Micron Technology, Inc., today announced it has shipped the world's first low-power DDR5 DRAM in mass production to be used in the soon-to-be-released Xiaomi Mi 10 smartphone. As Xiaomi's memory technology partner, Micron provides LPDDR5 DRAM with superior power efficiency and faster data access speeds to meet growing consumer demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G functionality in smartphones.

"Micron's leadership in delivering the industry's first low-power DDR5 DRAM for use in a smartphone will accelerate enablement of 5G and AI applications," said Dr. Raj Talluri, senior vice president and general manager of the Mobile Business Unit at Micron. "Our customers and partners require next-generation memory solutions, based on the latest process technology, that drive unmatched power and performance to support 5G and AI systems. Micron's LPDDR5 DRAM addresses those requirements with a 50% increase in data access speeds and more than 20% power efficiency compared to previous generations."

"We value Micron's long-standing leadership and innovation in memory," said Chang Cheng, vice president at Xiaomi Group. "Micron's LPDDR5 DRAM market-leading features ensure our Xiaomi Mi 10 smartphone will remain power-efficient while still offering incredible performance and greater stability. We believe LPDDR5 will be the standard configuration for all flagship devices in 2020."

Sharkoon Technologies is an international supplier of PC components and peripherals, offering performance at a reasonable price. Sharkoon now introduces the Mobile DAC and the Mobile DAC PD. These are two audio converters that are compatible with the most popular Android-based mobile devices. Both devices deliver a high-resolution audio amplification of sound output for headsets and headphones which have a TRRS connection, and, in addition, they provide quality voice transmission thanks to an integrated microphone input. Therefore, podcasters and streamers will also benefit from the Mobile DACs.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, announces a broad Qualcomm Snapdragon Compute platform portfolio with long battery life, cellular connectivity, and AI accelerated performance to enable fanless, thin and light designs for modern computing. Built with mobility in mind, the portfolio accommodates the evolving needs of mobile consumers. The Snapdragon 7c and 8c now join the previously announced Snapdragon 8cx, delivering lightning fast cellular connectivity to premium, mainstream, and entry-level notebook PCs. The portfolio is available in various price points allowing partners to design always on, always connected PCs for a wide array of consumers. In addition, the Snapdragon 8cx enterprise compute platform brings connected security software and secured-core PC support for modern enterprises looking to bring mobility to their workers.

SteelSeries, the makers of the most award-winning headset line in history, today announces the newest member of the Arctis family, the Arctis 1 Wireless. The Arctis 1 Wireless features the new slimmed down body of the Arctis 1, but connects via a small USB-C dongle for a true lossless and low latency connection across Nintendo Switch, PS4, PC and mobile.

The Arctis 1 Wireless is the ultimate 4-in-1 wireless headset. Through a small USB-C dongle, it features SteelSeries' lossless 2.4 GHz wireless technology for ultra-low latency wireless on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4 and Android. This allows users to easily take the same console or PC experience on-the-go on Nintendo Switch or Android devices.

IFA is the largest consumer tech show in Europe and we expect to see significant news from 4K and OLED TVs to wearables to smartphones. We'll be showcasing our latest PCs, of course, as the move to thin and light continues across the industry. It's not only about smaller form factors though - consumers want adaptive, always connected, high-performing, and flawlessly designed PCs. Dell continues to set the bar for the PC industry.

Ahead of IFA, we're expanding our consumer portfolio with brand new form factors and the addition of new 10th Gen Intel Core processors to our current XPS and Inspiron portfolio, delivering performance gains needed for compute intensive, demanding multi-thread workloads, while still handling 4K content efficiently. And in doing so, giving our customers heavyweight performance in thin, light and portable designs — the best of both worlds.

Intel announced that laptops verified through its innovation program, code-named "Project Athena," will feature the visual identifier "Engineered for Mobile Performance." PC manufacturers and retailers can use the identifier across promotional activities and in-store and online retail environments to draw consumers to the laptops that meet the high standards of the program's target specification and key experience indicators (KEI).

The new identifier can be found for the first time today with the new Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, one of the initial systems verified through Project Athena and now available for U.S. customers to purchase from Dell.com. Over the coming weeks, the identifier will also be visible in marketing efforts for the HP Elitebook 1040 and HP Elitebook 830, which are also among the initial laptops verified through the program. Additional laptops are expected from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung for the holiday season.

