Samsung is giving finishing touches to a new line of PCI-Express solid-state drives (SSDs) that offer performance that matches or beats the current SSD 950 Pro series, at lower price-points, the 960 EVO. These drives leverage the company's 48-layer 3D-VNAND flash memory, and the new "Polaris" SSD controller by Samsung, to serve up performance that beats the 950 Pro. Samsung could transfer some of the cost-savings in using the inexpensive flash standard to the consumer, highlighted by the company's decision to brand these drives "EVO."

Tom's Hardware discovered that the Samsung PM961 drives are analogous to the 960 EVO, featuring identical components - the "Polaris" controller, and 48-layer TLC 3D-VNAND flash chips . These drives come in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, with sequential transfer rates of up to 3000 MB/s reads, with up to 1150 MB/s writes; up to 360,000 IOPS 4K random-read, and up to 280,000 IOPS 4K random-write. The 960 EVO will ship in M.2 NGFF-2280 and PCIe add-on card form-factors, with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 bus interfaces. The drives will support the NVMe protocol.

HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ), the world leader in printing, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.'s (KSE: 005930) printer business in a deal valued at $1.05 billion. The acquisition positions HP to disrupt and reinvent the $55 billion copier industry, a segment that hasn't innovated in decades. Copiers are outdated, complicated machines with dozens of replaceable parts requiring inefficient service and maintenance agreements. Customers are frequently frustrated with the number of visits needed to keep copier machines functioning. Today, HP is investing to disrupt this category by replacing copiers with superior multifunction printer (MFP) technology.

Samsung has built a formidable portfolio of A3 MFPs that deliver the performance of copiers with the power, simplicity, reliability and ease-of-use of printers and with as few as seven replaceable parts. Integrating the Samsung printer business' products, including their mobile-first and cloud-first user experience, with HP's next-generation PageWide technologies will create a breakthrough portfolio of printing solutions with the industry's best device, document, and data security.

SoftBank today announced that it has concluded the acquisition of British chipmaker ARM, in a USD $31 billion purchase. The acquisition was first announced in July 2016. Following this, ARM will be de-listed from the London Stock Exchange from the 6th of September 2016. Although ARM is a CPU architecture designer with a mere $1.5 billion in revenue last fiscal, and licenses the architecture to other SoC makers such as Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, etc., SoftBank is betting on ARM CPU architecture's emergence as the prime-mover of the IoT (Internet of things) revolution. This is SoftBank's largest tech acquisition following the $20 billion acquisition of American cellular network Sprint, and a $15 billion investment in Vodafone Japan.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is announcing a new high-end Trident Z memory kit with the growing popularity of 32GB (8GBx4) capacity configuration at DDR4-3866MHz CL18-19-19-39 under 1.35V. Manufactured with the high performance Samsung IC memory chips and selected for its high frequency performance, this memory kit marks the continuous growth of high performance DDR4 on the popular Intel Skylake platform.

With the transition into higher capacity memory kits for gaming, work, and daily use, G.SKILL is raising the bar on DDR4 memory kits with 32GB (8GBx4) capacity, resulting in a jump from a previous DDR4-3600MHz speed to an astounding DDR4-3866MHz. See below for the test screenshot with the memory kit on an Intel Core i7-6600K processor and ASUS Z170-Deluxe motherboard.

Samsung Electronics extends its innovation in displays with the release of its most powerful and visually compelling curved gaming monitors to date. The CFG70 (available in 24 and 27 inch) and CF791 (34-inch) monitors provide distinguished curvatures of 1800R and 1500R, respectively. Other best-in-class features include interactive LED lighting, an intuitive user dashboard, and AMD FreeSync Technology for the ultimate gaming experience.

"Incorporating the same quantum dot technology found in our incredible TV lineup, the CFG70 and CF791 monitors are poised to deliver the most realistic experience for gamers and consumers alike," said Andrew Sivori, Vice President, Consumer IT Marketing at Samsung Electronics America. "In addition, we've bolstered color accuracy, refined the display curvature and significantly reduced MPRT (Moving Picture/Pattern Response Time)."

Even as its fellow-Korean DRAM maker SK Hynix is pushing for HBM3 to bring 2 TB/s memory bandwidths to graphics cards, Samsung is betting on relatively inexpensive standards that succeed existing ones. The company hopes to have GDDR6, the memory standard that succeeds GDDR5X, to arrive by 2018.

