Thread: Anandtech News

Marking a new high in microSD card capacities, Western Digital has started shipping its flagship SanDisk Extreme 1 TB microSDXC card. This is the company's (and industry's) first 1 TB microSD card, and while the $450 launch price is definitely steep, for portable devices that need a massive amount of storage in a thumbnail-sized removable card, a full terabyte is the biggest step up yet.
When it comes to performance, the memory card is thankfully a member of SanDisk's higher-performing Extreme line, so performance isn't too pokey for reading and writing a full TB out of the drive. Formally, SanDisk rates it for read speeds up to 90 MB/s and write speeds up to 60 MB/s when working over a standard UHS-I interface. This works out to roughly 3 hours and 4.6 hours to read and fill the card, respectively. In fact at this point SanDisk is outright bottlenecked by the UHS bus; the card can actually read at 160 MB/s and write at 90 MB/s when used with proprietary hosts that support DDR transfer modes. So microSD Express and its vastly higher transfer rates can't get here soon enough.
Along with its advertised peak performance, SanDisk's supersized card supports video speed class 30, which among other things means that its minimum write speeds need to be at least 30 MB/s. The card also meets the requirements for the A2 app performance class, meaning that it can sustain at least 4000 random read IOPS and 2000 random write IOPS, and supports capabilities such as command queuing and caching.
Unfortunately for tech enthusiasts, SanDisk isn't saying much about the 1 TB card under the hood. Given the capacity, the card is likely based on the company’s latest 96-layer TLC or QLC 3D NAND memory. But short of tearing it apart, this is hard to confirm.
For the moment the new 1 TB microSD card is available directly from Western Digital for $449.99. But eventually the product will hit regular retail stores too.
Related Reading:

• Micron and Western Digital Unveil 1 TB microSD Cards with A2
• SanDisk Extreme microSD Cards with A2 App Performance Spec Unveiled: 4K/2K IOPS
• HiDisc’s 1 TB SDXC Card with A2 Rating Now at Retail
• ADATA XPG Launches Gaming microSD Cards, up to 512GB
• Lexar Launches 512 GB microSD Card with A2 App Performance Spec

Source: SanDisk (via Tom’s Guide)



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Samsung and Verizon on Thursday officially started sales of the Galaxy S10 5G smartphone in the US. The handset is immediately available exclusively with a Verizon contract whether it is bought from the carrier or from the manufacturer itself. The retail price of the Galaxy S10 5G 512 GB, which has finally been revealed for the first time, is $1399, which is $150 higher than the equivalent Galaxy S10+.

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There are two trade shows every year that I love. Computex in June is great, because the scale of the industry it covers, and Taipei is a wonderful location. Hot Chips in August is the other show, which is amazing for the level of depth it provides on the latest technology, as well as upcoming releases. This year the list of presentations for Hot Chips is almost overwhelming, and we’re looking forward to attending.

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The Mate 20 X 5G had been announced by Huawei some months ago, and we saw the first European launch of the phone on Switzerland’s Sunrise two weeks ago. Today, Huawei officially announced the UK launch of the phone on upcoming networks from EE, O², Three and Vodaphone.
The Mate 20 X is a bigger variant of the Mate 20 Pro which we reviewed late last year. The new 5G variant adds Huawei’s own HiSilicon Balong 5G modem to the system to enable connectivity to the new standard. The Balong 5000 along with the Exynos Model 5100 are the most future-proof 5G modem currently available by vendors in commercial devices by virtue of supporting today’s NSA (Non-standalone) as well as future SA (Standalone) 5G networks. Other differences on the 5G variant is that the battery capacity reduces from 5000mAh down to 4200mAh – possibly due to less internal component space.
The Mate 20 X 5G will be available in the UK in June at a recommended price of £999, which interestingly enough a lot more than the CHF 997 (£755) pricing in Switzerland.
Related Reading

• Switzerland's Sunrise Starts Selling Huawei Mate 20X 5G & Xiaomi MIX3 5G Phones
• The Mate 20 & Mate 20 Pro Review: Kirin 980 Powering Two Contrasting Devices
• Samsung & Verizon Launch the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G in the US
• OnePlus Teases the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G: Seven Pro + 5G Later This Year
• Samsung Confirms Galaxy S10 5G Specifications: Exynos Modem 5100 For First 5G Devices In Korea
• Sizing Up The 5G Modem Market: Qualcomm, Intel, Huawei, Samsung, UniSOC, and Mediatek

