Solid state storage might not have been the most exciting tech sector to follow in 2020, but it certainly had its fair share of new technologies arriving, consumer-friendly price drops, and a major corporate acquisition deal. 3D NAND flash memory has reached 176 layers, PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs are gaining gaining ground, and QLC NAND has enabled the first 8TB M.2 SSDs.

The mini-STX form-factor was introduced by Intel in 2015 to provide additional options in the burgeoning small form-factor (SFF) PC space. Since then, vendors such as ASRock, ECS, and MSI have been releasing new products based on the mSTX form-factor – and not just for Intel platforms, but AMD as well. As a result, while it’s still a small part of an overall much larger market, mSTX has seen increasing traction as the smallest form factor to

Today Xiaomi held the Chinese launch announcement of the new Mi 11 – the company’s new mainstream flagship phone for 2021. The new phone features a new super-high-end OLED screen that ticks off every checkmark feature that you’d expect from a 2021 design, including 1440p resolution and 120Hz refresh rates, features the new Snapdragon 888 SoC at its heart – as well as comes in a new thinner, lighter, and more

We’re a few days away from completing the 2020 calendar year, and it’s been a quite a hectic year for everybody. In times of troubles, the smartphone industry had been under a two-prong attack from both an economic stand-point as well as the from a product maturity standpoint – trying hard to innovate with new features to convince users to upgrade their previous generation devices. This year, we’ve seen several new industry trends make breakthrough advances in terms of technology in smartphones

Ever since consoles moved to the same underlying architecture as modern desktop computers, there has always been an underlying question as to whether those same processors could run regular desktop computer versions of Windows, and subsequently be used for more than just gaming. We’ve had to wait a long while, but for whatever reason one of the 8 ^th Generation Console processors is being enabled for the (mass) market, and the first to jump on that game is the Chuwi Aerobox. We can install Windows, and it’s

Following the launch of Thunderbolt 4 earlier this year as part of Intel's Tiger Lake CPUs, the next piece of the TB4 hardware stack has dropped this week with the release of Intel's first stand-alone Thunderbolt 4 controller, Maple Ridge (JHL8540). Previously announced back in July as part of Thunderbolt 4's reveal , Intel this week updated their Ark database to add a product page for the Maple Ridge controller family and flag that the first part is now shipping. With

ECS is a well-known OEM in computing circles, known for building motherboards, computers, and industrial / embedded systems for other vendors. Some of their motherboards and small form-factor PCs are marketed under their own brand name - for example, their LIVA series of ultra-compact form-factor (UCFF) machines serves markets that are not directly addressed by the Intel NUCs. At the 2020 CES, the company introduced the LIVA Z3 Plus and LIVA Z3E UCFF machines based on the

More widely known for its server-grade models, Supermicro always launches a small number of consumer motherboards, sometimes with some extra flair and hardware we don't see from the regular vendors. This time around, Supermicro's top-tier C9Z490-PGW uses a PLX chip which enables the board to operate with dual PCIe 3.0 x16 or quadruple PCIe 3.0 x8 slots. This is combined with dual PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots from

Today Qualcomm is disclosing a set of benchmark results for their new Snapdragon 888 SoC that’s set to power next year’s flagship Android devices. Usually, as in years past, we would have had opportunities to benchmark Qualcomm’s reference designs ourselves during the chipset launch event, or a few weeks later during CES. However due to obvious circumstances, this wasn’t possible this year.

As an alternative, Qualcomm is instead sharing with the press a set of benchmark results from their new Snapdragon 8

Samsung this morning has dropped as brief teaser about their next-generation Exynos SoC. Dubbed “Exynos is back”, Samsung is revealing that there will be a proper announcement for the new SoC on January 12, which would fall on the first full day of CES.

Being that this is a teaser, any details are non-existent. But it’s worth noting that Samsung is promising “A whole new Exynos is coming”. Which hopefully is a sign that Samsung has spent the last couple of years