Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has brought the latest software innovations to the company's most cutting-edge PCIe Gen4 solid state drive (SSD) series, opening up a new paradigm in SSD performance.

"We are combining breakthrough speeds and capacities with revolutionary software solutions as we accelerate expansion in the premium SSD market," said Kye Hyun Kyung, executive vice president of Memory Solution Product & Development at Samsung Electronics. "We plan to introduce additional innovation led by our most advanced (sixth-generation) V-NAND in helping to trigger a lot more growth in the global IT market."

With PCI-Express 4.0 graphics cards and motherboards soon to arrive, UL has released their PCI Express feature test for 3DMark. This latest addition has been designed to verify the bandwidth available to the GPU over a computer's PCI Express interface. To accomplish this, the test will make bandwidth the limiting factor for performance and does so by uploading a large amount of vertex and texture data to the GPU for each frame. The end goal is to transfer enough data over the PCIe 4.0 interface to thoroughly saturate it. Once the test is complete, the end result will be a look at the average bandwidth achieved during the test.

Today Team Group launches two solid state drives with different features. The internal model, which under Team Group's gaming brand T-FORCE, is CARDEA II M.2 solid state drive. This solid state drive emphasizes on features like PCIe Gen3 x4 high speed interface and cooling module with patent gaming fin type design. The portable solid state drive PD400 uses the latest generation of high speed USB 3.1 Gen1 interface. It is lightweight, easy to carry and also has three major features: pressure resistant, shock proof, water proof. The two internal and external solid state drives offers solutions for the need of performance and appearance. Consumers not only can possess the latest visual design, but also enjoy the great advance in performance of storage devices.

T-FORCE M.2 PCIe SSD - CARDEA series release the CARDEA II solid state drive with improved performance. The gaming fin type cooling module has patented design (Taiwan Utility Model Patent No. M541645), and has passed rigorous tests and burn-in test. It can be cooled down about 10 degrees in a closed space, and 30 degrees in an open space. The radiating performance can be increased by 15% comparing with traditional cooling module. Module's superconductivity - thermally conductive adhesive can effectively accelerate the heat transfer process, so the speed performance won't be affected by high temperature anymore. CARDEA II uses PCIe Gen3 x4 high speed interface and supports the latest NVMe 1.3 protocol. It has a truly outstanding sequential read/write speed of up to 3400/3000 MB/s, and random read/write speed of up to 180K/160K IOPS.

UL Benchmarks via its 3DMark product have announced that they'll be introducing a new, comprehensive test that aims to test PCIe bandwidth across generations. Citing the introduction of PCIe 4.0 to the masses - soon available in the consumer market via AMD's Ryzen 3000 series release - UL wants users to be able to know what a difference this makes towards allowing for more complex games and scenarios that aren't data-constrained by PCIe 3.0.

The 3D Mark PCIe Performance Test will be made available this summer for free for 3DMark Advanced Edition and for 3DMark Professional Edition customers with a valid annual license.

MSI's CEO Charles Chiang, quoted by Tom's Hardware at COMPUTEX 2019, laid out what we were already seeing with motherboard designs from all vendors of AMD's X570-based motherboards: pricing is likely increasing across the board, and AMD's market positioning won't be of the alternative, lower-value brand.

As quoted, Chiang said that ""Lots of people ask me, what do you think about today's AMD? I say today's AMD is completely different company compared to two, three, five years ago. They have nice technology and they are there to put the higher spec with the reasonable pricing. But right now they say, "Hey Charles, let's push to marketing to the higher [end]. So let's sell higher-pricing motherboards, higher-spec motherboards, and let's see what will happen in the market. So I don't think that AMD is the company that wants to sell low cost here, low cost there." Which does make sense: AMD isn't in the position of the underdog anymore -at least technology and product-portfolio wise when it comes to consumer CPUs. With better products, comes a desire for higher margins, and a change in direction for a company that was basically forced to almost cut itself out of the market in terms of profits with its previous, non-competitive CPU designs.

