Several weeks ago, NVIDIA launched the “crown jewel” of the GeForce line, GTX 1080 Ti(tanium) in the “Founders Edition” variant. As promised, custom boards were to follow over the “next couple of weeks”. MSI, known Taiwanese vendor of graphics cards unveiled custom versions of the 1080 Ti, featuring not just a custom heatsink option, but a custom PCB as such. The line-up consists out of several cards, starting with the Aero card, which comes with a simpler heatsink and the PCB. The MSI 1080 Ti Aero card comes with a blower-style cooler to bring its price as close to MSRP as possible. Second one is
AMD Radeon Pro SSG Could Support 4TB Memory
In a move that was perhaps the most important announcement of Siggraph, Radeon Technologies Group presented the Radeon Pro SSG card, perhaps the most innovative concept to have come out of the GPU world of in quite some time. SSG stands for “Solid State Graphics”, and in its prototype version consists out of a Polaris 10 graphics processor, commonly known as Radeon RX 480 with 8GB of memory, a PLX PCIe bridge and two M.2 NVMe slots with two 512GB SSD drives, which might come to market on their own, probably branded as Radeon R9 memory. The way how Radeon Pro SSG works is quite ingenious. When AMD
NVIDIA Tesla P100 Shows Future Quadro P6000, GeForce GTX Titan
At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), which takes place this week in Frankfurt, Nvidia finally unveiled the PCIe version of its largest chip, the GP100. This is not the rumored GP102 chip and confirms words spoken by Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corporation – when he said that the company ‘taped out all the Pascals’: GP100, GP104 and GP106. The GP100-based Tesla P100 is a quite long dual-slot card, which rivals dual-GPU Tesla K80 in its length. The board features lower clock for both GPU and the HBM2 memory, meaning only the Nvidia NVLink-based daughterboards will feature GP100 chip in its full performance
Seagate Presents World’s Fastest SSDs
Seven months ago, Steve Luczo (CEO) stated that “there is no one that is using SSDs for storage.” This statement still haunts Seagate Technologies, LLC to this date, even though it was out of context. “I mean, maybe at the margin for replacing boot drives… I mean, maybe one or three per cent of the hierarchy is SSDs for storage. Most of our flash product is actually not hanging off the storage bus, it is fast memory.” As it usually goes, the dismissive statements come at the time when you know that you have a good thing coming down the line, but you need to hold the fort.
PREVIEW: OCZ’s RevoDrive 400 Looks Like a Great SSD
Ever since the company got acquired by Toshiba, OCZ Storage Solutions focused on more performance for the enthusiasts and expanding the market share in the fast-growing segment of enterprise storage. On CES 2016, OCZ introduced several new products, basing them on NVMe PCI Express Gen 3 standard. For the enthusiasts, OCZ launched RevoDrive 400 Series. Unlike RevoDrive 350 (which featured non-removable memory on the add-in PCIe card), the all-new RevoDrive 400 now comes as an M.2 form factor product with an additional PCIe x4 add-in card – very similar to Kingston’s HyperX Predator. By moving to M.2 form factor, RevoDrive 400 can now be installed not just in desktop, but
SPEC Releases New Workstation Benchmark
The Workstation Performance Characterization Group inside SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) launched a new workstation benchmark at the Supercomputing Conference (SC’15) held this week in Austin, TX. New SPECwpc V2.0 benchmark marks a new chapter for SPECwpc body, which creates professional benchmarks utilized by commercial entities and research institutes in order to find the ultimate hardware performance on a set of industry-standard benchmarks. Most of upgrades were focusing on changes going on with the PC architecture. According to SPECwpc, these are the upgrades inside the benchmark suite: Improved storage workloads that better reflect performance of NAND Flash devices for high-capacity data storage. Better scalability measurement for
Samsung Claims ‘World’s First’ With M.2 NVMe SSD
Keyssa's Kiss Connectivity Looks to Kill Connectors
Keyssa is promising that their new Kiss Connectivity technology will enable mobile devices to transmit data without any connectors or cables anywhere.
