ASUS Zenbook UX31

It was just last week that we got to take home the Acer Aspire S3, the first Ultrabook to go on sale here in the States. Unfortunately, it doesn't live up to the pillars laid out by Intel: its performance trails similar machines, its battery craps out early and the design, while portable, is too chintzy to make it a bellwether for skinny Windows laptops. Our verdict, in a sentence, was that you'd be better off getting a MacBook Air, or at least considering other Ultrabooks -- namely, ASUS' line of Zenbooks.

Buffalo CloudStation Duo Hands

On test here is the 2 TB version of Buffalo‘s CloudStation Duo, a RAID-capable NAS with built-in Pogoplug, giving the user their own personal cloud.

The CloudStation Duo is squarely aimed at the prosumer market, both in terms of the hardware and the software on-board. For the hardware, it is equipped with two 1 TB drives and the unit can either be setup as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) or else RAID 1 in which each disk mirrors the other. Obviously, in RAID configuration, the NAS has only 1 TB of storage available for use.

Apple MacBook Air (MC969X/A)

Apple’s MacBook Air is without a doubt the most iconic ultraportable laptop. Despite that, prior to our 2011 ultra-portable laptop roundup I’d never laid hands on one. I’d always assumed that something so thin and light must sacrifice function for form, and perform like a thin slice of brick. Long story short, I really need to stop making assumptions.

AMD FX 8150 Black Edition

October marked a special occasion for CPU manufacturer AMD – it released its first completely new processor design since 2003. Athlon 64, for those that remember, heralded the golden age for AMD where by and large its chips matched or beat the performance-per-dollar value of rival Intel’s products.

Three years later Intel’s Core 2 line of processors were released, which sparked the downward spiral which AMD has since failed to pull out of. Their new family of CPUs – known as Bulldozer – is meant to change all that.

The main problem faced by AMD is that instead of meeting Intel head-to-head with high performance hardware, they opted to change tack and focus on the value end of the market, providing low cost CPUs which were incredibly good for low power and low noise situations like Home Theatre PCs and mobile computers.

Asus Transformer Prime Review

The Asus Transformer Prime has finally landed, and it’s no wonder why it has been one of the most searched topic in the past couple of weeks: it a fabulous tablet and a concept that has come to maturity. If you haven’t seen it before, the Asus Eee Transformer Prime is the world’s first Tegra 3 powered quad-core tablet that can turn into a small laptop, thanks to a keyboard-dock accessory.

The story is good, but it gets better: the keyboard virtually doubles the already long battery life of the tablet while keeping the overall shape elegant and thin. This sounds great, but how does it behave in the real world? In this review, we will look at the strengths, weaknesses and real world usage of the Asus Eee Transformer Prime – are you ready?

Technical highlights

NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, 1.3GHz (read our Tegra 3 overview)

10.1” 1280×800 Super IPS+ display, Gorilla glass

8 MP camera with LED light in the back, 1.2MP front camera

32GB to 64GB of internal storage + microSD slot

1080p MPEG-4/H.264 “High Profile” (Blu-Ray) decode, 1080p video capture

WiFi B/G/N, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR

263 x 180.8 x 8.3mm, 586g

25WHr Li-Polymer battery

Note: the unit used in this review does not yet have the final firmware which should be updated at least one more time on December 2nd to version 8.8.3.27. (I’m currently using 8.8.3.23)

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E CPU

We’ve been in this business here at HotHardware for a long time now. For most of that time, we’ve heard from countless so-called "industry experts" that the PC is dead, or at the very least dying. Quite frankly, we’re sick of hearing it. The PC is far from dead. One has to look no further than Intel's most recent finanical results, or even the contents of this website. In fact, we’d argue that the PC is more pervasive than ever. The PC isn’t dead, it just so happens to be one of the most flexible and versatile pieces of technology in existence, and it has simply gone through a number of transformations in its illustrious lifetime. What was once a non-descript, beige box good for little more than word processing and spreadsheets is now the sleek, aesthetically pleasing, hub of our digital world, that can take many different shapes. And despite its impending doom, today the PC is about to become more powerful than ever.

PCAudioLabs Rok Box MC 7xs Preview

Specialty or niche' products have always caught our attention here at HotHardware, for the simple reason that, when it comes to PCs anyway, attention to detail or a specific characteristic usually equates to something interesting.  And after all, we're not into publishing stories and evaluations of uninteresting things here.  You are reading the pages of "Hot" Hardware.