EUROCOM Tornado F7 Server On-the-Go. The Tornado F7 Server Edition is an all-in-one, single-server, small form factor, laptop-based server form Eurocom that is designed for rapid, on-the-go ad hoc deployment. This Mobile Server has its own internal UPS/battery pack and is ready to go right out-of-the box, providing On-the-Go capabilities where fast deployment and high mobility of server capabilities is critical.

At 4 kg (9lbs), the Tornado F7 weighs much less than traditional rack-mounted servers and is ideal for fast set-up and relocation of server environments consisting of multiple VMs, anywhere.

AMD and Samsung today announced a key strategic partnership in high performance graphics technologies for the mobile space. The agreement means that Samsung will license AMD's Radeon graphics IP in its latest RDNA iteration, no less, for integration on smartphone graphics processing. Let me stress how impressive this can be: that AMD developed a graphics architecture that can scale from a high-performance GPU down to a nimble, fast, power-sipping module for mobile graphics processing.

This is a huge strategic win for AMD, in that more and more products will be infused with their technology. As Lisa Su puts it, the Radeon user base and development ecosystem will be greatly increased with this Samsung integration - as will AMD's revenue, for sure. Perhaps we'll see a "Powered by AMD Radeon" sticker or engraving in our future Samsung smartphones, as we do with Leica partnerships, for example.)

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing the highest-capacity mobile DRAM - the industry's first 12-gigabyte (GB) low-power double data rate 4X (LPDDR4X) package - optimized for tomorrow's premium smartphones. Featuring higher capacity than most ultra-thin notebooks, the new mobile DRAM will enable smartphone users to take full advantage of all the features in next-generation smartphones.

"With mass production of the new LPDDR4X, Samsung is now providing a comprehensive lineup of advanced memory to power the new era of smartphones, from 12GB mobile DRAM to 512GB eUFS 3.0 storage," said Sewon Chun, executive vice president of Memory Marketing at Samsung Electronics. "Moreover, with the LPDDR4X, we're strengthening our position as the premium mobile memory maker best positioned to accommodate rapidly growing demand from global smartphone manufacturers."

NVIDIA via a customer help post has announced that their 3DVision work will be ceasing come April 2019. Release 418 of NVIDIA's GeForce Game Ready Drivers, and all other driver packages, will cease to provide support and improvements to 3DVision across the titles that are already covered by the technology. Users who want to keep 3DVision support will have to stay with the 418 release. Extended support for issues already present in the latest 3DVision release will still be granted support by NVIDIA until April 2020.

Like 3D TVs, mobile and desktop computers with 3D-capable screens have dwindled to almost zero in recent years, with the technology proving to be more of a novelty than an actual addition to users' computing experience. The NVIDIA support post also states that driver support for their Kepler-based graphics cards will cease as of April 2019. Desktop Kepler is still supported.

NVIDIA has added new SKUs to its low power mobility graphics lineup. the MX230 and MX250 come in to replace The GeForce MX130 and MX150, but... there's really not that much of a performance improvement to justify the increase in the series' tier. Both solutions are based on Pascal, so there are no Turing performance uplifts at the execution level.

NVIDIA hasn't disclosed any CUDA core counts or other specifics on these chips; we only know that they are paired with GDDR 5 memory and feature Boost functionality for increased performance in particular scenarios. The strange thing is that NVIDIA's own performance scores compare their MX 130, MX150, and now MX230 and MX250 to Intel's UHD620 IGP part... and while the old MX150 was reported by NVIDIA as offering an up to 4x performance uplift compared to that Intel part, the new MX250 now claims an improvement of 3.5x the performance. Whether this is because of new testing methodology, or some other reason, only NVIDIA knows.

EA stocks today have taken a dive of 12.83% (17% at the worst case scenario, with a slight rebound in the meantime), at the moment of writing, compared to their opening hours. The descent, which represents a dip towards a $80.61 valuation per share compared to the $92.52 at the opening market, followed the release of the company's Q3 FY19 Financial Results, caused by lower than expected sales from Battlefield V and lower than expected revenue from EA's mobile efforts. This is capitalism at its finest - the 7.3 million sales of Battlefield V (an impressive number by any metric) fell close to a cool million short of projected sales by this time, and that is enough for the market to correct their expectations.

