Workstation

Shortly after Apple announced the Mac Pro desktop earlier this week, AMD said that it is introducing two new Vega 20 cards for workstation users — the Radeon Pro Vega II and the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo targeted at high-compute workloads. The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo is the world's most powerful GPU at the moment with an FP32 performance of 28.3 TFLOPs. Sadly though, this GPU is only available to the Mac Pro and it will be some time before gamers can reap the benefits of Infinity Fabric on GPUs.

Apple's long-awaited Mac Pro has finally been revealed ahead of its fall launch. Apple initially promised it would arrive in 2018, but it appears that the design team got quite creative and developed several innovative design solutions worth highlighting.

Seagate announces that it is now prepared to market enterprise- and server-grade hard-drives with capacities of 16TB for the first time. The Exos X16 is a helium-based 7200rpm drive, whereas the IronWolf 16TB and IronWolf Pro 16TB are NAS drives. Tencent Cloud has already picked up X16s for use in its operation.

Apple has taken off the covers of its both its long-anticipated all-new Mac Pro and companion 32-inch Pro XDR 6K display. At US$4,999 it is far from cheap, but for what it offers it is arguably a good value proposition.

Apple revealed a lot of interesting new technology at WWDC 19, but the one thing that almost everyone is talking about is the insane price it is charging for its fancy new Pro XDR monitor stand. The monitor is already eye-wateringly priced at US$4,999, although with all the technology packed into it that part makes sense. What makes little to no sense is that Apple is charging a whopping US$999 for the almost mandatory companion stand.

Dell and Alienware VP Frank Azor has confirmed in a tweet that the recently announced XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 will indeed have all its components — particularly its SSD — soldered on, citing the "extremely tight form factor" and comparing the device to a modern smartphone.

Why can't professional workstations look more like ultra-thin gaming laptops? RTX Studio will kick-off a new generation of sleek professional laptops that are expected to appeal to younger CAD users and digital artists who may not want the thick and visually anemic ThinkPad, Precision, or ZBook laptops of old.

Announced today, the new 2019 Mac Pro looks like an updated "cheese grater" Mac Pro. Featuring a massive spec bump over the current Mac Pro, the new desktop features 8 PCIe slots and Apple's new Mac Pro Expansion (MPX) Module system. MPX Modules use a proprietary connection that allows for enough PCIe lanes to deliver 500 Watts and support dual Radeon Pro Vega Duo GPUs with a total of 56.8 teraflops of computing power and 128 GB of HBM2 VRAM.

The newest generation of mobile workstations from Lenovo, the Lenovo ThinkPad P73 and ThinkPad P53, have leaked ahead of their official announcement. The smaller Lenovo ThinkPad P53 receives a lot of upgrades, including an OLED screen and a much faster Quadro GPU.

Today, (May 31, 2019) Creative unveils a new partnership with the Taiwanese PC-smiths Clevo. It will involve the integration of Super X-Fi technology into this manufacturer's notebooks in the future. Therefore, this platform will focus on headphone audio in Clevo machines.

AMD's Ryzen 3000 launch has been the talking point at Computex 2019 and all eyes were on the plethora of X570 motherboards unveiled by various OEMs. The excitement with this new chipset generation is largely due to the transition to PCIe Gen4 and the fact that these chipsets have higher power draws, requiring active cooling. This article presents all the information about AMD's new flagship chipset that we are hearing from the event and from other publications so far

MSI has unveiled the upgraded WS65 workstation, which the company claims is the world’s first laptop to be powered by Nvidia’s brand-new mobile Quadro RTX 5000 graphics card. The WS65 also features an Intel Core i7-9750H processor and a whopping 32 GB RAM. The MSI WS65 is available for pre-order at a price of US$3,499.

The MSI GT76 Titan houses powerful desktop-class components including a Core i9-9900K that is overclocked to 5 GHz on all cores and an NVIDIA RTX 2080 GPU. The GT76 offers a 17.3-inch 4K panel that covers 100% Adobe RGB and comes with all the connectivity options one expects in a laptop this size. The powerful internals are provided with improved Cooler Boost Titan features for sustained peak performance and the suave exterior modeled after exotic cars further adds to the visual appeal.

MSI has announced a new entrant to its workstation lineup, the WP65. The WP65 mobile workstation is powered by a 9th gen Intel Core i7 processor and the just announced NVIDIA Quadro P620 graphics. The WP65 is certified by independent ISVs for workstation programs and from the looks of it, seems to be one of the more affordable workstation laptops.

Nvidia has officially revealed a new lineup of Quadro GPUs for laptops, which includes three SKUs that feature RTX technology. Seven mobile Quadro GPUs have been announced in total, with many major OEMs already incorporating the powerful graphics solutions in upcoming professional-level workstation notebooks.

Nvidia Quadro launches are generally quieter and more discreet when compared to their GeForce counterparts. Expect the next generation of mobile Turing-based Quadro GPUs to appear first on the latest Dell Precision laptops this July to supplant the long-running Quadro Pascal GPUs.

HP is set to release a new all-in-one (AIO) for 2019: a modular one. The Mini-in-One 24 Display looks like just another 1080p monitor. However, it has an enclosure at the back into which certain HP Mini desktops can be slotted. The Display can then use this PC's I/O as its own.

The TUF sub-division of Asus has released new gaming monitors at Computex this year. There are 3 of these devices, 1 of which is a vertically-aligned panel. All 3 support HDR, Adaptive-Sync and HDMI v2.0.

The announcement comes on the same day as Nvidia's official reveal of the mobile Turing Quadro RTX family of GPUs for laptops. The two Razer Studio Edition workstations will cater to professional users who may want extreme performance from a chassis that is thinner and lighter than most workstation laptops in the market today.

The Intel i9-9900K is widely regarded as one of the best desktop CPUs out there. Ahead of Computex 2019, its maker has released a new version of this SoC. It is exactly like the base 9900K, except it runs at 5.0GHz on all 8 cores rather than just 1.

ASUS is currently holding a "30 Years Together" event to celebrate 3 decades as a hardware and peripherals OEM. It involves competitions in which contestants can enter a PC-centric quiz or tell their own ASUS/ROG ownership story to gain points. The prizes to be won include laptops, cutting-edge graphics cards and accessories.

Marketing material and the features and technical specifications sheet for the Dell Precision 7740 workstation have apparently been leaked on the Chinese website Chiphell. The new information seems to match the details in documents that were also leaked earlier this month. The Precision 7740 will offer users a choice between AMD Radeon Pro WX GPUs and Nvidia’s seemingly brand-new mobile Quadro RTX GPUs.

Zotac is doubling down on workstation users with full-on Xeon and Quadro SKUs equipped with all the modern connectivity features like Thunderbolt 3, WiFi 6 Killer 1650X, Bluetooth 5, M.2 NVMe, and four HDMI 2.0 ports.

Micro- and mini-LEDs may make up the next generation of high-end displays after AMOLED. At present, however, they are more of a niche-application product. However, new research indicates that their market will grow to be worth US$6 million in 2024.

Golden Emperor International Ltd (GeIL) has released a new DDR4 memory product based on the long DIMM form factor. As it has collaborated with ASRock for its design, this new line of RAM is called the EVO SPEAR Phantom Gaming Edition. They have variants optimized for AMD and non-AMD boards.

Today (May 16, 2019), the corporations Microsoft and Sony unveiled plans to collaborate on the development of new technology. This partnership will see the 2 electronics giants team up on new image sensors and cloud computing applications. This may enhance platforms such as PlayStation and Azure AI in the future.

Microsoft has unveiled ElectionGuard, a software development kit (SDK) intended to make e-voting technology more secure. This open-source, encryption-enabled kit is intended to improve the polling systems to which it is applied. It will become available to polling officials via GitHub from the summer of 2019.

The new Linux kernel update integrates support for using persistent storage as regular system memory, a new Linux Security Module (LSM), live patching, as well as multiple minor tweaks and fixes. All these will be included in the first point release that should go live later this month, but those in a hurry can grab the sources and compile the new kernel right now.

While the chassis will remain the same, internal options will be updated from 12-core Xeon and Quadro RTX 6000 options to 28-core Xeon and Quadro RTX 8000 options for massive gains in performance. Units will begin shipping before the end of this month.

An entry for an Intel Xeon W-3275 processor has been discovered on Geekbench that shows a pretty remarkable result at least in the multi-core benchmark. While the single-core score for the CPU was still decent at 5,211 points, the multi-score recorded was a huge 39,869 points. The codename used in the record was Skylake-W.