PCI-SIG today announced the release of PCI Express (PCIe ) 5.0 specification, reaching 32 GT/s transfer rates, while maintaining low power and backwards compatibility with previous technology generations. "New data-intensive applications are driving demand for unprecedented levels of performance," said Al Yanes, PCI-SIG Chairman and President. "Completing the PCIe 5.0 specification in 18 months is a major achievement, and it is due to the commitment of our members who worked diligently to evolve PCIe technology to meet the performance needs of the industry. The PCIe architecture will continue to stand as the de facto standard for high performance I/O for the foreseeable future."

"For 27 years, the PCI-SIG has continually delivered new versions of I/O standards that enable designers to accommodate the never-ending increases in bandwidth required for next generation systems, while preserving investments in prior generation interfaces and software," noted Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64. "Over that period, peak bandwidth has increased from 133 MB/second (for the first 32-bit parallel version) to 32 GB/second (for the V4.0 by16 serial version), a 240X improvement. Wow! The new PCIe 5.0 standard doubles that again to 64 GB/second. Wow2. We have come to take this increased performance for granted, but in reality, it takes a coordinated effort across many members of the PCI-SIG to execute these transitions so seamlessly."

With AMD chipset based motherboards like X570 and next-generation Ryzen 3000 series CPUs delivering the 4.0 version of the PCIe protocol for consumers, products based on the faster protocol are bound to take advantage of its improvements - especially in terms of better bandwidth.

At their Computex booth, Gigabyte showed off some pretty impressive results of their PCIe 4.0 based SSD card. The so-called "Auros AIC Gen4 SSD" is a performance monster. It is able to pack up to four PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs that can go up to 2 TB of density each, for a maximum 8 TB total storage. Put them in RAID 0 configuration, though, and you will get some amazing performance numbers. Gigabyte demonstrated speeds exceeding 15 GB/s in sequential reads and writes, providing much more bandwidth than what has ever seen before ina consumer-geared product. The SSD comes with an aluminum shroud with pre-applied thermal pads to facilitate heat dissipation. Additionally, there is a blower fan attached to the card to keep a constant flow of fresh air, which seems like a must if you're packing four M.2 drives inside a tiny aluminum case.

Seasonic showed us a unique new innovation that could change the way you manage your cable clutter, particularly python-wrestling with your 24-pin cable behind the motherboard tray. Called simply the Seasonic Connect, the accessory is a PSU connection hub, or a disintegration of a conventional modular PSU's connector back-plane. A ruler-shaped structure runs behind your case's motherboard tray, with your PSU's various connectors (ATX, EPS, PCIe, SATA), on its either sides. Shorter-than-usual modular cables handle the "last-mile" connection to the various devices. A single ribbon cable runs between the Connect and the PSU, with high-capacity wires for the various voltage domains (+12V, 3.3V, 5V, etc.). Those into PSU cable modding would be breathing very heavily. The upcoming Prime GX750, an upper-mid range model with 80 Plus Gold chops, could be the first to implement this concept.

The DC-ATX Direct Plug from HDPlex is an interesting new accessory that lets you power mini-ITX motherboards with conventional ATX/EPS inputs inside SFF cases that come with 2-pin external power bricks. The accessory plugs directly into the 24-pin ATX input of your motherboard, and takes input from a 2-pin DC. It also puts out 8-pin EPS for the CPU (over a 4-pin connector), one 6+2 pin PCIe power connector, and two SATA power connectors.

The accessory uses DC-to-DC switching to convert 12V to the various other voltage domains, such as +5V, 3.3V, and 5vsb. The accessory supports a power output only up to 200 Watts, which is still impressive for something its size. Available now, the DC-ATX Direct Plug from HDPlex is priced at USD $62.50. You can also buy a bundle that includes a 200-Watt power brick that's nano-ATX capable.