EA's mobile business saw a YoY fall of 22%, which did little to assuage investors and provide a positive note for the underperforming Battlefield V. It's interesting to note how interesting the markets can be: on the surprise announcement of the new, Respawn-developed Apex Legends, there was no significant change in EA's stock valuation, despite this launch meaning a new, hopefully rich, revenue source for the publisher. Although considering TechPowerUp's overall sentiment regarding that games' launch (not representative of the entire community), it seems that EA won't be banking much on our users.

NVIDIA is in the process of rolling out the first implementations of its RTX 2000 series GPUs in mobile form, and if the going is as is being reported, it's going to be a little rough for users to actually extrapolate their performance from product to product. This is because manufacturers are apparently getting a whole lot of leeway in how to clock their products, according to their solution's thermal characteristics and design philosophy.

What this means is that NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Max-Q, for example, can be clocked as low as 735 MHz, which is a more than 50% downclock from its desktop counterpart (1,515 MHz). The non-Max-Q implementation of NVIDIA's RTX 2080, for now, seems to be clocked at around 1,380 MHz, which is still a close to 200 Mhz downclock. Of course, these lowered clocks are absolutely normal - and necessary - for these products, particularly on a huge chip such as the one powering the RTX 2080. The problem arises when manufacturers don't disclose clockspeeds of the GPU in their particular implementation - a user might buy, say, an MSI laptop and an ASUS one with the exact same apparent configuration, but GPUs operating at very different clockspeeds, with very different levels of performance. Users should do their due research when it comes to the point of choosing what mobile solution sporting one of these NVIDIA GPUs they should choose.

If you had not heard of Sonarworks prior to this or the press release that went out last week, you may not be alone. The Latvian company is a little over 6 years old, and has since already managed to grab attention of some of the largest players in the audio market, including car makers interested in stereos, DJs, music producers, and of course more typical headphone and speaker makers. Their True-Fi desktop program claims to calibrate headphones to where everyone is able to hear the same sound no matter where they are- provided you use a supported headphone. This makes use of software sound processing and filtering, and the process works well enough to where they say over 30,000 recording studios worldwide currently use their technology.

At CES 2019, Sonarworks demonstrated the mobile version of their True-Fi program, currently in the Apple and Google Play stores as unreleased versions that will remain free until ready, following which it will cost $3.99/month or $99 for a lifetime license (the desktop version costs $79 by itself at this time). I was able to try out the app at their suite, and then also at home on my own phone, and came out impressed with the changes made. I did happen to have one of the ~300 currently-supported headphones though, and Sonarworks say they are working on adding more all the time. Users can also specifically request support to their own headsets if not on the list, although that might involve round trip shipment to Latvia. Read past the break for more, including their equally exciting personalized audio feature coming later this year.

Pioneering audio calibration software company Sonarworks has announced the launch of its new Sonarworks True-Fi mobile app at CES 2019. The revolutionary mobile app, which provides audio calibration references on both iOS and Android for nearly 300 headphone models, has already launched in 'early access' and will be available for purchase later this year in the App Store and Google Play at a price of $3.99 USD per month, or as a lifetime license for $99 USD. Existing Sonarworks customers who already own the desktop version will be provided a free upgrade option to a lifetime license for the mobile app.

Sonarworks True-Fi mobile app- provides consumers with the ultimate sound experience 'while on the go- supports wide a range of native file formats as well as content from iTunes and Android local content libraries. True-Fi mobile supports native file formats including MP3, WAV, AIFF, AAC and ALAC (iOS) and MP3, WAV, OGG (Vorbis) and AAC (Android).

It was about 6 months ago that we posted a news story about how a Lenovo representative mentioned that the successor to NVIDIA's GeForce 10-series of GPUs would be named the 11-series. Fast forward in time, we know how that turned out with the recently announced RTX 20-series instead. The rumor mill has not taken a break over the holidays, however, with consistent postings and speculation online about how NVIDIA will announce not only the RTX 2060 at CES 2019, but also a whole new GTX 11-series accompanying it that is aimed to meet gaming needs without real-time ray tracing support and at a lower price point respective to the equivalent RTX SKU.

