Digitimes reports that Korean memory manufacturers Hynix and Samsung have both been hit by unstable yield rates for their 18 nm server DRAM production.

While the yields are claimed to be sufficient for notebook and desktop PC production, they are not good enough for server memory, which has higher quality requirements. Due to the shortage, Chinese enterprises like Alibaba, Huawei, Lenovo and Tencent are now switching to use 20 nanometer DRAM for their servers, which is in better supply. Other vendors have even requested that no more 18 nm chips are shipped by these Korean suppliers, in a bid to improve quality, which might take several months, but shouldn't have a significant impact on overall DRAM prices.

For enthusiastic gamers and modders, powerful gear is a must. And after winning over the professional gaming crowd, Apacer is bringing some colorful bling to DRAM. Since its last incarnation, PANTHER RAGE DDR4 has evolved from single-light LED to splashy RGB, with its bold new color in Gold. Apacer is going to show that the new gear is definitely worth the wait.

By implementing the newly developed hardware architecture to enhance the RGB controller, PANTHER RAGE DDR4 RGB has improved the performance by 200%. It also seamlessly integrates with the latest ASUS Aura Sync software which is popular among gamers, and allows users to select various patterns based on their preference. On top of that, it is compatible with the latest platform by Intel and AMD.

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high-performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash products, announces that it has overclocked its XPG SPECTRIX D80 RGB DDR4 memory module to 5531 MHz in a liquid-nitrogen-cooled configuration. The milestone was achieved through the joint effort of ADATA's XPG team and MSI's OC team. The result was confirmed by HWBot, and reaffirms ADATA's strong R&D capabilities and the outstanding performance offered by the XPG SPECTRIX D80 RGB memory module.

XPG SPECTRIX D80 DDR4 RGB is the world's first RGB DDR4 memory with a hybrid liquid-air cooling system. Utilizing the combination of a liquid heatsink, an aluminum heatsink, and thermally conductive materials on the PCB, the SPECTRIX D80 offers comprehensive thermal cooling capabilities and delivers outstanding performance.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today unveiled new TVS-882BR RDX models (including the TVS-882BR-RDX and TVS-882BRT3-RDX) that integrates the Tandberg RDX QuikStor internal SATA 5.25-inch docking station (8813-RDX) for installing removable and portable RDX hard disk cartridges. Compared to standard external hard drives, the Tandberg RDX cartridge features a rugged dust-proof design that protects data for a longer period of time and allows users to easily transfer data with the cartridges.

"QNAP constantly integrates partner backup solutions to our existing NAS solutions. By supporting RDX hard disk backup, the new TVS-882BR RDX models allows users to enjoy longer data protection and the portable cartridges can easily be shared for data exchanging. Coupled with Media Asset Management (MAM) software and a wide range of backup solutions, the TVS-882BR helps improve work efficiency while also providing highly-scalable storage space and powerful hardware that meets the requirements from modern businesses and organizations" said Dan Lin, Product Manager of QNAP.

Sk Hynix has added to its product catalog single-die 16 Gb DDR4 memory chips, which should enable a two-fold increase in maximum memory capacity per single DIMM. This allows SK Hynix to sell same-capacity chips with fewer memory semiconductor dies, due to the increase in storage density, and to increase maximum memory capacity at the same memory die populations as before. The benefits are lower power consumption (due to the reduced number of memory dies to power), and the possibility of putting together either dual-ranked 64 GB modules, quad-ranked 128 GB LRDIMMs and octal-ranked 256 GB LRDIMMs. That last part is the most important: theoretically, the maximum amount of memory on top Intel or AMD server platforms could double, which could enable up to 4 TB RAM in EPYC systems, for example. And as memory-hungry as big data applications have become, there's ever need for higher memory capacity.

SK Hynix's 16 Gb DDR4 chips are organized as 1Gx16 and 2Gx8 and supplied in FBGA96 and FBGA78 packages, respectively. Current 16 Gb density speeds stand at DDR4-2133 CL15 or DDR4-2400 CL17 modes at 1.2 V. SK Hynix plans increase the available frequencies in the third quarter of this year, adding DDR4-2666 CL19 to the lineup.