Mushkin Enhanced MFG - An industry-leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance and high-reliability computer products, is excited to announce global availability of its much-anticipated Helix-L PCIe m.2 SSD (Solid State Drive) originally announced at CES 2019 and has available capacities of 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB.

Built using the latest Silicon Motion SM2263XT PCIe Gen 3 x 4 NVMe controller to generate super-fast sequential Read and Write speeds. The Helix-L offers extreme storage performance and capacities in a M.2 2280 form factor, fitting directly into a motherboard or notebook. Employing the ultra-high-speed PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 interface for maximum bandwidth, the Helix-L leaves traditional SATA III and even previous generation M.2 SSDs in the rearview. Loading everything from large video and image files to games, applications or the operating system faster than ever before.

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced KC2000, its next generation M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD for enterprise and power users. Kingston's KC2000 NVMe PCIe SSD delivers powerful performance using the latest Gen 3.0 x 4 controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Offering superior read and write speeds up to 3,200 and 2,200MB/s, respectively, KC2000 delivers outstanding performance and endurance, and improves workflow in desktop, workstations and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

KC2000 is a self-encrypting drive that supports end-to-end data protection using 256-bit AES Hardware-based encryption and allows the usage of independent software vendors with TCG Opal 2.0 security management solutions such as Symantec , McAfee , WinMagic and others. KC2000 also has built-in Microsoft eDrive support, a security storage specification for use with BitLocker.

MSI, without naming its product, teased its MEG X570 Ace motherboard late last week, obeying the cardinal rules of a teaser, such as not putting out clear pictures or names. BIOSTAR probably wanted to do something similar, but ended up leaking glaring details and pictures of its flagship socket AM4 motherboard based on the AMD X570 chipset, the Racing X570GT8. The X570 is AMD's first in-house design chipset for the AM4 socket after "Promontory" and FM2-based "Bolton," supplied by ASMedia. It was necessitated by the need to get downstream PCIe connectivity from the chipset to be certified for the latest generations (gen 3.0 or later), by AMD, and overcome many of the connectivity limitations of ASMedia "Promontory," from which AMD carved out previous socket AM4 chipsets.

Design compulsions of being a flagship product aside, there are signs of a clear focus on strengthening the CPU VRM on the Racing X570GT8, to cope with the rumored Ryzen 9 series 16-core "Zen 2" processor. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8+4 pin EPS connectors, conditioning it for the processor with a 12-phase VRM. There are two metal-reinforced PCI-Express x16 slots wired to the AM4 SoC, and we get the first glimpse of the PCI-Express gen 4.0 lane switching and re-driver circuitry. We haven't seen anything to suggest that the downstream PCIe lanes from the X570 chipset are gen 4.0, yet, but we expect them to at least be gen 3.0. The presence of three M.2 slots bodes well for the downstream PCIe lane count. ASMedia "Promontory" puts out a paltry eight gen 2.0 lanes. It's also interesting to see an active fan-heatsink cooling the X570 chipset, indicating a rather high TDP compared to the 3-5 Watt TDP of the 400-series "Promontory" low-power variant chipsets. The component choices by BIOSTAR look premium and are a callback to its T-Power glory days enthusiasts remember.

A report from technology market analyst Trendforce places SSD's pricing in sharp decline, with price per GB being projected to hit as low as $0.1 by year's end. Citing oversupply in the NADN flash market and an impending price war to allow manufacturers to sell out accumulating inventory, this is one of those clear cases of a win for consumers - which, after the shenanigans in the DRAM market, is about time. Trendforce further states that the price reductions should render 128 GB SSDs obsolete, as they mostly are by now, with 512 GB capacities becoming the mainstream choice for system integrators and DIY.

