Biostar has unveiled its latest mini-ITX motherboard for the AMD B550 chipset, the B550T-Silver, which is designed for use with AMD's Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 3000processors. The small-sized board combines a simple silver and black aesthetic with decent features including PCIe 4.0 support,Wi-Fi 6, 2.5 GbE networking, and one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot. With both NVIDIA and AMD moving quickly away from multi-graphics card setups to single card powerhouses, the mini-ITX form factor has become as potent

SEMI, an organization representing chipmakers and producers of semiconductor production tools, published this week that sales of wafer processing equipment has surged to an all-time record of $71.19 billion for 2020. In the lead-up to the current chip crunch, equipment sales to South Korea and China noticeably spiked, with fabs in the former buying 61% more gear than in 2019, while China has risen to become the largest fab tool customer of all of the nations. Overall, sales of fab equipment surg

With the launch of Intels Third Generation Xeon Scalable platform based on 10nm Ice Lake processors, Intel has upgraded a part of the company that makes the BIG money. For the last few years Intel has been pivoting from a CPU-centric company to a Data-centric company, leveraging the fact that more and more of its product lines are built towards the datacenter mindset. With the launch of the new server platform in this past week, Intel is gearing itself up for an enterprise stack built on 10nm, P

This week TSMC has disclosed its full quarterly financial results for Q1 2021. In those results the company often explains where the revenue demand is for its technologies, and the financial split the demand brings. This number is not correlated to wafer production (although TSMC provides an overall number too), given that smaller process nodes have a per-wafer premium, but it does indicate where the demand is in the market right now. As perhaps to be expected, 7nm takes top billing, however a c

On the back of Intel's 11th generation Rocket Lake processor release last month, MSI has dropped a new Z590 motherboard which certainly raises an eyebrow towardsaesthetics. The newZ590 Ace Gold Edition is a gold-inspired take oftheregular MEG Z590 Ace motherboard, with all of the same premium features such as PCIe 4.0 support, 2.5 GbE, Wi-Fi 6E, and dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C on the rear panel. Built around its Enthusiast Gaming series, theMEG Z590 Ace Gold Edition injects a lot of flair and

With the high demand for semiconductors causing most companies to focus on their high margin, high profitability components, I wasnt expecting to see many launches of low-to-mid range hardware for the rest of 2021. AMD has surprised me in announcing its entry and mid-level processors with integrated graphics today, offering up to eight Zen 3 cores and Vega 8 graphics, but AMD is pointing out that these models are for the pre-built system market only right now. AMD has plans to enable a full reta

Microsoft tends to update their Surface lineup on an irregular schedule, not necessarily following the updated CPUs that are generally announced on a mostly annual cadence. Today Microsoft is announcing an updated Surface Laptop, dubbed the Surface Laptop 4, and brings the hardware up to date, somewhat at least. Also, with the explosion in video conferencing as a result of the Covid-19 global pandemic, the company is also announcing a slew of accessories to improve the Microsoft Teams experience

Announced a few weeks ago, were looking at the impressive performance and efficiency of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 780G SoC, courtesy of Xiaomis new Mi 11 Lite 5G mid-range phone.

Another month into 2021, and AMD's Ryzen 5000 series processors are still thin on the ground, especially the high-core count parts. The more affordable models, such as the Ryzen 7 5800X ($449) and Ryzen 5 5600X ($399), are slowly coming back into stock. While we occasionally see the higher core count CPUs listed for ridiculous prices it doesn't make much sense to hold out much hope of stock levels increasing any time soon. Much better value may be better found in its Ryzen 3000 offerings

ASUS Z590 motherboards are among the best that you can buy for 11th Gen Intel CPUs. Heres an overview of what makes them special, as well as who each of the motherboards are best for.

StarWind has developed a 2-node hyperconverged infrastructure perfectly designed to fit the needs and budgets of ROBO, SMB, and Edge IT environments.

Kicking off another busy Spring GPU Technology Conference for NVIDIA, this morning the graphics and accelerator designer is announcing that they are going to once again design their own Arm-based CPU. Dubbed Grace after Grace Hopper, the computer programming pioneer and US Navy rear admiral the CPU is NVIDIAs latest stab at more fully vertically integrating their hardware stack by being able to offer a high-performance CPU alongside their regular GPU wares. According to NVIDIA, the chip is bei

Join us at 8:30am PT for our coverage of NVIDIAs annual GPU Technology Conference keynote address . The traditional kick-off to the show be it physical or virtual NVIDIAs annual spring keynote is showcase for NVIDIAs vision for the next 12 to 24 months across all of their segments, from graphics to AI to automotive. Along with slew of product announcements, the presentation, delivered by CEO (and lovely kitchen owner) Jensen Huang always contains a few surprises. Due to the coronavirus, this y

A PCIe Gen4 SSD controller can get more performance out of QLC NAND, but can a QLC SSD ever be more than a low-end drive?