GDDR6 will serve up bandwidths of up to 16 Gbps, up from the 10 Gbps currently offered by GDDR5X. This should enable memory bandwidths of 512 GB/s over a 256-bit wide memory interface, and 768 GB/s over 384-bit. The biggest innovation with GDDR6 that sets it apart from GDDR5X is LP4X, a method with which the memory controller can more responsively keep voltages proportionate to clocks, and reduce power-draw by up to 20% over the previous standard.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, displays two super-large capacity DDR4 memory kits at ultra-high speeds with amazingly low CAS latencies at the Intel Developer Forum 2016 this week in San Francisco, including the Trident Z series DDR4-3333MHz CL14 128GB (8x16GB) and DDR4-3333MHz CL13 64GB (8x8GB) memory kits. Both kits are featured with high performance Samsung DDR4 8Gb components and operate on the latest Intel X99 platform with Broadwell-E processors.

G.SKILL is dedicated to pushing the performance limit of DDR4 kits to new heights with the latest platform generations. With the launch of Broadwell-E in May 2016, G.SKILL is pushing a 128GB (8x16GB) kit of the high end Trident Z series to a blazing DDR4-3333MHz frequency at a very tight timing of CL 14-14-14-34. Featuring the Intel Core i7-6800K processor and ASUS ROG Rampage V Edition 10 motherboard, this is one of the highest performance memory kits with such massive capacity.

Intel is opening up its silicon manufacturing facilities to fabless chip-makers, beginning with the manufacture of ARM SoCs. The company entered a licensing deal with ARM that allows ARM SoC designers such as Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung, to manufacture their SoCs at Intel fabs. Intel is among the first fabs with a working 14 nm node, and is on-track for sub-10 nm node development.

Intel had a crack at the market segments typically addressed by ARM SoCs, with its own x86 chips, which failed to see the kind of volumes ARM chipmakers were pushing. The company has now changed tactics to open its fabs up to those ARM SoC makers, letting them manufacture their designs on proven silicon-fabrication tech, in geographically important locations. Intel has its cutting-edge fabs located in Costa Rica and Malaysia.

It looks like NVIDIA won't skip the 14 nm process en route sub-10 nm nodes, despite meeting its energy-efficiency targets with the 16 nm FinFET node, after all. The company has reportedly concluded talks with Samsung Electronics, to optically-shrink its current GeForce "Pascal" architecture down to the newer 14 nanometer FinFET node, by Samsung. It's unclear as to whether specific upcoming (unreleased) Pascal GPUs will get 14 nm treatment, or if this is a series-wide die-shrink of the kind NVIDIA did between the 65 nm and 55 nm nodes. The Samsung-made 14 nm "Pascal" GPUs should enter production before year-end.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled the industry's first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1.0 Card Extension Standard*, for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices such as DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. Coming in a wide range of storage capacities including 256, 128, 64 and 32 gigabyte (GB), Samsung's UFS cards are expected to bring a significant performance boost to the external memory storage market, allowing much more satisfying multimedia experiences.

"Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution," said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics "By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritize performance and user convenience above all."

At the 2016 Flash Memory Summit, Samsung unveiled a massive 32-terabyte solid state drive (SSD) for enterprise applications. The drive leverages the company's 4th generation, 64-layer 3D V-NAND flash memory, making it the company's highest-capacity SSD, upping the 15.36 TB drive the company unveiled in March, 2016. The drive is built in the 12 mm-thick, 2.5-inch form-factor, and features the SAS 12 Gb/s interface. At the summit, the company announced that it plans to have 100 TB SSDs ready by 2020.

Japanese conglomerate Softbank acquired British CPU architecture designer ARM in a USD $32 billion deal on Monday. Softbank's bid of $32 billion is a 43 percent premium over ARM's current valuation of $22.3 billion, and the Cambridge-based firm will recommend its shareholders to approve of its acquisition. Shares of ARM surged 45% on the LSE, adding £7.56 billion to its market value. The company reported revenues of $1.49 billion in 2015. ARM founder Herman Hauser, however, isn't happy with the board's decision. "This is a sad day for me and a sad day for technology in Britain," he stated.

ARM designs CPU architectures, which it then licenses to other processor and SoC manufacturers, many of which are fabless themselves, making it an intellectual property giant. None of ARM's products are "tangible" or physical. While Intel, for example, designs CPU architectures (eg: x86), implements it (eg: Core i7, Celeron), and manufactures it (at its Costa Rica and Malaysia fabs) ARM's product is not tangible. It has a CPU architecture, which clients such as Samsung, Huawei, and Qualcomm license, implement (eg: Exynos, Kylin, Snapdragon), and contract-manufacture, through fabs such as GlobalFoundries, TSMC, and ST Microelectronics.

