Component

Although there are rumours that Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia Corp. are not really happy with 20nm process technology of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., they will inevitably have to use it. A vice president of AMD said last week that the company’s 20nm chips would be out next year. “20nm …

WD (Western Digital) has launched high capacity versions of its Red NAS drives in 6TB £240 and 5TB £199 versions. On the face of it this looks like a slow response to the 6TB Hitachi Helium, 5TB Toshiba MC series and 5TB/6TB Seagate Enterprise drives which were launched a few …

The new Enthoo Luxe tower case fills a gaping chasm in the Phanteks range between the £199.99 Primo and the £89.99 Pro (£79.99 without window). Priced at £129.99, the Luxe delivers a set of features that are similar to the Pro, however there are a couple of significant changes to …

One of the mysteries of modern life in Western culture is the size of the portion compared to the size of the bill. While Italian restaurants are happy to heap spaghetti on your plate for next to nothing, haute cuisine in a French restaurant can often look like it has …

Advanced Micro Devices this week reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2014. The company did not manage to take advantage of corporate PC replacements, like its rival Intel did, but sales of chips for video game consoles allowed the firm to post rather significant increase in revenue compared …

Last year Intel announced plans to accelerate its Atom roadmap and produce its low-power/low-cost products at the same nodes as its leading-edge chips for desktops and notebooks. Apparently, the widely-discussed issues with the 14nm general-purpose process technology seem to also affect Intel’s 14nm process for low-power system-on-chips. According to a …

Fujitsu Limited and United Microelectronics Corp. plan to form a joint venture that will operate Fujitsu’s semiconductor manufacturing complex in Mie prefecture in Japan. While initially Fujitsu will hold the control stake of the new company, it is going to gradually reduce it. The Japanese conglomerate has been winding down …

Seagate Technology on Thursday said that it had shipped the first samples of hard disk drives (HDDs) with 8TB capacity to its customers. The company did not reveal any peculiarities regarding the product or the name of its clients. “We have also delivered 8TB customer development units to major customers …

The first specifications as well as a block-diagram of AMD’s next-generation code-named “Carrizo” accelerated processing unit (APU) have been published by a web-site. Despite expectations, the “Carrizo” will not support high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technologies, at least, in its mainstream implementation. Nonetheless, the new chip will carry a fair amount of …

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said this week that it had begun to ship the first wafers processed using its 20nm fabrication technology to customers. The company began mass production of chips using 20nm manufacturing process in early January, the first commercial wafers were shipped to undisclosed customers in June. The …

Intel Corp. said this week that its future PC platforms will be equipped with its own 3G/4G modems so to enable wireless Internet connectivity everywhere and on every device. The move will clearly make notebooks and slates with integrated baseband capabilities more affordable eventually, whereas Intel’s chips will get more …

It seems like only yesterday that we were all happy with a 1TB spinning hard drive. Then the technologies around solid state drives dropped to the point where ‘working 100% on memory' became viable – at least for the rich and famous. So how much should you spend on the …

Although Intel Corp. is behind the schedule with its 14nm manufacturing process, the company claims it has not made any changes to its 10nm schedule. Unfortunately, Intel has not officially revealed exact plans regarding production of chips using 10nm process technology. “We have done no changes or shift to our …

Thanks to strong sales of central processing units for personal computers, servers, tablets and other types of devices, Intel Corp. sold the record number of microprocessors in one quarter ever in the second quarter of its fiscal 2014. The company said that multiple factors affected demand for chips during the …

Chief executive officer of Intel Corp. said that replacement of Windows XP-based personal computers by businesses and enterprises will help the company to sell more microprocessors this fiscal year. While the company does not want to make predictions regarding next year, it does not exclude the possibility that the replacements …

Although Advanced Micro Devices said earlier this year that it would use 20nm process technology from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for its future chips, it looks like the company readies two new graphics processing units (GPUs) that will be made using TSMC’s 28nm HPM [high-performance mobile] process technology. Synapse Design, …

Intel Corp. on Tuesday disclosed its financial results for the second quarter of the year. The company reported revenue of $13.8 billion, net income of $2.8 billion and gross margin of 64.5 per cent. As expected, Intel’s results improved because of better sales of personal computers and continued strong sales …

The original Raspberry Pi miniature system birthed a bunch of exciting projects around the world, from teaching children the basics of programming and integration, to building quadcopters, MAME machines, time-lapse cameras and a host of others. Now though a new version has been launched, with the creators keen to point …

A web-site has published the first details regarding Intel 100-series chipsets that will power personal computers based on the code-named Skylake microprocessors. As expected, Intel’s next-generation core-logic sets will support SATA Express as well as some other innovations. What is interesting is that the new chipsets will also support enhanced …

Micron Technology on Monday introduced the industry’s first monolithic 8Gb DDR3 memory component. Previously 8Gb memory chips were made by stacking together several 2Gb or 4Gb devices. 8Gb monolithic components will enable cost-effective, high-capacity solutions for servers. “The ability to scale with our customers' accelerating memory demand was a key …

One of the advantages that some of Intel Corp.’s integrated graphics processors (IGPs) have compared to AMD’s IGPs is a large level four cache that is used to store frequently used data. While at present AMD’s integrate graphics adapters are still faster compared to Intel’s, in the future the latter …

Phison Electronics, an independent developer of controllers for solid-state drives (SSDs), may lower prices of its products in a bid to boost shipments. The company needs to gain market share since large SSD producers tend to use their own controllers inside its drives nowadays, as a result, going forward it …

Today we follow on from our recent analysis of the remarkable ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q 144hz G-Sync monitor and focus on the partner card for that review – the Asus GTX780 Ti ROG Matrix. ASUS claim this card is created around ‘hand chosen cores' to ensure the highest levels of …

Intel Corp.’s Quark microprocessor for ultra-low-power systems, wearable electronics and smart appliances, has not yet gained any traction on the market, but the world’s largest chipmaker is already working on its replacement that will be available in 2015. The new platform is code-named “Dublin Bay” and at present not a …

In a bid to convince its partners and investors that it is on-track with its Tick-Tock strategy, Intel Corp. reportedly plans to showcase several yet-unannounced products at the Intel Developer Forum event this September. While the company will demonstrate certain new things, it does not mean that everything goes truly …

HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., this week introduced the industry’s first hard disk drive with 1.8TB capacity, 10K rpm spindle speed and SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive will be used in mission-critical applications that do not require maximum possible performance offered by solid-state storage solutions, but take advantage of …

Intel Corp.’s NGPTIM [next-generation polymer thermal interface material], which was supposed to bring back record overclocking capabilities to the company’s processors is better than its predecessor, but is significantly worse than commercially available thermal interfaces, a new research has found out. Earlier this year Intel Corp.’s promised that its Core …

In a bid to retain its leadership position on the market of contract semiconductor manufacturing, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is reportedly accelerating development of its 10nm FinFET process technology. At present TSMC is the leading contract maker of chips produced using 28nm process technology. It is believed that the company makes considerably …

Panasonic Corp., which is not known for PC hardware, has quietly started to sell its own-brand solid-state drives in Japan. The drives are based on OCZ’s Indilinx Barefoot M10 controller and are most likely manufactured by Toshiba Corp.’s OCZ Storage Solutions in Tawan. Akiba PC Hotline reports that at least …

Today we are going to look at an exciting new cooler from Noctua – the NH-D15. Unfortunately to some technical issues, our review of this has been delayed for some time now. The Noctua NH-D15 slots in at the top of their range of coolers – above the critically acclaimed NH-D14 …