Samsung’s semiconductor business is having a ball – first there’s talk of Qualcomm switching to Samsung foundries, now the SSD division has something to brag about. Last year Samsung SSDs had double the market share of arch rival Intel.

The info comes from market research firm IHS. Read more »

If you need ultimate performance on your PC then SATA drives just don’t cut it – fast SSDs need to be hooked up to the faster PCIe bus. The new Intel 750 SSD promises read speeds of up to 2,400MB/s and writes up to 1,200MB/s.

The drive offers high performance in random reads and writes too. Read more »

AMD has definitely lost a lot of its former glory. Once on top of the food chain, the company is now struggling to make ends meet with shrinking CPU and GPU sales. This decline has naturally been felt on the stock market as well, where AMD is now priced at around $2.64 a piece – a number which was as high as $40 in 2006.

This has put the company in a tough spot, but its extensive R&D capacity really makes it a desired target for acquisition. Over the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about such buy-outs, most recently Mediatek was cited as a prospective buyer, but none of the plans has actually stuck. A new rumor now hints that Samsung might have its sight set on the struggling semiconductor company. Read more »

Hewlett-Packard will feature Bang & Olufsen audio in its products going forward. Previously, the PC manufacturer had a partnership with Beats Audio, which was struck before its acquisition by Apple.

The first HP products with audio tech from the Danish company will appear this spring. Read more »

NVIDIA spilled all the beans on its freshly announced, beastly GTX Titan X GPU during the opening keynote of its GPU Technology Conference. The graphics powerhouse is available today for $999.

NVIDIA GTX Titan X features Maxwell GPU architecture, which offers “twice the performance and double the power efficiency of its predecessor.” Read more »

Western Digital subsidiary HGST has shown a 10TB hard drive at a tradeshow for Linux and open source storage developers. So yes, 10TB hard drives are a thing now. Unfortunately though, the 10TB SMR HelioSeal HDD by HGST is destined for enterprise use only.

But in a few years, who knows, one of its successors (of the same capacity) may just end up inside your next desktop PC – if by that time consumers will still buy hard disk drives, of course. Or PCs. Read more »

NVIDIA showcased the ultra high-end Titan X graphics card during a press event in San Francisco. The company’s CEO boasted that the newcomer is “the most advanced GPU the world has ever seen.”

Titan X is built using NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture. Read more »

Valve is preparing a VR demonstration for the Game Developers Conference in March, but the first hardware for it came out unexpectedly from HTC. The HTC Vive headset will work with PCs rather than phones, but the company claims it has what it takes to beat the Oculus Rift.

This could be a big win for HTC though as official figures have it that Valve has 125 million users, nearly 9 million of which are online at the same time. Read more »

Chromebooks have definitely been on the rise lately and frankly we can see their appeal. They are ideal for a pure-online mobile experience on a budget and frankly nowadays you can get most of what you need through the abundance of online Google services, which you are most likely already relying on anyway. The point being that Chromebook definitely have their own place on the market, but currently they offer little hardware variety.

Of course, you can rightfully argue that most users of the budget machines don’t really care what is pushing the numbers inside the case, but the fact is that currently it seems only Intel is supplying processing power for the various portables. This is in no way mere chance and AMD really seems to have little interest or actual benefit from powering Chromebooks. Read more »

Intel has been working on the 14nm node for years, but it’s now sorted out and shipping – both as the mobile Broadwell processors in laptops and the Cherry Trail chipsets for phones and tablets. The next stop will be at 10nm, but Intel has plotted the future to 7nm as well.

These nanometers reflect the size of a silicon chip’s components. The smaller they are, the smaller the chip is. Also, shrinking the process node is the leading way to improve power efficiency and reduce the amount of produced heat. Read more »

Out of the blue the new Raspberry Pi 2 is official. It’s a successor to the B+ model and features the same hardware arrangement (1x Ethernet, 4x USB 2.0), but a much upgraded CPU – a quad-core Cortex-A7 at 900MHz. The best part is that Microsoft will provide a free Windows 10 version!

All this for the same $35 price tag. Read more »

MINIX, a reputable media center hardware manufacturer, has announced the latest addition to its device lineup. It comes in the form of the Minix Neo Z64 Mini PC. The name is more than fitting, as the device is truly small and will fit nicely in front of any TV and also packs quite a punch offering PC-grade performance.

It is powered by an Intel Z3735F 64-bit processor with 2MB of cache and a Turbo clock of 1.83GHz. Tech-savy readers are sure to recognize the chip, as it is the same silicon that powers most of today’s Windows-based tablets. That being said, the device will more than readily run Android as well, making it as universal as it gets in terms of media PCs. Read more »

Samsung unveiled today its new SM951 PCIe (M.2) SSD in a trio of different capacities – 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. The drive is not only quite small, but also freakishly fast with 2.15GB/s read and 1.55GB/s write speeds.

The SM951 uses a new 10-nanometer MLC flash technology, which makes it 50% less power hungry. In fact, the drive consumes just 2 miliwatts in standby mode. Read more »

With CES 2015 announcements under way Lenovo wasted no time in the introduction of its future product plans in the mobile PC sector. Today the Chinese tech giant introduced the third generation of its immensely successful X1 Carbon model as well as new additions to the ThinkPad X, T, E and L families. The press release also discloses information on a new IPS panel by the company, as well as an interesting power-bank with interlocking design and multiple charging accessories.

It comes as no surprise that Lenovo is once again hitting strong on the mobile computer front and it is this kind of perseverance that insured the manufacturer the formidable leading position as the world’s biggest PC manufacturer for 2013. The ThinkPad lineup has been playing a central role in the company’s success formula and has been Lenovo’s pride and joy ever since it was acquired from IBM. The latest third generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon was introduced today as the lightest 14-inch performance ultrabook yet, weighing just under 2.9 pounds battery and all. Read more »

HP went ballistic today with its monitor announcement, launching no less than seven of them at once. This includes some 4K monitors, some curved, one 5K screen and there’s even a 3D monitor.

The HP Z27q is the 27-inch 5K monitor with a 5120×2880 resolution, identical to the new iMac with Retina display. The monitor has two DisplayPort 1.2 inputs, four USB 3.0 outputs, tilt, swivel, pivot, and height adjustment, and covers 99% of the Adobe RGB gamut. The Z27q will set you back by a reasonable $1,299 starting March. Read more »