Memory & Storage Space Archives - VR World

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VR World’s Guide to SD Card Storage

SD cards exist in three different form factors these days. There is the standard SD card designed in 1999, then we got the Mini-SD card which made its debut in 2003 and the Micro-SD card which appeared in 2004. These three form factors have been with us all this time and even though their design remained the same, a lot has changed in terms of performance and reliability. Most modern laptops, smartphones, gaming consoles and other devices feature an SD card slot of one shape or the other. There are also countless adapters and SD card reader devices which you can use as an add-on

AMD, Breaking, Business, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News, Nvidia, VR World

AMD’s Next Generation GPU to Feature 384-bit GDDR6 Memory?

Last year, Micron collaborated with NVIDIA and brought forward GDDR5X memory, with 2.5 GHz QDR clock i.e. “10Gbps per pin” achieving record bandwidth per pin. With GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN Xp, Micron and NVIDIA went 10% up and reached 11Gbps, with some lucky owners able to reach 3GHz QDR i.e. “12Gbps per pin”. That all is set to change with SK Hynix launching the GDDR6 memory. Debuting on AMD (and NVIDIA) graphics cards in about six-to-eight months from now, GDDR6 replaces GDDR5 and GDDR5X, bringing great times for improvments for GPUs and FPGAs. SK Hynix introduced the world’s fastest 8Gb (i.e. 1GB) Graphics DDR6 DRAM chip. Its operating

Breaking, Memory & Storage Space, News, Promoted, Reviews, Software Programs, VR World

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard to the Rescue

Since ever there was computing, we needed to save the information somewhere safe. Today, more than ever – we’re generating immense number of different data sets, and consuming data at ever higher rate. Every significant event is captured on a camera or smartphone, and every document is stored on our PC, it is really important to save all those personal and business files somewhere safe. However, what if our “safe place”, such as the ubiquitous hard drive gets formatted, you delete file or lose the whole partition? In that case, you would need a good data recovery software to get all those pictures or documents.

3D, Breaking, Business, Companies, CPU, Exclusive, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Reviews, startups, Virtual Reality (VR), VR World

Hands On Review: PIMAX 4K VR Headset

Several weeks ago, we posted the story on the very first 4K VR headset, coming from PIMAX. Apparently, the name of the company is “Maximum Pi” based on mathematical skills of the founder, but the similarity with a well known Canadian company – (P)IMAX is just too close. Given that headsets are bound to go into higher resolutions and refresh rates, we were intrigued can the relatively unknown manufacturer from Shenzhen beat the well established players on the market. First off, the packaging – the retail package is smaller than one might expect – significantly smaller than HTC Vive, and about a quarter smaller than Oculus Rift. Inside

Breaking, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News, Samsung

Samsung Launches New Generation of Ultra Fast SSD Storage

At the Samsung’s SSD Global Summit in South Korea, the company officially unveiled their next generation SSDs. All the models launched use the M.2 connector based around the NVMe (PCI Express SSD) standard. The new 960 PRO SSD is the successor to the 950 PRO, launched at last year’s Global Summit as Samsung’s first M.2 PCIe SSD for the retail market. The new 960 EVO introduces a more affordable option based on TLC NAND flash. Earlier this year, Samsung released the SM961 and PM961, a new generation of OEM M.2 PCIe SSDs. These brought V-NAND to the OEM side of the family and introduced a new Samsung “Polaris” SSD

AMD, Breaking, Enterprise, Graphics, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News

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

Exclusive, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News

Toshiba Rebrands OCZ Storage Solutions

In December 2013, Toshiba announced the acquisition of OCZ Technology, Inc. for $35 million. Several weeks later, Japanese giant completed the acquisition and rebranded the company “OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company”. This brand continued to exist until recently, when Toshiba moved to streamline its branding position on the market. We got in touch with the OCZ PR team to learn that “OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company” is no more, with the parent company positioning “OCZ” as its sub-brand, similar to the branding segmentation between Kingston and HyperX, or Micron and Crucial. OCZ will continue to exist as an independent brand, wholly owned