Perhaps it is fitting that Lenovo provides more fuel to this fire once again, with a listing of a mobile GeForce GTX 1160 (N18E) graphic solution on their upcoming Legion Y530 and Y7000P laptops. VideoCardz.com was quick to capture a screenshot of the specs listing, seen below, that describes it as a "next generation GPU", albeit with an asterisk hinting that the specification may not be final. Indeed, Lenovo has since changed the description on that product page to remove all signs of said 11-series mobile GPUs, and the LaptopMedia specs database for the Legion Y530 also now mentions a "GTX 2060" with 6 GB of VRAM instead. The only thing we know for sure is that we are not sure of anything, and it may well be that a GeForce 11-series, if it even exists, is a mobile-only platform. Hopefully CES will shed more light on this matter, and stay tuned for our coverage of the event accordingly.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced its latest premium application processor (AP), the Exynos 9 Series 9820, equipped for on-device Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The Exynos 9820 features a fourth-generation custom CPU, 2.0-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) LTE Advanced Pro modem, and an enhanced neural processing unit (NPU) to bring new smart experiences to mobile devices.

"As AI-related services expand and their utilization diversify in mobile devices, their processors require higher computational capabilities and efficiency," said Ben Hur, vice president of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics. "The AI capabilities in the Exynos 9 Series 9820 will provide a new dimension of performance in smart devices through an integrated NPU, high-performance fourth-generation custom CPU core, 2.0Gbps LTE modem and improved multimedia performance."

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced that it has begun mass production of the industry's highest-capacity and first monolithic 12Gb low-power double data rate 4x (LPDDR4x) DRAM for mobile devices and applications. This latest generation of Micron's LPDDR4 memory brings key improvements in power consumption while maintaining the industry's fastest LPDDR4 clock speeds, thereby delivering advanced performance for next-generation mobile handsets and tablets. In addition, Micron's 12Gb LPDDR4x doubles memory capacity to offer the industry's highest-capacity monolithic LPDDR4 without increasing the footprint compared to the previous generation product.

The exponential increase in usage of compute and data-intensive mobile applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) and 4K video has been accompanied with demands by mobile users to maximize battery life and performance and increase capacity. Next-generation mobile devices that integrate multiple high-resolution cameras and increasingly use AI for image optimization also require higher DRAM capacities to support these features.

As the industry transitions towards deployment of 5G mobile technology, the memory subsystem in mobile handsets will have to support these dramatically higher data rates and the associated processing of data in real-time. New applications built upon 5G technology will also be able to leverage the increased capabilities of the memory subsystem to enable new and immersive user experiences.

A new report from EEDAR paints quite a rosy picture for PC gaming: much rosier than what most users would think it to be. That mobile gaming is the platform king is no secret: anyone and everyone seems to be rocking a smartphone these days, and every smartphone has a myriad of games available that are so easy to consume that practically everyone with a smartphone (particularly an Android one) qualifies as a gamer. The interesting bit comes in the result that PC gaming is ahead of console gaming in gamers' minds and usage.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA ) today formally introduced the VESA Display Compression-M (VDC-M) standard, a new display interface compression standard designed for embedded mobile display applications, including smart phones and other hand-held devices. Developed in collaboration with the MIPI Alliance, VDC-M provides a higher level of compression ratio (up to 5:1) at the same visually lossless quality level as VESA's Display Stream Compression (DSC) standard (which offers up to 3:1 compression), with the trade-off of higher circuit complexity. VDC-M is the third compression standard in VESA's family of compression codecs, which include DSC 1.1 (introduced in 2014) and DSC 1.2 (introduced in 2017).

"VESA was a pioneer in the area of low-latency data compression specifically targeting the display interface," according to Bill Lempesis, executive director of VESA. "The initial application for VESA's effort in this area was the Embedded DisplayPort Standard (eDP) and MIPI DSI, both which currently use DSC 1.1, with the specific intent to increase battery life and reduce form factor. The success of this spearheaded our effort on DSC 1.2 for external displays, primarily focusing on increasing display resolution. Working again with MIPI through their liaison with VESA, we returned our focus on mobile displays with VDC-M, developing a display compression standard more optimized for smaller mobile devices such as smart phones."

