Business Articles

The leaked 3DMark picture shows some outstanding specs for the GTX 1170, besides the benchmark score. Apparently, the next gen GPU will come with as much as 16 GB of GGDR6 VRAM running at 2.5 GHz, which already sounds a bit exaggerated. Upon closer inspection, one could find a few red flags that signal faked information.

The fourth generation Z2 Mini workstation series from HP is bringing refreshed specs like the Intel 8000-series desktop CPUs and the more advanced Xeon E 2100-series for professional designers. The new SFF systems support up to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, up to 1 TB NVMe SSDs, Intel Optane memory and up to 1 TB SATA HDDs, plus a choice between Nvidia’s Quadro P600/P100 and AMD’s Radeon Pro WX 4150 GPUs.

Introduced back in November 2014 as the result of Snapchat's collaboration with Square, Snapcash ended up as a payment service mainly used for trading adult-oriented content online, far from the initial goal of allowing friends and family members to quickly transfer money while using Snapchat.

Anticipating increased demand for 3D NAND flash storage in the coming year, Samsung is looking to invest an additional US$2.6 billion to expand production capacities of its NAND factories in China and Korea taking the total investment to US$9 billion by 2019. The increased investments are being centered around production of 3D NAND flash, V-NAND flash, and QLC flash memory.

Facebook subsidiary PointView Tech is building an internet satellite to enable broadband connectivity to remote areas. The project, named Athena, was shrouded in secrecy up till now. Facebook has finally confirmed to WIRED and CNET about the existence of such a project. Details of the satellite itself are still under wraps but is expected to launch in early 2019.

Although the Chinese brand might not hit its planned sales target of 200 million units for the entire year, reaching the 100 million units milestone is also quite impressive. Compared to 7 years ago, Huawei managed to increase its smartphone sales by no less than 51 times.

The Chinese company reports that it should sell 200 million handsets by the end of 2018, which would bring it fairly close to Apple's target. At this rate, Huawei is expecting to overtake Apple in global sales at some point in 2019. The US and Indian markets should help Huawei further their plans in this respect, although the US embargoes could hinder this development.

According to reports from Korean media, Samsung could be looking to merge the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S brands given that the differences between them are minimal. This move can reduce the costs of Samsung's mobile development portfolio and possibly increase profitability amidst the onslaught of Chinese smartphone brands.

At the Inspire partner show this week, Microsoft executives talked about plans to bring back consumers into their fold with the inclusion of Gaming and Modern Life under the Modern Life Services umbrella in Microsoft's core digital solutions across the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. The idea is to make these services attractive for professional consumers with the goal of making them even more productive.

The first foldable phone from Samsung will most likely be named Galaxy X, and Wall Street Journal informs that it is supposed to be launched in early 2019 with a flexible 7-inch display that can be folded like a wallet. It can either hide the display completely or split the main display into two smaller screens.

The latest financial report coming from TSMC reveals that the Taiwanese company experienced some revenue problems in the first half of 2018 due to the crypto market depreciation, but the foundries are expecting substantial profits in the second half over great demand for next gen GPUs and mobile chips.

Although the changes were quickly removed, Dell's Chilean website has been up for a while showing the XPS 13 convertible with two Amber Lake processors, namely the Intel Core i5-8200Y and the Intel Core i7-8500Y. Now, it only remains to see how long does it take for Dell to make these processor options available for real.

The last of Siri's co-founders, Tom Gruber, has announced his retirement from Apple. Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010 but two of its founders left in the succeeding years. The news comes in the wake of Apple recently appointing Google's former head of Machine Intelligence, John Giannandrea, as Chief of Machine Learning and AI Strategy.

After numerous leaks and teasers, the Xiaomi Mi Max 3 is finally here. Xiaomi's new phablet inherits a lot of specifications from the Redmi Note 5 including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 SoC and dual cameras but the standout features of the Mi Max 3 are the 6.9-inch FHD+ 18:9 display and its 5,500 mAh battery.

Research firm Blancco has published a Mobile Device Repair and Security Report that throws up some interesting facts. The report puts Samsung as the OEM with the highest failure rate among Android manufacturers and the Xiaomi Redmi 4 as the specific model with the highest failures in 2017. In the Apple camp, the iPhone 6 was the device with the highest failure rate.

Without a doubt, Google has become one of the most important technology companies in the last ten years – the company not only has a monopoly in search-engines, but also in the mobile OS market. Today, Google has been fined by the EU commission for abusing its mobile OS monopoly.

Walmart has chosen Microsoft as its cloud services provider to improve the former's forecasting, purchasing, and data sharing abilities. While both the companies clearly share a rivalry with Amazon, this 5 year deal helps Walmart increase its market share in the US and also streamline its delivery system.

The Snapdragon 632 was released a few weeks ago and has made its way to Geekbench, with it recording scores that would make it the company's most impressive mid-range SoC, even ahead of the Snapdragon 636.

