Intel announced its upcoming Braswell SoC at the IDF conference earlier this year, set to run Windows or Android, among others, on a 14nm 64-bit architecture. We now learn that those will finally be available at the start of 2015, over 6 months from now.

Meanwhile, its Broadwell K desktop architecture, the successor of its current Haswell lineup, will also reportedly be delayed until 2015. Read more »

Ever see Android users shouting “OK Google” into their phones, forcing their little Droid handsets to do their bidding via voice, and find yourself feeling left out?

Well there’s no need to be jealous any longer, because even if you don’t have an Android phone, you can still use google voice commands in Chrome. Read more »

Samsung announced today it has begun mass producing of the industry’s first 3-bit NAND-based SSD designed specifically for servers and large data centers. The new 3-bit NAND technology is going to enable data centers operate more efficiently and manage heavy workload better. Ultimately, this would benefit complex queries common with social networking, web browsing and email.

The new PM853T SSD will be available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB sizes and will deliver a 30% boost in manufacturing efficiency compared to 2-bit NAND SSDs. Read more »

South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix has announced that it has developed the industry’s most advanced double data rate 4 modules with 128 GB of capacity.

The new DDR4 modules are based on Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology and will significantly improve speeds and efficiency. Read more »

At the today’s IDF conference in Shenzen, China, chip giant Intel has unveiled a boatload of new processing systems and technologies.

Braswell, the next iteration of their processor family and successor to their Bay Trail lineup has been unveiled, as well as a new 64-bit Android 4.4 KitKat kernel specifically optimized for the next generation architecture. Read more »

Over the span of last year around 2.1 million Chromebooks have been shipped. The majority of those numbers come from North America – exactly 89% – giving the continent the highest demand in the world.

The numbers were calculated by ABI Research and the firm forecasts an increase to 11 million in 2019, but who can really say what can happen in five years (less than five years ago Symbian was top OS). Read more »

Microsoft announced its Surface Pro 2 tablet with a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor but then decided that it will include a 1.9 GHz Intel Core i5-4300U processor instead two months later.

But now that the device is shipping to users who have bought it it turns out that some (if not all) of them are getting the Surface Pro 2 with the initially-announced chip. Read more »

Over at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Intel has shown its latest beast – the Core i7 Extreme Edition – dubbed Devil’s Canyon. It’s an 8-core 16-thread processor with unlocked cores (allowing easy overclocking), support for the latest DDR4 memory and a better thermal interface.

Intel has also confirmed that its next-generation processors, Broadwell, will feature Iris Pro graphics. Broadwell chipsets will have 14-nanometer processors and will come with unlocked cores. Read more »

Samsung has initiated the mass production of what it calls is the “most advanced DDR3 memory”. Its based on the 20nm manufacturing process, which Samsung has been using for nearly 2 years now.

This time however the 4 gigabit modules are DDR3, not DDR2 and the company utilizes its new double patterning technology with something called ArF lithography immersion. Read more »

Microsoft will be giving game developers a closer look at the next version of its graphics API set on March 20 at Game Developer Conference or GDC. Microsoft didn’t reveal much about it right now and all we know for sure is that AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are onboard with it right now.

But while Microsoft did not reveal much on its website, the GDC schedule for the DirectX event does give a good hint at what we can expect. According to the description, it seems DirectX 12 will offer lower-level access to hardware, similar to AMD’s Mantle API. Having low-level access to your hardware means you are able to get the most out of it and make better use of it. Read more »

Toshiba has officially launched its new 5TB enterprise HDDs from the MG04 series spinning at 7200rpm. Designed for the mid-range servers and cloud applications in mind, the new Toshiba MG04 HDD is based on 1TB platters and comes in 2TB, 3TB, 4TB as well as 5TB variants.

The MG04 HDDs feature 7200 spindle-speed and either 64MB or 128MB cache. Naturally, they utilize the SAS-6Gb/s interface (as opposed to ATA-6GB/s) and are quite power efficient. Read more »

According to e report by Nikkei, Sony is planning to sell its Vaio division which designs and manufactures personal computers. The move is dictated by the business unit’s poor performance, as well as the Japanese giant’s desire to shift its focus on smartphones.

Sony will reportedly sell its PC business to the investment fund Japan Industrial Partners with the estimated price ranging between ¥40 billion and ¥50 billion ($391 million to $489 million). Read more »

It looks like the White House will be getting a little bit of help with its ConnectEd Initiative.

A bunch of tech companies will be offering free products and services and amongst them, is Apple. Read more »

Samsung has chosen Carphone Warehouse as a “preferred partner” for Europe. The retailer will collaborate with Samsung to open and manage over 60 dedicated stores of the Korean company.

Carphone Warehouse is already managing the three pilot stores and it seems Samsung is happy with the results and has decided on an aggressive expansion. Read more »

A new player has officially entered the ARM CPU market – AMD. Opteron A1100 packs four or eight Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 2+ GHz. As you can imagine (if the Opteron name didn’t give it away), this will be a server part.

This chip is aimed at high-density servers where it’s more important to run many threads than run one thread quickly. Read more »