MSI, a world leader in computer hardware, continues to innovate its workstation line with the Vortex W25 and updated WT75, WS63 and WE series of mobile workstations. The Vortex W25 is the world's first 2.5L desktop powered by NVIDIA's Quadro P5200 GPU. "The Vortex W25 is one of the smallest and most capable workstations on the market," said Andy Tung, President of MSI. "We first created the chassis for powerful gaming performance with the Vortex G25, but we believe the innovative design will translate easily to those who need desktop-grade power in a small form factor."

Vortex W25
The Vortex W25 is the world's first 2.5L desktop powered by the NVIDIA Quadro P5200 GPU. In addition to its powerful graphics card, the Vortex also comes equipped with the latest Intel 8th generation processor. The new processor with its six cores of computing power, is up to 30 percent more powerful than the previous generation. The Quadro GPU provides up to 40 percent more performance than its predecessor. These performance upgrades make the Vortex W25 ideal for high-end 3D or VR tasks.

After being crowned as Steam's third best-selling game ever, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is on its way to conquer the mobile world. Developed by LightSpeed & Quantum Studio and published by Chinese tech giant Tencent, PUBG Mobile has been soft launched in Canada. The game is now available for download at the Google Play Store. PUBG Mobile stays true to the PC version. It was developed on the Unreal Engine 4 and supports features that include 7.1 surround sound and in-game voice chat. For the time being, only the original Erangel map is in the mobile version. The minimum requirements consist of a smartphone with Android 5.1.1 and 2 GB of RAM. Although there is no mention of a minimum processor requirement, the developer states that the game is supported on more than 500 Android devices.

Intel is gearing up towards launching their mobile CPU solutions based on the current desktop architecture, Coffee Lake. These mobile CPUs will bring Intel's increased core and thread counts philosophy to the mobile crowds, thus increasing overall performance due to the extra two cores and four threads on the top of the line processors.

The CPU that was benchmarked on Geekbench is the i7-8750H, a six-core, twelve-thread CPU with a 2.2 GHz base clock and up to 4.1 GHz Turbo speeds. Its L3 cache department makes do with a pretty respectable 9 MB, and all of this is wrapped in a 45 W TDP package. As it comes to scores, these show expected gains over Intel's previous generation Kaby Lake Core i7-7700HQ - around 20% in single-thread workloads, and a more impressive 50% boost in multi-threaded ones. Two Quanta systems based on the i7-8750H managed single-thread scores of 4700 and 5008, and multi-threaded marks of 17,504 and 20,715. A HP system using the same chip scored 4980 in the single-thread test and 19,402 in the multi-thread benchmark. All in all, impressive gains in the processing prowess department, though these are overwhelmingly derived from the extra cores and threads, and not from some spectacular microarchitecture improvements.

ASUS today announced ProArt PQ22UC and ZenScreen Go MB16AP, slim and light portable monitors created for designers, video producers and other professionals who often need to create and showcase work away from the office. ProArt PQ22UC features an extremely high contrast ratio due to its OLED panel and exclusive ASUS ProArt Calibration technology for highly accurate, vibrant and undistorted colors. ZenScreen Go MB16AP can be connected to a laptop or Android device, and provides more flexibility with a built-in battery. The new portable monitors will be on display at the ASUS Showcase Room at Wynn Las Vegas, from January 9-12, 2018.

We welcome all lucky applicants to Bridge Constructor Portal with our new vehicle-based test chambers, Quantum Tunnels and patented Aperture technology! For the last year we've been secretly working in our underground labs on the next iteration of the million-selling Bridge Constructor series. This new stand-alone title will release on PC, MacOS, Linux, mobile devices, and console, and fully embraces the Portal license, one of the most beloved video game franchises of the last decade.

Bridge Constructor Portal will blend the laws of structural engineering and technology straight from Aperture Laboratories into an exciting new game experience, all under the demanding gaze of GLaDOS. Bridge Constructor Portal will be released on December 20 2017 for Windows, MacOS and Linux as well as for mobile devices. The console versions will follow in early 2018.