Techreport

Intel is holding its Data-Centric Innovation Summit at its headquarters in Santa Clara, CA today, and the company took the opportunity to talk about its plans for its future server processors at the event. ...Read more...

Intel has a slate of new 14-nm parts coming this year, and one of the next stops in the land of a thousand lakes is Whiskey Lake. Intel hasn't announced much about these chips beyond an internal code name, but a new HP spec sheet could tell us more about what to expect from those parts. The sheet potentially reveals the existence of three chips: the Core i7-8565U, the Core i5-8265U, and the Core i3-8145U.The first thing of note about these potential Whiskey Lake parts comes in the peak boost clock department. The i7-8565U's 4.6-GHz peak clock speed represents a whopping 400-MHz advantage over the top-end Kaby Lake-R part , the Core ...Read more...

AMD's Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise drivers get a fresh coat of paint every quarter, and today the company is unwrapping the 18.Q3 version of its supporting software. The headlining feature of this quarter's release is AMD Remote Workstation. This feature works with Citrix's XenDesktop Virtual Delivery Agent software to let users tap into the power of their Radeon Pro WX 7100 or Radeon Pro WX 9100-equipped workstations over the internet using Citrix's Receiver app. ...Read more...

This is my local lighthouse, the creatively named Big Red.

Samsung announced yesterday that it's mass-producing QLC SATA SSDs for consumers, but Intel has beaten the NAND giant to the punch with a QLC drive of its own. The SSD 660p launching today offers SATA-like prices for NVMe gumsticks in 512-GB, 1-TB, and 2-TB capacities.According to Anandtech's report on the drive , the SSD 660p uses Intel's 64-layer, 1-Tb 3D QLC NAND to achieve its high densities at relatively low prices per gigabyte for NVMe storage. The uniform ...Read more...

Greetings folks. It's nice and balmy today at my location, but unfortunately not everywhere. After a relatively calm July, Portugal's fire season is now again in full swing. The recent Iberian peninsula heat wave didn't help matters any, and my Glorious Leaders supposedly had learned the lesson since last time around. Oh well, back to supporting our firefighters as usual. Not everything that's hot is bad, though. Our deal selection today is seriously toasty, and we think you'll want to have a bite. Check it out. ...Read more...

Cooler Master is growing its family of MasterBox cases today with the MB530P. This case rides two major trends in chassis design of late: tempered glass and addressable RGB LEDs. The MB530P includes three addressable 120-mm RGB LED fans on its front panel. To show those fans to the world, Cooler Master frames a sheet of tempered glass in a slanted front panel with blessedly large air intakes to let those fans breathe. ...Read more...

We're drowning in Threadripper test hardware at The Tech Report right now, as you can see in our second-gen Threadripper unboxing video. Gigabyte has also sent over one of its X399 Aorus Xtreme motherboards for us to test those chips with. ...Read more...

The Flash Memory Summit is underway in Santa Clara, CA this week, and NAND news is likely to fly hard and fast. For its part, Samsung is taking the wraps off what it calls the first quad-level-cell, or QLC, SSD for consumers. The company says these drives are in mass production now. ...Read more...

A plethora of leaked roadmaps this week suggests that Intel's ninth-generation Core or 9000-series CPUs are on their way sooner rather than later. To add fuel to that fire, motherboard makers are touting firmware updates that offer support for these chips despite the lack of any official acknowledgement by Intel that they even exist yet.

The pieces for 5G network connectivity are falling into place, but we haven't seen an actual production-ready 5G handset from a major manufacturer yet. Motorola, for its part, is taking the first steps down the road to 5G hardware by harnessing the Moto Mod accessory connector on the new Moto Z3 handset. A companion 5G Moto Mod exclusively for Verizon's network could make the Moto Z3 the first 5G-capable phone on the market. ...Read more...

Rumors of a "big" Ryzen APU with a massive Vega graphics processor on board have been circulating for months, fueled by appearances in public hardware benchmark databases and the like. Now, we may know why. AMD has taken the wraps off a semi-custom product it's produced for Chinese manufacturer Zhongshan Subor for use in a new gaming PC and console for the Chinese market.Subor's semi-custom chip includes a four-core, eight-thread Ryzen CPU running at a 3-GHz clock speed. It's paired with 24 Radeon Vega compute units running at 1.3 GHz, all connected to 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. For reference, that's even ...Read more...

I like my captions how I like my ice cream sandwiches: short and sweet.