PCAudioLabs is a different sort of boutique system builder out of Chatsworth, CA.  While so many custom computer systems you see here are targeted toward gamers and mainstream users, the folks at PCAudioLabs, you guessed it, cater to musicians, both professional and amateur, as well as production studios and educational institutions. There aren't many system builders that can say they've worked with the likes of Peter Frampton, the Grand Ole Opry and Eric Clapton.  PCAL builds what folks in the music biz call a "DAW" or Digital Audio Workstation. A DAW can come in the form of a notebook, standard ATX tower or a rack-mount chassis. Today we're looking at the PCAL Rok Box MC 7xs, a mini-tower ATX platform built for sweet, melodic content creation

Supercomputer Mont Blanc

Nvidia Corp. and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) said on Monday that they had initiated development a new hybrid supercomputer that, for the first time, will use energy-efficient, low-power Nvidia Tegra ARM system-on-chips as well as high-performance Nvidia Tesla compute accelerators.

BSC is planning to develop the first large scale system based on this technology, with a near term goal of demonstrating two to five times improvement in energy efficiency compared with today's most efficient systems. BSC's ultimate research goal is to deliver exascale-level performance while using 15 to 30 times less power than current supercomputer architectures. This so-called EU Mont-Blanc Project will explore next-generation HPC architectures and develop a portfolio of exascale applications that run efficiently on these kinds of energy-efficient, embedded mobile technologies.

Russian Supercomputer Use 1544 Unit GPU NVIDIA Tesla X2070

GPU computing module has proved itself more than just a competent asset that is used in supercomputing systems. NVIDIA Tesla is now seems to be a little proud, the article of the recent components in its ranks has managed to get a place to be used as part terhandal supercomputer owned by a Russian tycoon.

Some of the problems of humanity are often faced with the problem such as disease, environmental degradation, and the like, can basically be solved by the ability of an increasingly powerful supercomputers. Although so far the success rate obtained varies greatly, but there was no mistaking the fact that high-performance computing clusters will be able to contribute to ongoing and contribute to human progress.

Intel Announce Knight’s Corner with22nm and 50 Cores Technology

Fancy a processor with 1 teraflop of processing power in your PC?  Intel have today unveiled their new Knight’s Corner chip that uses a 22nm build process to pack a huge 50 cores onto the die.  This new (MIC) Many Integrated Core chip isn’t for playing Battlefield 3, frankly it would be wasted on that.  Instead this chip will be used solely for special scientific and engineering research into subjects like weather modelling, protein folding and cancer research.

What it means though is a huge leap forward in processing power and this can have the benefits of enabling supercomputers to perform vastly more calculations per second than are currently available, or for far smaller supercomputers to be constructed that would not only be considerably cheaper than today’s machines, but that would also consume much less electricity.

As and when this technology filters down towards the consumer level this will mean smaller and much more energy-efficient datacentres and rack servers that can support up to fifty virtualised environments simultaneously.

Obviously the huge memory required to support running this many VMs is not supported by modern server single-processor motherboards.  Intel will be busy now designing a new generation of motherboards to harness the full power of Knight’s Corner.

AMD Launches AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series Processors

We designed the new AMD Opteron processor for this precise moment,” said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business, AMD.

AMD Gets Mini-PC Outing in the Fit-PC3

One of the very first energy efficient mini-PCs to catch my attention was CompuLab's fit-PC2 model, with an ultra-low-power Intel processor, a gigabyte of DDR2 memory and a 160GB HDD. Now, the company has jumped into AMD's camp for the forthcoming release of the fit-PC3, set to become the most powerful member of the company's line of miniature industrial PCs. It doesn't offer quite the same energy efficiency as the previous model, but there is up to 1.6GHz of processing power on offer, coupled with up to 4GB of DDR3 memory and a 2.5-inch SATA3 hard drive.

USB 3.0 Speeds Up Performance on External Devices

The USB connector has been one of the greatest success stories in the history of computing, with more than 2 billion USB-connected devices sold to date. But in an age of terabyte hard drives, the once-cool throughput of 480 megabits per second that a USB 2.0 device can realistically provide just doesn't cut it any longer.

64 bit: More than just the RAM

Introduction

If you're a member of this or any other technology-based forum, odds are that you've noticed the several versions of Microsoft's latest offering, Windows Vista. If you haven't, well... please come out from under that rock and get with the programming! 