Reuters reports that a sudden (if ridiculous) 5% drop in memory chip prices in Q4 2017 has brought revenue expectations and investors' profit measurements to a teetering halt. 5% may not look like much - it certainly isn't much when we look at the historic price increases that almost doubled the cost of DDR4 memory kits, as you can see in the PC Part Picker chart below. This memory module price chart doesn't include the 5% drop yet, probably because it takes time for memory chip pricing to materialize in end-user module pricing. But for investors, it's like a spark in a paper archive - it could signal an impending price decrease that would push all profit estimates out the window.

This 5% drop in pricing has prompted industry analysts to review their profit estimates for 2018, and expect that the memory industry's growth rate will fall by more than half this year to 30 percent. You read that right - investors are scared because growth rates will be 30 percent instead of 60 percent. Oh the joys of inflated pricing, and slower-than-usual ramp-up to keep demand higher than supply. The joys of economic capitalism, where prices for consumers go up, and an industries' value skyrockets by more than 70$ in a single year (2017).

It was a banner year for graphics, both in terms of market strength and technology advancements. Gaming, virtual reality, crypto mining, and artificial intelligence fueled demand for GPUs in 2017. The market responded with a wide array of products: high-performance discrete PC graphics cards that let gamers run multiple 4K displays; game consoles and VR headsets; and workstation-class GPUs that can build the stunning effects we have all come to expect. And since these products are full of our GDDR5 or G5X memory, it was an exciting year for Micron's graphics team too. We had a record-breaking year in GDDR5 shipments and further solidified Micron's industry leadership in graphics memory with the launch of our 12 Gb/s G5X, the highest-performance mass production GDDR memory.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside have developed a new, ultrafast method for electrically controlling magnetism in certain metals, a breakthrough that could lead to greatly increased performance and more energy-efficient computer memory and processing technologies. The findings of the group, led by Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) professor Jeffrey Bokor, are published in a pair of articles in the journals Science Advances (Vol. 3, No. 49, Nov. 3, 2017) and Applied Physics Letters (Vol. III, No. 4, July 24, 2017).

Computers use different kinds of memory technologies to store data. Long-term memory, typically a hard disk or flash drive, needs to be dense in order to store as much data as possible. But the central processing unit (CPU) - the hardware that enables computers to compute - requires its own memory for short-term storage of information while operations are executed. Random Access Memory (RAM) is one example of such short-term memory.

DRAM prices began to rise in the second half of 2016 and have maintained a strong upward momentum through the first half of 2017, according to data from DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. The average contract price of PC DRAM modules rose by nearly 40% sequentially in the first quarter to US$24 and then by more than 10% sequentially in the second quarter to US$27. Furthermore, the average contract price of PC DRAM modules increased by about 4.6% between this June and July. DRAMeXchange's price forecast for this year's second half indicates and steady and incremental gains as the general trend in the DRAM market.

TweakTown has put forth an article wherein they claim to have received info from industry insiders regarding the upcoming Vega 56's performance. Remember that Vega 56 is the slightly cut-down version of the flagship Vega 64, counting with 56 next-generation compute units (NGCUs) instead of Vega 64's, well, 64. This means that while the Vega 64 has the full complement of 4,096 Stream processors, 256 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 2048-bit wide 8 GB HBM2 memory pool offering 484 GB/s of bandwidth, Vega 56 makes do with 3,548 Stream processors,192 TMUs, 64 ROPs, the same 8 GB of HBM2 memory and a slightly lower memory bandwidth at 410 GB/s.

The Vega 56 has been announced to retail for about $399, or $499 with one of AMD's new (famous or infamous, depends on your mileage) Radeon Packs. The RX Vega 56 card was running on a system configured with an Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2GHz, 16 GB of DDR4-3000 MHz RAM, and Windows 10 at 2560 x 1440 resolution.