Hi there, folks. It's with much joy that I recently noticed that there's a "second season" to Steins;Gate called simply Steins;Gate 0. The original show is one of the most intelligent ones I've experienced, and the new one seems to be going that very same route (which is good), but it's taken or taking a long time to get there (which is bad). Any other clever shows that I should watch out for? Oh, right, the deals. We've got some good ones today, check them out. ...Read more...

Samsung's $649 Galaxy Tab S4 might have stolen the spotlight yesterday, but the company has another Android tablet for folks who don't want to pay iPad Pro-like prices for their slates. The Galaxy Tab A 10.5" seems to have one mission in life, and that's content consumption. While the Tab A maintains the Tab S4's quad-speaker array with Dolby Atmos special sauce, it drops the DeX support and included S Pen that make the more expensive slate a potential productivity powerhouse. ...Read more...

The Tech Report has been incorporating digital audio workstation performance benchmarks into its CPU reviews for some time now—and we're one of only two sites on the web that I'm aware of to do so—but that practice got started almost by accident using hardware we basically had laying around the labs for other purposes.Serious musicians have long asked us to benchmark DAW performance using serious hardware, and in preparation for future reviews, we've finally ...Read more...

The high-end Android tablet is an endangered species, but Samsung is trying to keep the idea alive with its new Galaxy Tab S4. This 10.5" slate leans heavily on Samsung's DeX interface to provide a desktop-like multi-tasking experience in tandem with the company's Book Cover keyboard and compatible Bluetooth mice.DeX can also let the Tab S4 hook up to external monitors for dual-display productivity work with a separate USB Type-C to ...Read more...

Although we've been covering AMD's B450 motherboards as details have become available over the past couple of weeks, the official launch of those mobos happened yesterday. If you've missed our coverage of Gigabyte, Asus, and MSI's selections of freshened midrange mobos, be sure to check out our post on each manufacturer's wares for all the details.ASRock is ready for B450 budget builds with five new motherboards of its own. The company's ...Read more...

Apple posted its financial results for the second quarter of 2018 (or the third quarter of its fiscal 2018) today. The company took in $53.3 billion in revenue, up 17% year-on-year, and made $12.6 billion in operating income, also up about 17% year-on-year. Net income was $11.5 billion, up 32.1% year-on-year, and gross margin was 38.3%, down about 0.2 percentage points.iPhone shipments totaled 41.3 million, or an increase of 1% on the year. Despite the more-or-less unchanged unit shipments, Apple's handsets brought in $29.9 billion in revenue, or ...Read more...

Still the best GPU tech-demo ever.

Howdy, folks. Europe is under a massive heat wave right now, and it's getting to be Serious Business. Where before I was poking fun at Brits and Swedes for nearly keeling over with massive temperatures of 26 °C (79 °F), Portugal's now bracing for a four-day hell-fest of temperatures that could hit 48 °C (118 °F) in some spots. The prognosis for my area isn't that bad, but I'm still going to have a real toasty time. If you're praying for ice buckets, keep going. In the meantime, there's even more hotness to be considered—our daily selection of hardware deals. It's a doozy today, folks. ...Read more...

It's quarterly financial reporting season, and Samsung Electronics recently posted its second-quarter results. The company raked in $52.1 billion in revenue (58.48 trillion South Korean won) at today's exchange rates, and it made $13.3 billion in operating profit on that haul (14.87 trillion KRW). Revenue was down 4% year-on-year, while operating profit rose 6% year-on-year. Samsung said the drop in revenue was thanks to "softer sales of smartphones and display panels," while demand for its memory products helped soften the blow to its operating profits.As one of the world's largest (if not the world's largest) semiconductor and electronics manufacturing firms, Samsung has lots of irons in the fire. Although it doesn't break out divisional revenues in fine detail, the company said its semiconductor business unit, responsible for DRAM and NAND flash, enjoyed strong results ...Read more...

The Gamescom expo runs from August 21 to August 25 in Cologne, Germany, and Nvidia will kick off the event with its own GeForce Gaming Celebration pre-show party. As Nvidia puts it, the GeForce Gaming Celebration "will be loaded with new, exclusive, hands-on demos of the hottest upcoming games, stage presentations from the world's biggest game developers, and some spectacular surprises." ...Read more...

Have an older system that could really do with an SSD upgrade? Our deal-scouting today turned up a couple drives that could take the mechanical-hard-drive torpor out of your older laptop or desktop. ...Read more...