Intel's latest 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors have launched and officially on sale, which means Z590 motherboards with PCIe 4.0 can make use of the new hardware. Despite the initial reaction to reviews of the Core i9 and Core i7 being somewhat negative, the mid range Core i5 hardware seems to be a good offering, and Rocket Lake it's still seen as a technologicaladvancement of Intel's portfolio with the new core design. To use one of Intel's new Rocket Lake processors, or

The mention of Spectre and Meltdown is enough to send chills down any InfoSec spine. A number of these batches of security vulnerabilities deal with speculative execution, and how a processor might leak data while executing code in a speculative manner. This week AMD has pre-empted the security space by detailing a potential security concerns regarding its new Zen 3-based Predictive Store Forwarding feature designed to improve code performance by predicting dependencies between loads and stores.

Silicon Motion has announced their first SD Card controller to support the NVMe-based SD Express interface. The new SM2708 controller is capable of sequential transfer speeds of 1700 MB/s, vastly higher than the 104 MB/s most SD devices and cards are limited to using the older but widely-supported UHS-I interface. In 2018, version 7.0 of the SD specification introduced the PCIe and NVMe-based SD Express interface as the new way forward for SD cards. The older UHS-II and UHS-III interfaces develo

Hot onthe heels of Intel's latest Ice Lake-SP 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable processor launch, GIGABYTE Server has listed three new motherboards designed for server use. The GIGABYTE Server MU92-TU1, the MU92-TU0, and MU72-SU0 all offer different levels of features and controllers and are based on Intel's C621A chipset for 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable. Two are built on the E-ATX form factor, with one ATX model, with features varying between sixteen memory slots, different dual Ethernet configurat

The launch of Intels Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processors has been in the wings for a number of years. The delays to Intels 10nm manufacturing process have given a number of setbacks to all of Intels proposed 10nm product lines, especially the high performance Xeon family: trying to craft 660 mm2 of silicon on a process is difficult at the best of times. But Intel has 10nm in a place where it is economically viable to start retailing large Xeon processors, and the official launch today of Intels 3

Designed with a focus on Intel's latest 11th generation Rocket Lake processors and the new memory controller ratios, G.Skill has announced a wave of new memory kits designed to squeeze as much performance out of the platform. The new memory kits for Z590 and Rocket Lake feature speeds of up to DDR4-5333. They will bemade available across multiple lines of its range, including the premium Trident Z Royal, Trident Z RGB, and the more affordable Ripjaw V series. With memory performance and cont

This morning, LG issued a press release that announced the board of directors had decided to close down the conglomerates mobile phone business. The news is unfortunate, however isnt too surprising given the mobile division had been accruing continuous operational losses over the last 6 years , greatly denting the companys financials. SEOUL, April 5, 2021 LG Electronics Inc. (LG) announced that it is closing its mobile business unit. The decision was approved by its board of directors earlier t

Capping off a busy week for fab-related news, South Korea authorities this week gave SK Hynix a green light to build a new, 120 trillion won ($106.35 billion) fab complex. The fab cluster will be primarily used to build DRAM for PCs, mobile devices, and servers, using process technologies that rely on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The first fab in the complex will go online in 2025. The new cluster will house four huge semiconductor fabrication plants, which will be located on a 4.15 mi

TSMC this week has announced plans to spend $100 billion on new production facilities as well as R&D over the next three years. The world's largest contract maker of chips says that its fabs are currently working at full load, so to meet demand for its services going forward it will need (much) more capacity. Among TSMC's facilities to go online in the next three to four years are the company's fab in Arizona as well as its first 2nm-capable fab in Taiwan. TSMC is entering a period o

Intel has now launched its latest 11th Generation Core processors for desktop. The highest performing of these is the Core i9-11900K,with 8 cores and 16 threads, and it does have some raw core advancements with an updated microarchitecture. These processors need appropriate motehrboards, and although we've seen Intel's Z590 and B560 models already filter into retail channels over the last couple of months, the time is now to start getting to grips with them. The first up for review is th

ASRock and its in-house extreme overclocker Nich Shihhave created the latest in its series of high-end enthusiast-grade motherboards. The OC Formula brand returns, famed for its good extreme overclocking performance, with the ASRock Z590 OC Formula. As a high-end clocking board, it is equipped with two DDR4 memory slots as close to the socket as is feasibly possible with the cooler recommendations for improved memory performance. This meanssupport for DDR4-5600 out of the box, but it can go high