A problem that has been spotted in early March has resurfaced on Twitter this week, and Lenovo pointed the troubled customer to the official forum. Sadly, the 18-page discussion about the X1 Carbon's inability to use deep sleep on Linux also reveals that Lenovo's machines are unable to use LTE and the fingerprint reader when running this operating system.

DIY gamers should be thrilled for the latest GPU price drops, however, this also means that the overstocks may further delay the launch of the next gen models. Since the crypto market saw the sharp depreciation earlier this spring, analysts pointed out that profits for both AMD and Nvidia could significantly shrink, but a crypto market rebound may restore most of the lost profits later this year.

The new LPDDR5 memory modules will be featured in next year's handhelds like the Galaxy S10, which will also bring support for 5G connections and improved AI applications. Samsung claims that the new chips are 50% faster and need 30% less power compared to current LPDDR4 chips. Mass production for LPDDR5 chips should begin at some point in Q3 this year.

ZTE has paid off the huge US$1.4 billion fine issued by the US government over a month ago. This means that the Chinese company is finally back in business and can now negotiate deals with US companies.

According to Honor, three million units of the Honor 10 have been shipped. The device was released in the last week of April, so this is an impressive figure—one that comes amidst a plethora of other successes recorded by the company.

Intel has taken wraps off its new Xeon E-2100 entry-level workstation processor family. The 6C/12T Xeon E-2100 is a derivative of the 14nm++ 'Coffee Lake' architecture and is tailored for creative professionals looking at a low-cost workstation CPU that offers improved single-threaded performance along with faster DRAM and higher PCIe lane counts.

While some businesses would like to order the XPS 15 9570 with an Intel Core i7 or even an Intel Core i9 processor inside, but without dedicated graphics, Dell has no plans to offer such hardware configurations. The answer to this question comes from Frank Azor via Twitter, as usual.

The fifth-generation V-NAND memory chips by Samsung use the "Toggle DDR 4.0" interface for the first time in the industry and provide a data transfer speed of up to 1.4 Gbps — an impressive increase of 40 percent over the previous generation. These new 256 Gb chips will soon be followed by 1 Tb offerings.

According to a recent trademark filing with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, the next-gen Huawei Mate device will be the Mate 20. This is still a bit far from an official confirmation, but it definitely minimizes the chances to see the Mate 11 showing up first, as some rumors have been suggesting.

After a successful first month, sales of the Samsung Galaxy S9 devices have flatlined. Going by the current trend, sales of the duo are expected to peak at an underwhelming 31 million shipments, making them the worst-selling Galaxy S devices since the Galaxy S3 that was released back in 2012.

HTC’s fall from grace continues without hitting terminal velocity. The company released its June sales numbers, with the figures showing a 68% year-on-year drop in revenue.

Samsung Electronics' expanded mobile factory was inaugurated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Noida, Uttar Pradesh in the presence of South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. The factory is billed to be the world's largest facility for smartphone manufacturing with a capacity of producing 120 million units a year.

DigiTimes reports that Nvidia may be experiencing some problems with the current GTX 10 GPU overstock and might postpone the launch of the GTX 11 family for a few months, despite already being in possession of around one million next gen GPU cards. This could mean that the custom-made AIB and mobility versions could launch almost at the same time as the Founders' editions.

AI, machine learning and computer vision application will be getting a boost via the new NGD Catalina 2 programmable SSDs. Coming in 2.5-inch / add-in-board form-factors, these solutions integrate Toshiba's 3D NAND memory chips and benefit from the PCIe 3.0 X4 speeds with peak sequential read/writes capping at 3.9 GB/s. The programmable part is handled through a Xilnix FPGA.

Prominent Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley has learnt that Microsoft is still working out the nitty-gritty of the long-rumored Surface Phone or 'Andromeda' device, whose leaks and renders have been doing the rounds on the Internet. The delay in launching the device is apparently being attributed to the unfinished state of the 'Andromeda' shell and other quality and scheduling issues.

Xiaomi’s growth has been meteoric. The company made advances into Europe last year and is set to pay the US a visit in 2019, if company Vice President Wang Xiang’s words are anything to go by.

HTC is set to lay off 1500 workers from its Taiwan manufacturing unit by September. The company has seen a consistent drop in sales figures over the past year or so, and it’s about time we came to terms with the fact that the Taiwanese company could close shop soon.

Baidu's new Kunlun processor is advertised as "China's first cloud-to-edge AI chip" that will be used in both cloud and edge scenarios, including data centers, autonomous vehicles, and public clouds. The chip uses 14 nm Samsung engineering, providing 512 GB/s and 260 TOPS for a power consumption of 100 W.

Dell is going public once again. In an announcement made earlier today, the U.S.-based computer manufacturer said it will begin trading its Class V common stock for Class C common stock as it seeks to re-enter the New York Stock Exchange. The decision comes as Dell hopes to further pay down debt and increase the momentum its enjoyed over the past few years.

Startup firm Tachyum's Prodigy is being billed as a Universal Processor Platform that claims to deliver over 10x performance over conventional CPUs in the Hyperscale Data Center market. The company claims that it can outperform the competition in AI applications and that it needs just about 250,000 of these chips to rival the human brain.