HyperX has been building up its mouse lineup of late with the entry-level Pulsefire FPS and RGB LED-ringed Pulsefire Surge. For those after something in between, the company now offers the Pulsefire FPS Pro. This rodent takes the basic Pulsefire FPS formula and adds a top-tier Pixart PMW3389 sensor and single-zone RGB LED illumination to the package. ...Read more...

Intel's Coffee Lake-based Xeon E chips have been around for a little bit now, and every major vendor is peddling products meant for those CPUs. Asus has a couple of motherboards for Xeon-E builders, as well as E500 G5 workstations barebones systems that use them. Let's have a glance at Asus' WS C246 Pro and WS C246M Pro motherboards. The two boards on show are nearly identical aside from their size, although the differing dimensions obviously result in a few minor alterations.

In recent weeks, crypto-currency miners and speculators have been reeling as various forms of digital cash have lost upwards of 35% of their value. Miners got another, smaller bit of bad news when Apple banned mining applications from its app store a couple of months back. Now Google has taken a similar step in its Play Store, among other changes sure to impact developers of apps operating in the gray area of morality. ...Read more...

We've reported on AMD's Q2 2018 results just yesterday and noted that things are looking rosy for the red team. Now the blue giant published its quarterly results, and the basic diagnosis is "that's a ton of money." The company raked in $17 billion in revenue, up 15% year-on-year, and made $5.3 billion in operating profit, up 37% since the same quarter last year.Net income got a 78% boost from Q2 2017, up to a massive $5 billion. Stockholders should be extra-happy with the ...Read more...

Way back when, smartphones would see large performance increases year after year. Those kind of computing gains are now in society's collective rearview mirror, but handset makers keep pulling new tricks out of their hats in an effort to tempt customers. From a durability standpoint, water and dust intrusion resistance have become more widespread over the last couple of trips around the fireball in the sky.However, shrinking bezels and ever-thinner chassis conspire to maintain screen breakage as a spectre to keep flagship phone owners up at night. Samsung isn't the only company whose engineers are toiling to ...Read more...

Did you hear the one about... Wait, wait! The punchline is baygulls. Great, huh?

Greetings, folks! I hope you're enjoying the summer weather. Around here it's warm and balmy enough, and there haven't been reports of massive fires—at least so far. My European brethren in Sweden and Greece can't say the same, unfortunately. Best wishes for them. In the meantime, the PC hardware world hasn't stopped moving. Here are today's best deals. ...Read more...

Samsung's been selling mobile DRAM packages in capacities up to 8 GB since 2016. The market is moving on to LPDDR4X now, and Samsung isn't being left behind. The company announced today that it's mass-producing what it calls the industry's first second-gen "10-nm-class" LPDDR4X memory, or "1y-nm" in its own parlance. ...Read more...

AMD released its second-quarter 2018 financial results yesterday evening. The company posted revenue of $1.76 billion, up 53% year-on-year, and made $153 million in operating income on that haul compared to a $1 million operating loss a year ago. Net income was $116 million, compared to a $42 million net loss a year ago, and gross margin rose three percentage points to 37%.The Computing and Graphics business brought in $1.09 billion of revenue, a 64% year-on-year increase. AMD says that result comes from strong Radeon sales and the continued momentum of its Ryzen CPUs. Investors looking for signs of AMD's ...Read more...

Not that long after Intel apparently tipped off the internet about the existence of its ninth-gen Core CPUs, there are some more rumors flying about the company's latest developments in the desktop CPU space. Grab your salt shaker and proceed. According to Computerbase, a now-defunct thread in Chinese forum Coolaler contained specifications on rumored upcoming Core i9-9900K chips, Core i7-9700K, and Core i5-9600K chips. More recently, German site Golem.de claims to have obtained information stating that the two higher-end models will use solder instead of thermal pads under their heatspreaders. Let's look at the rumored specs first.Source: ...Read more...

We're into the third quarter of 2018, and that means it's time for yet another Backblaze quarterly report. It's interesting to see the results of the cloud backup outfit's abuse of hard drives from every vendor—though Backblaze itself cautions readers from reading too much into its data. The latest report includes results from 98,265 hard drives including Backblaze's first-ever reliability results for 14-TB spinny disks. ...Read more...

Machines in Intel's NUC line of compact computers have offered a good bit of performance inside of a 4" x 4" (10.2 cm x 10.2 cm) package since their introduction. The company is now stuffing its 28-W eighth-generation Coffee Lake processors into a new NUC family, available with Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 chips. Form factors include both slim and tall barebones versions, tall Optane-infused complete systems, and bare board configurations. As is tradition with Intel's NUCs, the main difference between the slim and tall versions is the presence of a 2.5" drive bay in the larger chassis. ...Read more...

