2019 is coming to an end, and it’s time again to look back at what the industry has brought us. This year, we saw a lot of hardware improvements from all the various vendors, with a big focus on bringing out new distinctive designs. We’ve seen some exotic devices in the form of foldable phones for the first time ever, and even some more traditional designs dared to implement design cues such as mechanical pop-out cameras. While designs were sometimes the main differentiating factors

It has been a couple of weeks since Intel formally provided some high-level detail on its new discrete graphics strategy. The reason for the announcements and disclosures centered around Intel’s contract with the Department of Energy to build Aurora, an exascale supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory. The DoE and Argonne want developers clued into the hardware early, so when the supercomputer is deployed it can be used with as little ‘learning time’ as possible. This means Intel had to flesh out some of its strategy, as well

Just in time for the launch of Apple's newly redesigned Mac Pro tower, OWC has introduced the ‘fastest SSD [they've] ever built’, the Accelsior 4M2. The high-end solid state drive combines multiple M.2 drives to offer up to 8 TB of storage, with aggregate read/write well over 6000 MB/s.

The OWC Accelsior 4M2 SSD is essentially a PCIe x8 backplane based on the ASMedia ASM2824 PCIe 3

The drive to putting Arm into the server space has had its ups and downs. We’ve seen the likes of Applied Micro/Ampere, Broadcom/Cavium/Marvell, Qualcomm, Huawei, Fujitsu, Annapurna/Amazon, and even AMD, deal with Arm-based silicon in the server market. Some of these designs have successful, others not so much, but Arm is pushing its new Neoverse N1 roadmap of cores into this space, aiming for high performance and for scale. We’ve already seen

Since AMD unveiled its products on the 7 nm process node, we've seen numerous CPU launches and announcements with the Ryzen 3000 series of processors. Not only processors but graphics cards too with AMD's launch of the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics cards back in July. Aimed at occupying the mid-range consumer graphics market, both the new Navi 10 graphics cards are based on its RDNA architecture which is completely re-worked from what we've

Outside of the plethora of AMD-related announcements of late, GIGABYTE has announced a pair of Intel motherboards for its workstation and server board users. The GIGABYTE MU71-SU0 is designed for Intel's Xeon W-3200 processor family and is based on the C621 single-socket chipset. The other model is the GIGABYTE MD71-HB0, which is dual-socket on the C622 chipset and supports Intel's Xeon Scalable processor product stack

Marking a thawing of relations between the Japanese and South Korean governments, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has partially removed export restrictions on photoresists to South Korea. As a result, Japanese companies can now obtain a ‘bulk’ license to supply three years’ worth of photoresists to companies like LG, Samsung, and SK Hynix rather than seek approval for each shipment. However not all restrictions have been removed: exports of fluorinated polyimides and high-purity hydrogen fluoride from Japan to South Korea are

Following on from our launch day AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and 3960X CPU reviews, we are taking a look at the accompanying flagship model from ASUS. The ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme is the successor to ASUS's previous generation X399 board, the original Zenith Extreme, and comes packed with all the benefits of AMD's TRX40 chipset. This includes PCIe 4.0, a strong USB 3.1 G2 implementation, and support for up to

Western Digital has started partner sampling of its 18 TB and 20 TB energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) drives. The HDDs utilize WD's up and coming EAMR tech to further improve their storage density, allowing hyperscalers and similar customers to continue improving the desity of their storage clusters. WD is on track to start volume shipments of these products sometimes in the first half of next year.

According to an announcement posted by Western Digital, the new 18 TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR and

LG has announced its new 31.5-inch UltraFine Ergo 4K display, the largest in the UltraFine family to date. Living up to its name, the Ergo monitor has an innovative ergonomic arm that provides far more flexibility than any other stand that comes with LCDs, affording some new opportunities to free up space on the desktop.