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash products, today announced that its upcoming XPG SPECTRIX D40 RGB DDR4 has been certified compatible with ASUS AURA Sync software. This allows users of ASUS motherboards to personalize the RGB lighting elements built into D40 modules with choice of color range, lighting sequence, and more. SPECTRIX D40 modules have been optimized for the Intel X299 platform with a starting speed of 2666MHz. They are also compatible with AMD AM4 motherboards. Designed for gamers, overclockers, and case modders, SPECTRIX D40 DDR4 modules provide more options and customization features and support the trend towards builds that incorporate sophisticated RGB and LED.

Graphene has been hailed for some time now as the next natural successor to silicon, today's most used medium for semiconductor technology. However, even before such more exotic solutions to current semiconductor technology are employed (and we are still way off that future, at least when it comes to mass production), engineers and researchers seem to be increasing their focus in one specific part of computing: internal communication between components.

Typically, communication between a computer's Central Processing Unit (CPU) and a system's memory (usually DRAM) have occurred through a bus, which is essentially a communication highway between data stored in the DRAM, and the data that the CPU needs to process/has just finished processing. The fastest CPU and RAM is still only as fast as the bus, and recent workloads have been increasing the amount of data to be processed (and thus transferred) by orders of magnitude. As such, engineers have been trying to figure out ways of increasing communication speed between the CPU and the memory subsystem, as it is looking increasingly likely that the next bottlenecks in HPC will come not through lack of CPU speed or memory throughput, but from a bottleneck in communication between those two.

DRAM prices have been high for quite some time now, due to a general increased demand over a slowly improving supply capability from manufacturers. Pricing of DRAM has been increasing (to the tune that if I wanted to double my memory capacity, I would have to pay double of what I paid a mere 11 months ago.) NAND pricing has been affected as well, with newer technologies such as 3D NAND not having a relevant impact on end user pricing as was expected, since tight supply and growing demand means process-level savings are dwarfed by the increasing prices on the balance of supply and demand.

Most of our woes can be traced back to high-end smartphones, which make use of up to 6 GB of RAM and have copious amounts of NAND memory. Now, reports are coming in that due to the iPhone 8's impending launch, supply is even tighter, with several firms being either unable to secure the amount of Ram they are looking for, or having to order in significant advance (futures speculation anyone?) Reuters is reporting that some clients have moved to 6-month supply agreements for their DRAM and NAND purchases, accepting higher prices than the customary quarterly or monthly deals, to make sure they get enough memory chips for their products.

The Mozilla Foundation has recently launched the latest version of their Firefox web browser. The foxiest web browser around, which lets you access all of those amazing websites (like TPU) now features increased support for multitasking through its multi-process technology. A result of the Electrolysis effort from Mozilla's part, which has spawned more than eight years of work, Firefox 54 applies the Goldilocks principle to browser design, straddling an approach between increased performance and acceptable memory usage.

As such, Firefox won't be like Chrome, where each process is responsible for a single tab and its content handling (and can therefore increase memory usage immensely, which has justified Chrome's fame as a memory hog), but will instead opt for a more streamlined approach. Open 10 different tabs with 10 sites in Chrome, and you'll have 10 different processes. Each of those processes has its own memory - with their own instance of the browser's engine. Au contraire, Firefox now creates up to 4 separate processes for web page content. This means that the first 4 tabs each use those 4 processes, and additional tabs run using threads within those processes, optimizing, as per Firefox, memory usage and performance.

Microsoft is seemingly going to introduce another version of their Windows 10 operating system. After introducing Windows 10 S earlier in the year, followed by the "Chinafinitive" Windows 10 China Government Edition, the company is seemingly responding to specific market demands of professionals and enterprises. The new Windows 10 Pro for Workstation PCs (which was first leaked by Microsoft itself through an erroneous upload to the Insider Program) will apparently come in two variants, a standard variant, and the N variant, which is built to comply with EU regulations.