One of Eurocom's most versatile 17.3-inch laptops can now officially swap between a Quadro MXM GPU and a GeForce MXM GPU presumably without any driver or compatibility issues for the end user. The system can effectively double as a high-power gaming laptop or workstation as needed.

The next Windows 10 update, May 2019 (or 1903) is becoming available via early-access programs run by its maker. However, Microsoft is also still maintaining the current general build, 1809. This version of the OS now has a new patch that may fix a whole raft of issues.

Reviewers and GPU aficionados have previously observed that there are two "classes" of the dies that make up NVIDIA RTX cards. They are essentially the TU10x-xxxA and TUx-xxx chips, the "A"s of which are approved for factory overclocking. However, new variants of the same dies negate this dichotomy.

Leaked documents providing information about upcoming Dell Precision laptops have revealed that Nvidia will be releasing mobile versions of its Quadro RTX graphics cards. It has been planned that the Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 workstations can be configured with the new high-end graphics solutions to work alongside their 9th Gen Intel Core CPUs.

Vade Secure is an email-security company that produces a series of reports called "Phisher's Favorites". The 2019 first-quarter (1Q2019) issue shows that the targeting of social media by this kind of hacker has increased by 74.7% compared to 1Q2018. Facebook and Instagram are prominent example of the sites in question.

Intel is currently preparing for the release of its new line of discrete graphics cards. Today (May 1, 2019), the company's senior principal engineer has officially confirmed that these new GPUs will support ray-tracing on a hardware basis. This puts them directly in Turing's firing-line - or possibly vice-versa.

These affordable Precision laptops will carry a very wide range of processor options from a U-class Core i5-8265U up to an H-class Core i9-9880H. GPU options, however, will be limited to the Quadro P620 and the older Radeon Pro WX 2100. Wi-Fi 6, fingerprint reader, smart card reader, and IR camera are optional extras.

Intel's new chief executive officer (CEO), Bob Swan, has conceded that the company's "supply constraints" may still impact on the diversity of the chipsets it offers as this year goes on. Swan has admitted that this will be a "challenge", even in the 3rd quarter of 2019. Then again, he has also committed to never allowing this to affect customers again.

The X570 chipset is compatible with AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series. So far, we have been led to believe that it will support PCIe 4.0 and will, obviously, next-gen performance and speed. A new leak appears to confirm its all-4.0 nature, as well as the number of USB ports an X570 motherboard may have.

The device-diagnostics company Blancco claims to have bought over 100 second-hand hard drives on the eBay sites of 4 different counties, to see what data, if any, could be accessed on them. It claims that 42% of these drives still stored information from their previous owners that can be thought of as sensitive.

Intel has made its earnings report for the first quarter of this financial year (Q1FY2019) available to the public. In it, overall revenue is described as "flat" compared to Q1FY2018. Its "data" business has declined by 5% in the same terms, although its "PC-centric" revenues are up 4%.

The 4K display standard is likely to be immediately succeeded by its 8K counterpart in the fullness of time. ResearchandMarkets has estimated that, even though this next-gen solution only pulled in about US$2 billion worldwide in 2017, this will increase to just over $68 billion in 2026.

The May 2019 update is set to be the next major upgrade to Windows 10. However, those with older machines may have particular trouble with getting it to work after installing it. This is because Microsoft has raised the minimum recommended hard-drive storage to support doing so to 32GB.

A record for a processor that utilizes the Glacier Falls platform has been spotted in SiSoftware’s Sandra database. “Glacier Falls PCH” was mentioned in a leaked Gigabyte presentation slide in December and was categorized as “Extreme” with availability starting in Q3 2019. The High End Desktop (HEDT) processor in this particular case could be a member of the upcoming Cascade Lake-X series.

The latest reports on the subject of new Intel platforms suggest that the first 10-nanometer (nm) chipsets will be here later in 2019. However, according to a new image characterized as the company's latest release schedule, this does not apply to commercial CPUs. It puts the launch of the next-gen architecture at the 3rd quarter of 2021.

Microsoft had announced a plan to finally put the legacy app Paint to rest in future versions of Windows. However, as with the last time the company tried this, it was met with user pressure to retain the beloved old drawing utility. As a result, it has subsequently been revealed that it will make it to 1903.

A trio of IT researchers affiliated with Facebook have created a new method to turn a video of an individual performing a series of actions (e.g. a dance) into a 3D 'game character'. This character - and its associated movements - can then be transposed onto a new background. The researchers assert that this background could interact with said character.