Samsung introduced a massive 4 terabyte variant of its popular SSD 850 EVO. The drive takes advantage of the company's latest 48-layer 3D V-NAND flash memory, and uses eight 2 Tb stacks driven by the company's existing S4LP052X01-8030 triple-core controller. The drive offers sequential transfer speeds of up to 540 MB/s reads, with up to 520 MB/s writes; up to 98,000 IOPS sequential reads, with up to 90,000 IOPS sequential writes. It's currently only offered in the 2.5-inch form-factor, with SATA 6 Gb/s interface. Backed by a 5-year warranty, the Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB is priced at US $1,499.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled the industry's first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1.0 Card Extension Standard, for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices such as DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. Coming in a wide range of storage capacities including 256, 128, 64 and 32 gigabyte (GB), Samsung's UFS cards are expected to bring a significant performance boost to the external memory storage market, allowing much more satisfying multimedia experiences.

"Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution," said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics "By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritize performance and user convenience above all."

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, announces the world's first DDR4 memory overclocking record to break past the mind-blowing 5GHz barrier, achieved with G.SKILL Trident Z Series DDR4 memory engineered with Samsung ICs and the MSI Z170I GAMING PRO AC motherboard. With this achievement in the official record books, the world's top 7 memory frequency records are now dominated by G.SKILL memory.

Surpassing the 5GHz frequency speed barrier had been the ultimate aspiration of the memory overclocking community since the last year's launch of the Intel Skylake platform. This historic milestone is finally succeeded today by the renowned Taiwanese overclocking legend, Toppc, under liquid nitrogen cooling. "We are extremely excited to achieve this great milestone together with Samsung components and MSI motherboard," says Tequila Huang, Corporate Vice President and Director of R&D, G.SKILL International. "We will continually push hardware performance to the limits and provide enthusiasts with even more advanced products."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., an expert provider of advanced memory solutions for more than three decades, today announced worldwide availability of the 750 EVO solid state drive (SSD) in 120GB, 250GB and an all new 500GB capacity. The 750 EVO SSDs provide mainstream consumers and PC builders with an efficient migration path from hard disk drives (HDDs) or slow performing entry-level SSDs to a faster and more reliable storage solution for every day computer use.

"Samsung is committed to constantly evolving and providing high-quality memory solutions that fit general consumer needs," said Un-Soo Kim, Senior Vice President of Branded Product Marketing, Memory Business at Samsung Electronics. "We have seen high consumer demand for our 750 EVO in the 120GB and 250GB capacities, which have been available in select emerging markets since last year. We want to meet the consumers' expectation who seek a reliable memory solution to extend the longevity of their existing computers in an easy and effective way. By adding the 500GB version to the current 750 EVO line-up and supplying the drives to more regions, consumers who need high data consumption will be better served."

The Toshiba-Samsung consortium TSST (Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology) has reportedly stopped production of optical drives. TSST manufactured CDRW+DVDR, DVDRW+BDR, and BDRW drives under the Samsung brand. Samsung and Toshiba co-founded TSST in 2004 to manufacture optical drives under the Samsung brand name, and to make unbranded OEM optical drives for use in Toshiba and Samsung branded notebooks.

Samsung had to partner with Toshiba as it held the requisite optical disc technology licenses and patents. LG Electronics similarly partnered with Hitachi, another founding-member of several optical disc standard SIGs, to make up HL-DT (Hitachi-LG Data-Storage Technology), and sell drives under the LG brand. Speaking to KitGuru, a TSST sales manager stated "it's true that TSST(Samsung ODD) stopped production from Mid-April." All is not over for TSST, though. "We will continue the ODD business aggressively to obtain about 50% of market share," and will "release a new ODD to the market," he added.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., an expert provider of advanced memory solutions, today unveiled its newest memory card globally - the EVO Plus 256GB microSD card. The EVO Plus 256GB offers the highest capacity for a microSD card in its class, delivering fast speeds and an expanded memory storage for use in premium smartphones and tablets, 360-degree video recorders, action cameras, and drones. Consumers can now record up to 12 hours of 4K UHD video or 33 hours of Full HD video on their mobile device or action camera without needing to change or replace the memory card, allowing them to experience more and worry less about running out of memory.

The EVO Plus 256GB raises the bar for capacity and performance of microSD cards thanks to Samsung's advanced V-NAND technology, offering high read and write speeds of up to 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. This level of performance will provide general consumers and professionals with superb user convenience for storing heavy-loaded, high-resolution photography and 4K video recording, as well as graphic intensive multimedia like virtual reality (VR) and gaming.