Pricing evolution in the market also places premium NVMe solutions at an only 6% premium over SATA offerings, showcasing the increased cost savings that manufacturers have achieved with the reduction in price for NVMe controllers, and the lower amount of physical materials needed to put an NVMe SSD together compared to a SATA-based alternative. Furthermore, Trendforce says that value PCIe-based solutions have a 0% price difference compared to SATA-based ones, so the option for the older form factor should only fall upon how many NVMe/PCIe sockets users' motherboards have available to populate.

The headline of this post makes it seem a touch more innocuous than the story may lead to, at least if you believe the rumor mills abound. There has been an ongoing issue with AMD systems using Ryzen CPUs and the HTC Vive wireless adapter (powered by Intel WiGig) to where the systems have frozen or even had a BSOD. HTC acknowledged this as early as Nov, 2018, noting that they have seen this with a subset of Ryzen-based motherboards when the PCIe wireless adapter is installed and running. It took until last week to get a solution of sorts, and unfortunately reports from users indicate this is not a true fix for everyone.

The hotfix update 1.20190410.0 was made available April 25 to attempt to combat this issue, which was garnering a lot of attention in the VR-community on whether there was more Intel could be doing to help AMD customers. This hotfix update is available automatically once an end user with the Vive wireless adapter checks for an update, and HTC acknowledge that they continue to test this, as well as partner with Intel and AMD to help resolve this once and for all. In the meantime, users report mixed success to date, including some we know personally as well, and it remains a thorn in the side of wireless VR to get to the PC successfully.

As we gear up for launch of AMD-s Ryzen 3000 series, details are bound to come up with increasing frequency. One of the latest, regarding AMD's in-house developed X570 chipset, which brings a renewed feature set to the AM4 platform, pertains to its PCIe lanes. AMD has included a grand total of 40 PCIe 4.0 lanes on the chipset, which will be distributed between PCIe uplink, USB 3.1 Gen2, USB 2.0 and SATA, as the spec sheet below (which may not be real) indicates. That's a whole load of bandwidth for the PC platform, not counting those PCIe lanes that are to be provided by the Ryzen CPUs.

It seems AMD will be using PCIe support level as a differentiator factor for its chipsets. The X570 is reported to be the only chipset to feature PCIe 4.0 support, while all other chipsets below it (B550 and so on) will only support PCIe 3.0. These lower-end chipsets should be manufactured by ASMedia.

Colorful Technology Company Limited, professional manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and high-performance storage solutions is proud to announce its latest motherboard featuring Intel Z390 chipset which supports unlocked 8-core 9th-gen as well 8th-gen processors from Intel. The new COLORFUL CVN Z390M GAMING V20 is aimed at enthusiasts, system builders, and gamers looking for a serious foundation for an mATX build. This motherboard allows mainstream to high-end builds without breaking the bank while still delivering a performance and features for a wide range of use.

The new COLORFUL CVN Z390M GAMING V20 will feature support for both 8th-gen and 9th-gen Intel processors in the LGA1151 package. This allows users to upgrade from Intel's 8th-generation processor to the 9th-gen CPU that increases core count to give you a performance upgrade. The motherboard also supports DDR4 memory higher bandwidth so applications can run as fast as possible. The motherboard also supports overclocking on unlocked processors for increased performance.

CXL, short for Compute Express Link, is an ambitious new interconnect technology for removable high-bandwidth devices, such as GPU-based compute accelerators, in a data-center environment. It is designed to overcome many of the technical limitations of PCI-Express, the least of which is bandwidth. Intel sensed that its upcoming family of scalable compute accelerators under the Xe band need a specialized interconnect, which Intel wants to push as the next industry standard. The development of CXL is also triggered by compute accelerator majors NVIDIA and AMD already having similar interconnects of their own, NVLink and InfinityFabric, respectively. At a dedicated event dubbed "Interconnect Day 2019," Intel put out a technical presentation that spelled out the nuts and bolts of CXL.

Intel began by describing why the industry needs CXL, and why PCI-Express (PCIe) doesn't suit its use-case. For a client-segment device, PCIe is perfect, since client-segment machines don't have too many devices, too large memory, and the applications don't have a very large memory footprint or scale across multiple machines. PCIe fails big in the data-center, when dealing with multiple bandwidth-hungry devices and vast shared memory pools. Its biggest shortcoming is isolated memory pools for each device, and inefficient access mechanisms. Resource-sharing is almost impossible. Sharing operands and data between multiple devices, such as two GPU accelerators working on a problem, is very inefficient. And lastly, there's latency, lots of it. Latency is the biggest enemy of shared memory pools that span across multiple physical machines. CXL is designed to overcome many of these problems without discarding the best part about PCIe - the simplicity and adaptability of its physical layer.

Intel Tuesday unveiled a new portfolio of data-centric solutions consisting of 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Optane DC memory and storage solutions, and software and platform technologies optimized to help its customers extract more value from their data. Intel's latest data center solutions target a wide range of use cases within cloud computing, network infrastructure and intelligent edge applications, and support high-growth workloads, including AI and 5G.

Building on more than 20 years of world-class data center platforms and deep customer collaboration, Intel's data center solutions target server, network, storage, internet of things (IoT) applications and workstations. The portfolio of products advances Intel's data-centric strategy to pursue a massive $300 billion data-driven market opportunity.

DigiTimes, citing industry sources, has reported that PCIe-based SSDs will be overtaking SATA-based solutions during 2019. This makes sense in a number of ways: the smaller footprint for Pcie-based, M.2 SSDs means they are prone to higher adoption form laptop manufacturers tan their SATA counterparts. On the desktop and DIY side of things, SATA solutions have sometimes been preferred to their PCIe counterparts mostly due to the pricing delta between solutions across those form factors.

However, as NAND prices have declined precipitously, and PCIe controllers' pricing has done so too, we are now hitting a point where the cost strain on SATA's additional materials compared to their PCIe counterparts leaves the delta so small that it doesn't make any sense to purchase a SATA-limited drive (usually limited only by the speed of the SATA III interface itself) instead of a PCIe-based one. AS demand picks up some additional 20-25% for 2019, this will mostly be taken up by PCIe-based solutions. Pricing of a 512 GB PCIe storage device is now comparable to that of a 256 GB unit just a year ago. Pricing is expected to keep falling for the duration of this year.

AMD will launch its 3rd generation Ryzen 3000 Socket AM4 desktop processors in 2019, with a product unveiling expected mid-year, likely on the sidelines of Computex 2019. AMD is keeping its promise of making these chips backwards compatible with existing Socket AM4 motherboards. To that effect, motherboard vendors such as ASUS and MSI began rolling out BIOS updates with AGESA-Combo 0.0.7.x microcode, which adds initial support for the platform to run and validate engineering samples of the upcoming "Zen 2" chips.

At CES 2019, AMD unveiled more technical details and a prototype of a 3rd generation Ryzen socket AM4 processor. The company confirmed that it will implement a multi-chip module (MCM) design even for their mainstream-desktop processor, in which it will use one or two 7 nm "Zen 2" CPU core chiplets, which talk to a 14 nm I/O controller die over Infinity Fabric. The two biggest components of the IO die are the PCI-Express root complex, and the all-important dual-channel DDR4 memory controller. We bring you never before reported details of this memory controller.

1-Terabyte SSDs could become a new mainstream-desktop must-have in 2019, as prices of the drives have fallen by 50 percent year-over-year, according to DigiTimes. A 1 TB SATA SSD in the 2.5-inch form-factor can now be had for as little as $99, while faster NVMe drives in the M.2 form-factor start around $130. At the beginning of 2018, 1 TB SATA SSDs used to start around the $160-mark, and NVMe drives north of $200. The 1 TB category includes 960 GB, 1000 GB, and 1024 GB marketed capacities with varying amounts of overprovisioning set by manufacturers.