One of the biggest changes has been the clear offering and even a gentle push towards the 64-bit version of the OS. Indubitably, this extra option becomes fodder for forum discussion, usually along the line of:

Forumite 1: "Hi, I am building a new system and I wanted to know what your thoughts were on whether I should use 64-bit or 32-bit Vista? I've heard varying things around the net regarding compatibility, and was hoping someone could help."
Forumite 2: "Hi! I just read your post. You should definitely go with the 32-bit version. There's tons of compatibility problems with 64b (Just look at XP-64), and it's going to die a long, drawn-out death. Besides, the only actual difference between them is that 64-bit can make proper use of 4GB of RAM."
Forumite 1: "Oh, ok! Thanks!"

Now, what's wrong with this picture? The answer is a lot. Time and time again, self-proclaimed gurus determine that the only real difference between 32-bit computing and 64-bit computing is the memory limit. Are they right that RAM is a reason? Definitely - but that's missing about 99 percent of the true differences. By that logic, the only major difference between your old 8-bit Nintendo console and your Xbox 360 is processor speed. I think we can all agree, that's just wrong.

So, if memory is only one of the myriad of changes to 64-bit computing, what does it actually do? And how? More importantly, why do we even care? We'll get to each of these questions in turn; but first, let's get some definitions straight and take a little trip down memory lane.

AMD Breaks 8GHz Overclock with Upcoming FX Processor, Sets World Record

While out at an event in AMD’s Austin offices a couple of weeks back, we got a chance to get up close and personal with the company’s upcoming Bulldozer-based FX-line of processors. Many of the details disclosed at the event are still under embargo, but AMD is allowing a bit of a sneak peek with today’s Guinness World Record announcement.

One of the demos at AMD’s HQ consisted of an array of overclocked FX processors, using various cooling methods, including air, water, and phase-change hardware. But the real star of the event was a liquid-nitrogen / liquid-helium setup that allowed AMD’s overclocking team to push a pre-release AMD FX-8150 processor to well over 8GHz, setting a world record for modern processor frequency in the process.

The Quantum Computer

Question: What Is a Quantum Computer?

What does quantum physics have to do with computing? How can a quantum computer work and what makes it different from a traditional computer?

Answer: A quantum computer is a computer design which uses the principles of quantum physics to increase the computational power beyond what is attainable by a traditional computer. Quantum computers have been built on the small scale and work continues to upgrade them to more practical models.

Important Step Towards Quantum Computers

A team of scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, USA, has managed to entangle ions using microwave fields for the first time. According to their publication in the journal Nature (“Microwave quantum logic gates for trapped ions”), the team has implemented a method that could be important for the realization of an integrated quantum computer with trapped ions.

Christian Ospelkaus, professor within the Cluster of Excellence QUEST (Centre for Quantum Engineering and Space-Time Research) at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Physikalisch-Technischen Bundesanstalt, Braunschweig since December 2010, has realized the experiment together with colleagues at NIST.

Qualcomm S4 Processor 2.5 GHz Mobile Dual Core More Efficient Power

Qualcomm has released the specifications of its upcoming Snapdragon S4 chipset, which will be the first in the mobile world to be using 28nm process technology. That would give it a substantial advantage in power-efficiency and processing power over its competitors.

The Snapdragon S4 chipset will be packing either two or four brand new Krait cores, which have been custom designed by Qualcomm and should bring a 60% improvement over the currently used Scorpion processors at the same clock speed. However, Qualcomm has obviously found 60% to be an insufficient upgrade and it will be clocking those cores from 1.5GHz to the mind-blowing 2.5GHz.

FeTRAM memory could be faster than SRAM and more energy efficient than flash

Researchers at Purdue University are developing a new type of computer memory that they claim could be faster than SRAM and use 99 percent less energy than flash memory. Called FeTRAM, for ferroelectric transistor random access memory, the new technology fulfills the three basic functions of computer memory; writing, reading and storing information for a long time. It is also a nonvolatile form of memory, meaning that it retains its data after the computer has been turned off. Its creators claim it has the potential to replace conventional memory systems.

Japan Supercomputer K Beats Rivals

After the indignity of seeing its economy overtaken by China's earlier this year, Japan has clawed back a little pride, beating its east Asian rival to produce the world's most powerful computer for the first time in seven years.

The machine, nicknamed K – a play on the Japanese word kei, meaning 10 quadrillion, the number of operations per second it is designed to perform when it is completed next year – crushed the opposition when the latest rankings were announced at the International Supercomputing conference at Hamburg.

It harnesses more power than the next five supercomputers combined, and is mush faster than its closest rival, designed by China's National University of Defence Technology. About 1m desktop computers would have to be linked up to replicate its performance.