Memory & Storage Space, News, press releases, Samsung

Samsung First to 10nm, Launches New DDR4 Memory

Samsung Electronics, world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer (according to SIA) just won the race to 10 nanometer (10nm-class) process by launching DDR4 SDRAM memory chips which utilize the new process node. However, this ’10nm-class’ is not exactly precise 10nm, as the distance between the cells / transistors can vary between 10-19nm. If you’re in the semiconductor industry, this will not be surprising as Intel’s famous 22nm process was considered 26-28nm process. The new DDR4 memory chips come in 8Gbit (1GB) capacity, supporting the frequency of up to 3.2 GHz (1.6 GHz in DDR mode). At the same time, power consumption is reduced by 10% when compared to

Business, Companies, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, VR World

WD, SanDisk Move Forward in Acquisition Deal

Looks like Western Digital’s acquisition of SanDisk is moving forward, as the hard drive maker’s shareholders have given a green light to offer common stock as part of the SanDisk deal. In turn, SanDisk’s shareholders have also approved of the Western Digital acquisition, making the transaction a done deal thus far. Western Digital’s shareholders held a special meeting on Tuesday. Around 90% of the shareholder group voted in favor of the stock issuance in the SanDisk deal. However, that number is merely a preliminary account, as the company will release the actual numbers in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed with the

AMD, Breaking, Hardware, Intel, Memory & Storage Space, News, Nvidia

HBM2 Will Revolutionize Your Computer

Even though HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) standard only launched last June in the form of AMD’s Fiji GPU, that memory was considered a ‘trial run’ for HBM2 – a memory standard which is here to stay. Launching in mid-2016 with AMD Polaris and NVIDIA Pascal, HBM2 memory standard will redefine computing as we know it. There are several memory standards which want to replace DDR and GDDR memory standards, including Intel-Micron 3D XPoint (pronounced: Cross Point) Optane memory – but HBM looks to have the widest support. If we compare this to HBM2, it had 1GB capacity and offered 0.5 Gbps bandwidth in 4-Cube configuration for a

Breaking, Enterprise, Memory & Storage Space, News, VR World

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.

Gaming, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News

OCZ Gaming Unveils Streamer Sponsorship Program

Gaming is one of largest, if not becoming the largest form of entertainment, and last several years witnessed the rebirth of PC gaming, as gaming consoles cannot keep up with the system demands of new games. As such, the way to advertise to new audiences is shifting, with a barrier of entry becoming so attractive that anyone with the right mindset and dedication can do it. Over a decade ago, I met Jonathan Wendel, who went on to become a first pro-gamer to earn over a million dollars, and creating a successful collaboration with different hardware vendors with his ‘Fatal1ty’ brand (Abit, ASRock, Creative Labs, OCZ etc.). Now,

Breaking, Enterprise, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News, VR World

SSDs Beat Conventional HDDs for the First Time: 30% Higher Capacity!

Even though Solid State Drive (SSD) technology is only now reaching significant levels of popularity, capturing more and more market share, the fact of the matter is that SSD as such is not a new technology. In fact, if memory serves me right – the very first SSD came out in 1990 in the shape of NEC 5.25″ SCSI drive (anyone remembers SCSI cables?). However, this drive was actually based on RAM-chips with a built-in battery. The dawn of modern SSD’s came with the arrival of NAND Flash memory, and in 2005 Samsung made a milestone strategic decision to pronounce Flash memory and SSD as ‘the future’,

Breaking, Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News, VR World

Mushkin’s $499 4TB SSD: Made in USA Works!