HGST Showcases 'Fastest Ever' SSD
Storage company HGST demonstrated this weekend at the Flash Memory Summit 2014 in San Jose, California what it calls the “world’s fastest” SSD. HGST’s new SSD uses a PCIe interface and delivers three million random read IOPS of 512 bytes and random read access times of 1.5ms. Latency was reportedly close to 1us. HGST says this performance is orders of magnitude faster than existing Flash based SSDs. “The PCM SSD demonstration is a great example for how HGST sets the pace of the rapidly evolving storage industry,” said Steve Campbell, HGST’s Chief Technology Officer, in a release. “This technology is the result of several years
SanDisk to buy FusionIO for $1.1 billion, Consolidation Continues
SanDisk and FusionIO have entered into an agreement where SanDisk will purchase all of FusionIO and its assets to the tune of $1.1 billion in cash, once again continuing the consolidation of the NAND flash market into fewer bigger companies. This announcement is likely a response to Seagate’s recent acquisition of the NAND flash division of Avago which included the SandForce controller division. However, the real truth is that FusionIO is not anywhere near a consumer flash storage company and most of their customers are professionals or enterprise while most of SandForce’s products are consumer focused. I’m sure SanDisk would have loved to buy both
Seagate Buys LSI Flash Business for $450 Million from Avago
So, its starting to get a bit confusing how many times SandForce has changed hands by this point, but the short of it is that they were bought by LSI in 2011 to beef up the company’s flash business, and then LSI as a whole was purchased by Avago last year which included the SandForce division. And now, Avago, a company mostly known for their components (not necessarily entire products) has sold the solid state flash business of LSI to Seagate to the tune of $450 million. This includes both LSI’s own line of PCIe based SSDs as well as their SSD controller business which produces
VisionTek GRX 240GB PCIe SSD Review
Introduction Over the last couple of years, SSDs have taken the market by storm. Once we leave the lowest budget segments of the market, a SSD is almost always part of a modern PC build. SSDs noticeably boost a PCs performance mainly due to their random data access times being orders of magnitude lower than on traditional rotation hard disk drives which makes them so desirable for the user. Transfer rates also increased beyond what hard disk drives are capable of and quickly hit the limits of what the Serial ATA interface is capable of. This led to the introduction of novel form factor SSD
HP Moonshot Using ARM 64-bit SoC
Last week ARM invited a group of journalists and analysts to Austin Texas to hear about their server, mobile, and wearable developments. ARM and their partners presented in-depth explanations of their version of the ARM architecture. On the first day of the conference, HP’s Dwight Barron gave an overview of their Moonshot system. They have been refining the specifications since its late 2009 inauguration. Moonshot’s design differs from the traditional servers which have been the general-purpose workhorses of the data center. These boxes have proved to be jacks-of-all-trades, able to run operations for organizations of every shape and size. They started with proprietary operating systems and a
Samsung’s 24 SSD video reminds us of all the speed brakes
Samsung’s Marketing guys probably pulled a marketing stunt of the year, with a Youtube video which probably cost them less than any of those fancy ads in papers. Guys’n’girls took 24 Samsung 220/200MB Read/Write SSD drives, put’em on an RAID controller and tested them using a Skulltrail system. While achieved speed of 2GB/s was awesome, it also struck me as a pretty low figure for a 24 drive setup. Each drive achieved only 85MB/s, far cry from what those drives are capable of. Given that a RAID0 array with five Intel or OCZ SSDs gives out 1GB/s, why did Samsung need 19 more drives to
ASUS kills PATA and PCI standards!
Back on the INQ, I wrote about dangers lying ahead for AGEIA, Creative Labs and Bigfoot Networks, representatives of these respected companies just told me that their business model is solid and that they are indeed, future-proof. Well, that turned out nicely – AGEIA never took off because of $250 charge for a PCI card, Creative now exists almost solely on patent charges and selling off its own property, while Bigfoot networks made the greatest network card on the planet – and failed to pack it up in an attractive and future-proof package. The reason for this rant is a story on Xfastest.com, introducing ASUS
nForce is dead: Zotac releases its GeForce 9300 motherboard
I saw first motherboards based on MCP7-series chipset back on Computex 2007. Yup, after a year and half nVIDIA is finally releasing MCP7 series to market, featuring GeForce 8-class GPU for Intel processors. It is hard to understand what kind of problems delayed this part for over a year, but one of theories could be that nVIDIA didn’t want to cannibalize the sales of GeForce 8400 and 8500 series, which is give-or-take the performance that you’re going to get with GeForce 9300/9400 chipset. Zotac is well known manufacturer of nVIDIA graphics cards, and also known as the company that produced highest clocked 8800Ultra, 8800GT and