The new Windows 10 Pro for Workstation PCs will introduce ReFS, the successor to the tried and true NTFS file system. The new ReFS is designed for fault-tolerance and is optimized for handling large data volume, including auto-correcting capabilities and backwards-compatibility with NTFS. Additionally, Microsoft is baking in SMB Direct protocol file sharing in Windows 10 Pro for Workstation which allows for high throughput, low latency and low CPU utilization when accessing network shares. It will also introduce support for systems with up to four CPUs (up from Windows 10 and Windows 10 Pro dual CPU limit) and 6 TB of RAM.

Patriot took the opportunity to tease an upcoming line of LED-lighted DRAM modules. Details on these were extremely scarce (actually, nonexistent), which could mean that Patriot is either playing its cards extremely close to its chest, or that specifications haven't been finalized as of yet. However, it seems the final design for the modules is, and that's what Patriot was proud enough to show. However, I think it's a given that these are DDR4 modules.

I have to say I really like the design on these heat-spreaders; they're both understated and bold, which isn't that much of a frequent combination. Expect more details on these memory sticks to come in the coming months.

You've probably heard of AMD's AGESA updates by now - the firmware updates that are ironing out the remaining kinks in AMD's Ryzen platform, which really could have used a little more time in the oven before release. However, kinks have been disappearing, the platform has been maturing and evolving, and AMD has been working hard in improving the experience for consumers and enthusiasts alike. As a brief primer, AGESA is responsible for initializing AMD x86-64 processors during boot time, acting as something of a "nucleus" for the BIOS of your motherboard. Motherboard vendors take the core capabilities of AGESA updates and build on them with their own "secret sauce" to create the BIOS that ultimately populate your motherboard of choice. The process of cooking up BIOS updates built on the new AGESA will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but AMD's Robert Hallock says you should be seeing BIOSes based on this version halfway through the month of June - if your vendor isn't already providing a Beta version of some kind.

This new AGESA update code, version 1.0.0.6, should be just up the alley of enthusiasts, however, in that it adds a grand total of 26 new parameters for memory configuration, improving the compatibility and reliability of DRAM, especially for memory that does not follow the industry-standard JEDEC specifications (e.g. faster than 2667, manual overclocking, or XMP2 profiles). Below you'll find the 26 parameters that were introduced.

DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, today reported that the average contract price of 4GB PC DRAM modules increased over 20% between September and October of 2016 (jumping from US$14.5 to US$17.5) as DRAM suppliers completed their fourth-quarter contract negotiations with first-tier PC-OEMs.

These increases come as the result of production capacity gradually shifting from PC-centric DRAM towards mobile and server DRAM, which have seen tremendous growths in demand. In fact, PC DRAM memory accounts for less than 20% of overall DRAM production. The already low inventories of branded device makers go hand in hand with higher-than-expected demand for DRAM-carrying products. And this higher demand comes after the PC DRAM market being severely undersupplied in the second half of 2016. The result: an across-the-board price upturn for all types of DRAM.

AMD's Radeon branded memory business appears to be at a standstill, with no new product launches since 2015, and Radeon memory products out of stock (or nearly out of stock) at key retailers across North America.

When AMD was asked if it was planning to exit the memory business altogether, a company spokesperson replied that the memory is still being sold but is "mostly distributed in Eastern Europe, only small quantities are diverted to North America."

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is thrilled to announce the Trident Z RGB Series - the world's most revolutionary RGB lighting DDR4 memory kit. Requiring no additional power connections, this incredible feat of engineering bares pure RGB lighting across an uncovered full-length light bar on the award-winning Trident Z series heatspreader design.

By default, the Trident Z RGB will display a rainbow of colors in a wave-style lighting effect, illuminating any system with a myriad of hues. Further lighting effects and color customizations can be controlled and chosen through software, scheduled for a February 2017 release.

Remember Geil'sEVO X? If you wanted some lighting phenomena going on inside your case with those DDR4 RAM modules, you'd also have to make do with unsightly cables, adding to the clutter of your chosen component holder. ZADAK511 has done away with those additional power cables, and now allows you to "pimp" your rig without them.