Falling SSD prices are accelerated by the entry of cost-effective 96-layer 3D NAND flash, higher-density QLC NAND flash, undigested inventories of drives based on older technologies such as 64-layer or TLC NAND flash; and a 15 percent sequential quarterly drop in NAND flash prices in the industry. Growth in speeds of client-segment SSDs have remained largely flat over the year, and not much is to be expected in performance growth other than perhaps the advent of PCIe gen 4.0 based enterprise SSDs towards the end of the year.

The Intel Xeon W-3175X processor is available today. This unlocked 28-core workstation powerhouse is built for select, highly-threaded and computing-intensive applications such as architectural and industrial design and professional content creation. Built for handling heavily threaded applications and tasks, the Intel Xeon W-3175X processor delivers uncompromising single- and all-core world-class performance for the most advanced professional creators and their demanding workloads.

Kingston at CES 2019 demonstrated its A2000 NVMe SSDs, which the company has developed with a specific goal in mind - undercut SATA-based SSDs. This has, until now, been impossible, due to increased costs of NVMe controllers over their SATA counterparts, but such is the trend with any technology - prices do come down after a product is first introduced. Some NVMe solutions have used cut-down controllers that only supported PCIe x2 buses, but not the A2000 - they will use full-fledged PCIe 4x lanes, and will be available in 240, 480, or 960 GB capacities.

The A2000 series will make use of different controllers, which means Kingston is sourcing from more than one manufacturer (Silicon Motion's SM2263-series and Phison's low-cost controllers). While that could introduce performance variations, Kingston says that they will be making sure the experience and performance stays consistent between differently-sourced products, and that the only reason for this is to decrease overall BOM costs to achieve a lineup-wide below-SATA cost. NVMe drives typically require less materials than SATA drives, and as a plus, aren't constrained by link bandwidth limitations. This is huge news for the industry, because if Kingston manages to do its bidding 2Q2019, as they expect, the industry will follow suit - they won't be leaving the lowest-priced, and consequently, likely highest-volume product, to a single player. Kingston is quoting up to 2000 MB/s sequential read speeds as well as up to 1500 MB/s sequential write speeds.

PLEXTOR, a leading developer of award-winning solid-state drives (SSDs) and other high-performance digital storage devices, today announced the introduction of its latest line of PCIe and SATA SSDs at this year's CES.

The new M10Pe PCIe SSD Series offers a new level of speed and performance targeted for all PC gamers and applications intensive users. The new series combines advanced 96-layer 3D NAND flash and industry leading controller to deliver awesome sequential read/write speeds up to 3,200/2,500 MB/s and random read/write speeds up to 410,000/320,000 IOPS.

ASUS dabbled with cases from time to time, and its latest creation is the Republic of Gamers (ROG) Strix Helios, an ATX mid-tower to go with your other ROG Strix-branded hardware. Built with brushed-metal finished steel and tinted tempered glass, the Strix Helios features an elaborate aRGB LED illuminated front embellishment that includes the ROG logo, which can be directly plugged in to the 3-pin aRGB header of your motherboard. It also comes with four USB 3.1 front-panel ports, one of which is type-C, all of which plug into your motherboard's standard USB 3.1 headers. You also get LED and fan-controls.

Although marketed as a mid-tower, the ROG Strix Helios is large, measuring 249 mm x 564 mm x 592 mm (WxHxD), and supports E-ATX motherboards in addition to smaller form-factors. Inside, you get a horizontally partitioned layout. Storage areas include two 3.5-inch/2.5-inch trays, and four additional 2.5-inch mounts. Among the cooling features are three 140 mm front intakes, which come with three factory-fitted fans, two 140/120 mm top vents that are vacant, and a 120 mm rear exhaust, which has a factory-fitted fan. In addition to 8 expansion slots, you get 2 vertically oriented slots so you can show off your graphics card better (PCIe riser cable not included). The company didn't reveal pricing.