By now, you’ve seen the word “Optane” bandied about on VentureBeat (such as here and here) and probably countless other places — and for good reason. Intel, the maker of all Optane products, is heavily promoting the results of its decade-long R&D investment in this new memory/storage hybrid. But what exactly is Optane, and what is it good […]
Category Archives: Hardware
Early Intel Tiger Lake Benchmarks Point to Beefy Cache, Gen12 Graphics
Several Tiger Lake Y (TGL-Y) and Tiger Lake U (TGL-U) entries have started to appeared in the Geekbench 4 and SiSoftware databases. Tiger Lake is slated to debut next year to succeed Ice Lake (ICL). Starting with the Geekbench 4 submission, the Tiger Lake Y sample checked in with a quad-core, eight-thread configuration and a 1.19 […]
Intel Comet Lake-S 10-Core CPU Benchmarks Surface
Fresh benchmarks for Intel’s 10th-Generation Comet Lake-S (CML-S) processors have started to appeared in the Geekbench 4 database. The results reveal the chips’ core counts, L2 and L3 cache, as well as the preliminary base and boost clocks. But as always, it’s wise to take these with a some grains of salt, since they are submissions of unreleased hardware. […]
ASUS Brings Wi-Fi 6 to Desktops with PCE-AX3000 Card
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 […]
Centaur Creates First x86 SoC with Integrated AI Co-Processor
People typically think of x86 processors as coming from Intel and AMD, but there is a third architectural license holder: VIA. This week, an Austin, Texas-based subsidiary of the Taipei-headquartered company announced it’s demonstrating an x86 processor that comes with an integrated artificial intelligence (AI) co-processor. VIA’s Centaur Technology is a small CPU design company. The […]
AMD might unveil a new GPU with ray tracing support at CES
It’s only a matter of time before AMD rolls out a GPU architecture with hardware-based real-time ray tracing support (though not in time for any Black Friday deals), to take on Nvidia’s growing army of GeForce RTX graphics cards. But might we see something in that regard at CES in January, 2020? According to the latest rumor […]
Demand for HDD Storage Booming: 240 EB Shipped in Q3 2019
Demand for storage is stronger than ever as, in addition to growing user-generated data, machine-generated data now requires a formidable amount of storage space and will need even more in the future as the number of connected devices increases. Since the bulk of data continues to be stored on hard drives, it is not surprising […]
Corsair’s New iCUE QL PWM Fans Pack 34 Addressable RGB LEDS Each
It appears that RGB has been in the market for so long that companies are starting to feel the need to up the ante, which is exactly what Corsair is doing with its new iCUE QL RGB PWM fans announced today. For the time being, the company is only announcing them in 120 and 140mm variants. What’s […]
Grab a Radeon RX 5700 graphics card for just $290 right now
AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 is a great graphics card, if you can’t spend a little extra money for the 5700 XT. The card has dropped to $290 a few times, and now one model from XFX has returned to that price. For comparison, most other RX 5700 cards start at $330. The model on sale uses AMD’s […]
The SK Hynix Gold S31 SATA SSD Review: Hynix 3D NAND Finally Shows Up
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. In most respects, SK Hynix fared the worst with the transition to 3D NAND, and their 3D NAND has not been used in very many […]