These two products were designed by the ZADAK Lab team, and ZADAK has developed a piece of software they named "ZArsenal" which allows the user to regulate the colors and lighting effects of both the memory modules and SSD, with a claimed nil performance impact on either. Details on the SSD refer only to its dual interfaces (SATAIII and USB 3.1, TYPE-C Gen2, updated from their Shield [sans RGB] series), while the memory kit's details are a little more scarce - we expect them to be on par with the companies' previously announced Shield line (sans RGB), which would mean at least DDR4-3000 speeds at timings of 16-18-18-38 (with 4 GB density modules) or the companies' top-of-the-line DDR4-4266 kit. No details on pricing for either of the products were given.

Japanese developer and publisher Capcom has publicized that the PC version of their anticipated Resident Evil 7 game will support up to 4K resolutions and HDR. Naturally HDR will remain dependent on being connected to a compatible TV or panel, whereas high resolution support could provide additional levels of image quality through the use of super sampling on screens that do not support such resolutions natively. It is said that HDR will complement the immersive experience, better enabling the game to deliver overwhelming fear and ultimate horror.

As previously revealed by Capcom, Resident Evil 7 will also support cross saves between the PC and Xbox One versions of the game, however this will only be possible if you purchase it for PC on the Windows Store. Resident Evil 7 is also available on Steam and this version will not support cross saving. Resident Evil 7 will be available for PC on the 25 January, 2017.

The Ballistix sub-brand of Crucial, Micron Technology's consumer products subsidiary, is now its own brand, and no longer labeled next to Crucial. The Ballistix Gaming brand will now include PC gaming hardware, including memory (RAM), and perhaps even SSDs and gaming peripherals in the future. Ballistix products will be targeted at DIY gaming PC builders and enthusiasts.

Commenting on the story, Crucial stated: "Ballistix is now it's own defined brand, becoming a sibling to Crucial (previously a sub-brand). For more than a decade, Ballistix has injected speed and style into PC gaming in a way that can't be imitated. As the only major brand of gaming memory that builds and tests products from start to finish, Ballistix brings you the proven performance and reliability that pro gamers build with. Ballistix performance memory (RAM) is designed to give the upper hand to gamers, performance enthusiasts, and overclockers."

Remember GeIl? I certainly do - mainly on account of a fleeting passion for the company's line of Black Dragon DDR3 memory. That same company has now announced availability of their EVO X DDR4 memory kits. That they took some time in the oven is an understatement, considering these kits were first announced back in May. The company now believes they are ready for prime time.

As expected, and as the name suggests, GeIl's EVO X features customizable RGB lighting on account of the company's Hybrid-Independent-Light-Module Technology, which means that LEDs, microprocessor, circuits, switch and dual-power-source are all fitted in one modular solution, which separates the entire lighting circuitry from the memory module, thus ensuring its stability.

At the 2016 annual Microsoft Surface Event, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Surface Computing Panos Panay announced a new addition to the company's Surface lineup: a 28-inch All-in-One, with a 3:2 aspect ratio monitor Microsoft calls a "Pixel Sense Display", packing a 4500x3000 resolution (with around 62% more pixels than 4K resolution, combining to provide about 192 pixels per inch), as well as 10-point touch and Microsoft Pen support.

All of that screen real-estate comes in at just 12.5mm thick - the AIO's innards are actually on the monitor's base, with an hinge that promises to allow the display to be moved seamlessly and in a wide variety of angles, as well as allowing it to take on extra weight in studio mode. All of this is powered by an Intel Skylake processor (configurable as an i5 or i7 model), your choice of an NVIDIA GTX 965 M 2GB or an NVIDIA GTX 980 M 4 GB model, 8 through 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 1 TB or 2TB storage - with all configurable options also including in their base specs what Microsoft calls a "Rapid Hybrid Drive", which at the moment, remains unclear as to its nature of either a SATA or PCIe SSD, or even an SSHD.