NVIDIA and Samsung have agreed to settle all pending intellectual property litigation between the two companies, NVIDIA announced today. The agreement will lead to the immediate dismissal of all pending IP litigation in U.S. district courts, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. Patent Office between the companies. The settlement includes the licensing of a small number of patents by each company to the other, but no broad cross-licensing of patents or other compensation. Further details of the agreement are not being disclosed.

Samsung Electronics announced today that it has sold more than one million curved monitor products worldwide. The global display provider introduced its first curved LED monitor - the 27-inch, 4000R (curvature radius of 4,000 mm) SD590C model - in September 2014, and since has expanded its line-up to include several additional curved monitors. As a result, Samsung currently accounts for more than 85 percent of all global curved monitor sales (Source: International Data Corporation (IDC), 2015 Q4 worldwide sales results for 15"~34" curved monitors).

Designed to match the natural shape of the human eye, Samsung's curved monitors feature uniform center-to-edge viewing distances to create a more comfortable and immersive viewing experience conducive to long-term use. Combined with extra-wide viewing angles and enhanced contrast ratios, these curved displays are ideal for gamers and at-home entertainment users seeking realistic, distraction-free picture quality. As a result, Samsung has capitalized on growing demand from these audiences (many of whom employ several monitors during game play or content viewing).

A picture of NVIDIA's next performance-segment GPU based on the upcoming "Pascal" architecture, the GP104, was leaked to the web, revealing a heap of raw material to speculate from. To begin with, GP104 retains the traditional component layout of a simple GPU die sitting on a conventional fiberglass substrate package, with memory chips surrounding it. NVIDIA is reserving exotic specs such as stacked HBM2 memory for the high-end GP100 silicon.

Some fairly straightforward trignometry reveals that the rectangular die of the GP104 measures 15.35 mm x 19.18 mm, with one source speculating a transistor-count of 7.4-7.9 billion. The card is expected to feature 8 gigabit GDDR5 memory chips, which tick at 8 GHz (GDDR5-effective). If the memory bus width is 256-bit, then you're looking at a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. The CUDA core count of the GP104 could be closer to 2,560, than the 4,096 from an older report.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing the industry's first 10-nanometer (nm) class, 8-gigabit (Gb) DDR4 (double-data-rate-4) DRAM chips and the modules derived from them. DDR4 is quickly becoming the most widely produced memory for personal computers and IT networks in the world, and Samsung's latest advancement will help to accelerate the industry-wide shift to advanced DDR4 products.

Samsung opened the door to 10nm-class DRAM for the first time in the industry after overcoming technical challenges in DRAM scaling. These challenges were mastered using currently available ArF (argon fluoride) immersion lithography, free from the use of EUV (extreme ultra violet) equipment. Samsung's roll-out of the 10nm-class (1x) DRAM marks yet another milestone for the company after it first mass produced 20-nanometer (nm) 4Gb DDR3 DRAM in 2014.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of JESD220-2 Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Card Extension Standard. The new removable memory card standard standardizes functionality that aligns with the popular UFS embedded device standard. JESD220-2 is available for free download from the JEDEC website.

UFS is a high performance interface designed for use in computing and mobile systems such as smart phones and tablets where power consumption needs to be minimized. Its high speed serial interface and optimized protocol enable significant improvements in throughput and mobile system performance. The new UFS card standard provides a leading-edge removable storage solution while maintaining sequential and random IOPS performance that is critical for future mobile markets. Even using a single lane the UFS 1.0 card offers 600 MB/s interface speed in both directions and a state-of-the-art queuing mechanism to further increase system throughput.

Samsung Electronics America, Inc., today announced availability of the Galaxy TabPro S, a two-in-one device created specifically for on-the-go consumers and mobile professionals. The powerful, sleek TabPro S - which runs Windows 10, and features an Intel Core m3 processor - will be available beginning March 18 starting at $899.99 with a full-size ergonomic keyboard with trackpad.

"Today's consumers and professionals are dynamic and highly mobile, and they demand tablets and laptops to use at the office, at home, or on the go, such as the TabPro S," said Gary Riding, senior vice president, product marketing at Samsung Electronics America. "Through our longstanding strategic partnerships with Intel and Microsoft, our products deliver power and functionality - all in a beautifully designed device."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it is now shipping the industry's largest solid state drive (SSD) - the "PM1633a," a 15.36 terabyte (TB) drive. First revealed at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in August, the 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, for use in enterprise storage systems. Because the PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, enterprise storage managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive

"To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading enterprise storage system manufacturers, we are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers' SSD requests," said Jung-bae Lee, Senior Vice President, Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team, Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers."