G77MP9 @ ? MHz Mali G76 MP4 @ 720MHz (800MHz) APU / NPU / AI Proc. / Neural IP "3rd gen APU" 2 "big" + 3 "small" + 1 "tiny" 4.5TOPs total perf 2x APU +1TOPs total perf Memory 4x 16b LPDDR4x LPDDR4X @ 2133MHz ISP/Camera 80MP or 32MP + 16MP 1x 48MP (64MP) or 2x 24+16MP

As the first quarter 2020 earnings period continues, up next is AMD, who has reported their earnings for the first three months of the year. The company, enjoying an accelerating turn-around in its fortunes thanks in big part to its Zen series of CPU architectures and resulting products, has closed the books on one of its best first quarters in years, with the company turning a tidy profit in the process. For the first quarter of 2020, AMD reported $1.79B in revenue, a staggering 40% jump over the same quarter a year ago. Their best first quarter in almost 10 years saw all of AMD’s metrics improve; along with that revenue AMD’s net income jumped by $146M (over 900%) to $162M, coming in just behind a seasonally strong Q4. Meanwhile gross margins are up as well, with AMD hitting 46%, improving on Q4 and leaping 5 points higher than the year-ago quarter. AMD Q1 2020 Financial Results (GAAP)   Q1'2020 Q4'2019 Q1'2019

Today Xiaomi is launching a trio of mid- to low-end devices, and we’re seeing the global launch of the new Mi Note 10 Lite, Redmi Note 9 Pro and the Redmi Note 9. The new Note 10 Lite is a cut-down version of  last year’s Note 10  which was the first phone with an 108MP camera. The Lite variant keeps the design aesthetics but comes with a smaller 64MP still very capable camera. The new Redmi Note 9 series phones adopt a new design language, offering new SoCs in the forms of the Snapdragon 720 and the Helio G85, all whilst maintaining their characteristic huge battery capacities as well as extremely low prices.

System integrators are there to offer users who don’t want to build their own system a way of getting a machine they can use for work or play. One of the benefits of using a system integrator to build your new system, and ultimately the additional cost of using this service, usually comes down to additional validation, checks, and the promise of a refined system from engineers that can build them in their sleep. One of the biggest markets in recent quarters is the creator market, and demand for workstations to help accelerate creative workflows is supposedly rising – on the back of this, MAINGEAR is launching its new configurable Pro WS range of workstations, complete with optimized builds for popular creative hardware. 4K/8K content creation, either on video, for animation, in modelling/CAD, or other areas such as the scientific verticals of oil/gas or financial markets, are all areas that require computational horsepower. Usually the more you have, the quicker a project can be co

A blog post from Intel has showcased the first consumer motherboard with the ATX12VO power standard from ASRock, and we reached out to ASRock for more details. They have now put up a product page for this board, the ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR.

Micron's consumer brand Crucial has introduced two new NVMe SSD product lines, including their first high-end NVMe SSD which features Micron's in-house SSD controller design. However, Crucial's adoption of NVMe continues to lag behind most brands as both new models are still using PCIe 3 interfaces while the high-end market is migrating to PCIe 4. The Crucial P5 is the first retail SSD to use a controller designed by Micron. Their in-house SSD controller design efforts date back at least as far as their 2015 acquisition of Tidal Systems , but the first product with a Micron-designed SSD controller only showed up a year ago: the Micron 2200 series client OEM SSD. The Crucial P5 is a clear step up from that, but still uses a PCIe gen3 interface, so it won't be setting any performance records and will face an increasing number of PCIe gen4 competitors as the year goes on. However, it should still deliver solid performance for all but the most demanding prosumer use ca

Along with detailing the nuts and the bolts of their Q1 2020 earnings , as part of Intel’s financial presentation, the company also offered a quick update on their upcoming Tiger Lake client CPUs. In short, the company is now preparing for volume production of the chips, and expects to being shipping them to OEMs mid-year. Intel first unveiled Tiger Lake back at CES 2020 early this year , where the company briefly detailed the architecture while showing off a device using a prototype chip. Tiger Lake will be based on Intel’s latest Core CPU architecture, and will also be the first CPU from the company to integrate an iGPU based on their new Xe-LP graphics architecture. The chips will be based on a newer version of Intel’s 10nm manufacturing process than what’s used in the current ice Lake chips, which Intel is calling their 10+ process. At the time, Intel was promising that Tiger Lake devices would show up by the holidays, a similar time frame as 2019’s Ice Lake launch. All told

Today something is happening for which I’m not sure there’s any parallel for in the computing industry – and certainly, there’s never been anything like it in the GPU computing ecosystem. Khronos, the consortium behind standards such as Vulkan, OpenCL, and OpenGL, is revealing OpenCL 3.0, the latest version of their GPU and parallel compute API. And, looking to reset the ecosystem, the group is turning back the clock on OpenCL, essentially reverting the core API back to OpenCL 1.2. As a result, everything developed as part of OpenCL 2.x over the last 9 years has now become optional: vendors can (and generally will) continue to support those features, but those features are no longer required for compliance with the core specification. Instead of having to support every OpenCL feature – no matter how useful or useless it might be for a given platform – the future of the API is going to be around vendors choosing which optional features they’d like to support on top of the core, OpenCL

After another long wait for a new Intel platform, Comet Lake and the 400 series finally descends. Here we get a new socket, support for up to 10-cores with its flagship Core i9-10900K/KF processors, and a few interesting adjustments on ethernet, Wi-Fi. Scrambling to be the latest and greatest, some motherboard vendors include support for PCIe 4.0 'for a future platform', which some have outright identified as Rocket Lake. We asked every motherboard vendor for specifications and details on their new product lines.