Much attention paid to Apple's latest MacBook Pros has been focused on the newly-silicone-ensconced keyboards in those notebooks, but another controversy has erupted regarding the new machines' performance under sustained heavy workloads. ...Read more...

The Nikon F kicked off the SLR revolution way back in 1959, and the lens mount of that iconic camera has persisted all the way to today's lineup of Nikon DSLRs. Nikon and rival Canon have both struggled to adapt to the burgeoning revolution in mirrorless cameras that's gained steam over the past few years, though, a shift led by Sony and its relentless refinement of its Alpha family of mirrorless bodies.

Shortbread challenge: Identify the motherboard.

You may recall Elgato's Stream Deck launched last May. To recap for those unfamiliar, it's essentially a box with 15 buttons that you can use to trigger events while streaming, like scene changes or special sounds. It's a pretty chunky device, though, and not everyone has that much desk space or needs all 15 buttons. Perhaps to serve the rest of the streamer market, Elgato is back with the Stream Deck Mini.

Howdy, folks! Let me tell you something about house floods: the water is often the least of your worries. You plug whatever spot it's coming through and proceed to bucket it out. What I've learned is that the post-op is way, way worse than the flood itself. Over the course of the past two weeks, I've spent untold hours with the after-flood logistics. I'd much rather just shovel water out for two days and be 100% done with this. Anyway, at least there's things that make me happy, like window-shopping sweet, juicy PC hardware. Here are the deals we have today. ...Read more...

Intel's Optane Persistent Memory sticks put 3D Xpoint memory chips in DIMM slots. While that may sound straightforward enough, the shift from DRAM to higher-density non-volatile stuff around server sockets could effect wide-ranging changes in the data center, and those potential shifts are only beginning to take shape. ...Read more...

When we reviewed Toshiba's XG5 NVMe SSD, it was one of the fastest drives we'd tested. Although that was the first drive we fondled that came equipped with Toshiba's 64-layer BiCS 3D flash memory, at the time Toshiba had already announced that it had 96-layer chips in development. That's been a year ago now, and the XG5's successor is here. Meet the Toshiba XG6 NVMe SSD. As you've no doubt already assumed, this drive uses fourth-generation TLC BiCS flash, stacking 96 layers of NAND cells in each chip. ...Read more...

In the wake of the Hydro Series H100i Pro it launched last week, Corsair has updated another one of its perennially-popular closed-loop liquid CPU coolers. The H75 is the latest to get an upgrade to Corsair's latest pump and fan designs. This 120-mm cooler boasts a white-LED-illuminated pump head, braided coolant lines, and a squared-off radiator to keep up with Corsair's latest. ...Read more...

Sony has announced a new smartphone image sensor that promises to produce some seriously impressive camera specifications for some future smartphones. The IMX586 performs some DSP magic on the raw bits from its unusual Bayer color array to arrive at an impressive-sounding 48-effective-megapixel resolution. That kind of resolution is more typical of high-end DSLRs, not handsets. Of course, comparing a DSLR sensor to an eight-millimeter-diagonal smartphone sensor isn't an entirely straightforward comparison, and the IMX586 is no exception.

5G cellular connectivity isn't an if, but a when. The next generation of mobile wireless promises much higher peak download speeds than today's LTE deployments, but to get there, carriers will need to deploy ample base stations covering the 28-GHz band, more commonly known as mmWave. mmWave signals are short-ranged, directional, and easily attenuated, so it's difficult to maintain a consistent connection with a mobile device using that spectrum. Despite those challenges, mmWave is a holy grail of sorts for 5G because bandwidth in that spectrum is abundant and can be used to carry lots of data quickly.

We've already examined Gigabyte and Asus' takes on the AMD B450 platform, and MSI is ready for action with a whopping 10 new midrange AM4 motherboards, too. The Dragon Army has ATX, microATX, and Mini-ITX options in a wide range of styles. ...Read more...

iFixit recently revealed that Apple's latest MacBook Pros include a new protective membrane under their key caps, and now the site has stress-tested the membrane it found to see whether the silicone prophylactic can keep dust out of Apple's delicate-as-its-name-implies butterfly key switch mechanism.The teardown team first dumped particles of a "powdered paint additive" that is apparently coarser than sand into the keyboard and concluded that the membrane ...Read more...

[insert onomatopoeia here]

Any new chipset means a slew of new motherboards is bound to follow, and Asus is joining the AMD B450 party with four fresh boards for every builder. ...Read more...