Bill Gates often recommends reading books by Vaclav Smil, especially the Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing. In this book, Vaclav goes in depth why a shift in manufacturing is irreversible, and goes in depth about the errors USA made while it moved mountains in manufacturing and the unstoppable move to service-based economy. However, every opinion is subject to change, and over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a lot of manufacturing returning to the USA, from high-end components to mainstream products. Furthermore, we’re seeing several Chinese companies moving the production to the North American continent. Faraday Future raised a lot

Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Reviews, Storage Reviews

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

3D, AMD, Analysis, Companies, Graphics, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Reviews, Video Card Reviews, VR World

AMD Radeon Fury X: Potential Supercomputing Monster?

When AMD launched its Fiji-based graphics cards, all eyes were focused on its performance in consumer applications such as computer games. And while the first results forced Nvidia to launch “Titan Lite” in the form of GeForce GTX 980 Ti, DirectX 12 benchmarks are starting to show different, brighter outlook for AMD, starting with Ashes of the Singularity. The focus of this article however, is its potential and usage in applications where Fiji GPU will be branded as Fire Pro, and Fire Pro S (Server) – where AMD can take an ASIC and upsell it to commercial clients, with full-speed enabled for Double Precision floating point

3D, AMD, Business, Companies, CPU, Graphics, Hardware, Internet of Things (IoT), Memory & Storage Space, News, VR World

SK Hynix Invests $39 Billion in Three Mega Fabs

Consolidation is inevitable in every industry, yet today saw the announcement that trumps numerous hyped or just rumored acquisitions made to pump up the stock in western media. SK Hynix just made recent moves by industry giants such as Intel ($16.6 billion acquisition of Altera), TSMC, or Micron (rumored sub-23 billion acquisition by the Chinese) – look small. The company announced it will invest no less than 38.9 billion US dollars in a bid to become the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, a crown currently held by Taiwanese TSMC for logic chips and Samsung for DRAM/NAND memory chips. This investment is split into two parts, $26.9 billion to build two

Back to School, Hardware, Intel, Memory & Storage Space, News, VR World

Kingston Launches DDR4 Memory, PCIe SSDs for Intel Skylake

Following the announcement of Intel Skylake-K processor for gamers and enthusiasts and the new chipset, known as the Z170 PCH (Processor Communications Hub), memory manufacturers introduced new products to support the platform. HyperX, a division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc. announced several new products optimized for Skylake. The company launched several 8GB and 16GB memory kits from the Fury family and now offers memory kits with two and four DIMM modules. Memory kits are available in low-latency 2133MHz (CL14), and CL15 versions at 2400 and 2666MHz. With Intel Core i5-6600K and i7-6700K, we are looking at very good bandwidth of 34.1GB/s for the 2133MHz, 38.4GB/s for 2400

AMD, Analysis, Business, CPU, Enterprise, Hardware, Intel, Memory & Storage Space, News, Opinion

End of the Tick-Tock Strategy for Intel?

Given the slow disintegration or refocusing of its competitors, we were not all too surprised when Intel started to slow down its famous “Tick-Tock” manufacturing cadence. Originally introduced in 2006 with the “Conroe”, Core 2 Duo processors, Tick-Tock was mixed between a new microarchitecture and current manufacturing process (Tock), and a new process, die-shrink processor with some architectural optimizations (Tick). Further separation in Tick-Tock was a cadence between mainstream parts (desktop, mobile) and high-end parts (gaming, workstations) – Tick or Tock would always debut as mainstream parts, followed by high-end 6-12 months after. High end would typically mean Intel Xeon and Core i7 ‘X’ line-up.

Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, News, VR World

Samsung Brings 2TB Solid State Drives To Your Computer

We have been lucky and were able to use solid state drives for a few years now. This ensured lightning fast performance even in daily usage circumstances. While the solid state drives are fast, they lacked in capacity. Many have argued that you would need an SSD with HDD combination, to fully utilize your computer speed. But with the advent of much faster, larger and better solid state drives, this is all turned in a completely new direction. A few years back, you had to bend over backwards to afford more than 1TB of Solid State Drive capacity in terms of finances. With the release