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Large displays as well as dual-monitor setups clearly improve productivity of office workers and creative professionals. Applying this to broader markets, HP thinks that gamers could also benefit from two displays by accessing messaging or media services, or even tweak performance of their components without quitting their games. To that end, HP is rolling out a new dual-screen laptop, the gaming-focused Omen X 2S 15. In addition to a typical 15.6-inch LCD as a main display, it also sports a secondary, 5.98-inch multitouch screen. Meanwhile, the system itself is powered by crème-de-la-crème gaming hardware including Intel’s eight-core CPU as well as NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU.



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AMD this week held its Annual Shareholder Meeting where it reiterated its current technology roadmap and once again confirmed that that its major products set to be released this year based on 7nm will be formally introduced in Q3. Previously the company implied on launch timeframes of its Navi GPU (at least one of them), Matisse CPUs, and Rome server CPUs, but never made a firm promise about the third quarter - this announcement is a commitment to delivering these products in Q3.

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Viper Gaming, the gaming peripheral arm of memory giant Patriot, has released two new gaming mice based on Pixart Optical sensors, the V550 and V551. The V550 features an ambidextrous design, while the V551 makes use of a more ergonomic right-handed design.

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This morning Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray are announcing that HPE will be buying out the supercomputer maker for roughly 1.3 billion dollars. Intending to use Cray’s knowledge and technology to bolster their own supercomputing and high-performance computing technologies, when the deal closes, HPE will become the world leader for supercomputing technology.
Cray of course needs no introduction. The current leader in the supercomputing field and founder of supercomputing as we know it, Cray has been a part of the supercomputing landscape since the 1970s. Starting at the time with fully custom systems, in more recent years Cray has morphed into an integrator and scale-out specialist, combining processors from the likes of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA into supercomputers, and applying their own software, I/O, and interconnect technologies.
The timing of the acquisition announcement closely follows other major news from Cray: the company just landed a $600 million US Department of Energy contract to supply the Frontier supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021. Frontier is one of two exascale supercomputers Cray is involved in – the other being a subcontractor for the 2021 Aurora system – and in fact Cray is involved in the only two exascale systems ordered by the US Government thus far. So in both a historical and modern context, Cray was and is one of the biggest players in the supercomputing market.

HPE for its part has some supercomputing exposure as well, however it’s nothing on the scale of what Cray has done. So for HPE, the deal represents an opportunity for the firm to acquire the know-how and technology needed to augment and evolve their own supercomputer and HPC technologies. Among other things, this deal means HPE will be picking up Cray’s Shasta system architecture as well as their new Slingshot interconnect, both of which will be core parts of Frontier.
The company sounds especially interested in incorporating these technologies into their current HPC plans. While supercomputers attract a lot of attention for obvious reasons, somewhat smaller systems are sold in much higher numbers due to costs and computing needs. Like many other hardware vendors, HPE is riding the wave of big data, including AI-driven analytics, and the company intends to grow their capabilities here using Cray’s technology. Interestingly, Cray is actually the second supercomputer manufacturer picked up by HPE over its lifetime; the company also picked up the remaining assets of Silicon Graphics back in 2016.
Broadly speaking, major acquisitions and mergers in the supercomputing space are rare events. Due to their ever-increasing price tag, only a small number of world-class supercomputers are sold each year. And due to these prices the buyers are often governments, which inevitably gives supercomputer construction a nationalistic element to it. None the less, because costs are increasing – Frontier is the US’s most expensive system yet at over $500M for the system alone – there is some pressure for consolidation as fewer systems get sold and overall performance efficiency increases have been slowing down as well. It’s not too surprising then that HPE’s plans include using Cray’s technologies to improve HPE GreenLake, the company’s HPC-as-a-Service offering.
Under the terms of the deal, HPE will be paying Cray shareholders $35 in cash for each Cray share, which is a notable price premium over Cray’s average stock price over the last year. This puts the total value of the deal at nearly $1.3 billion, with HPE expecting the deal to close in the first quarter of FY2020.



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Following on from a wide range of ASRock Phantom Gaming branded products, memory manufacturer GeIL has announced its new Evo Spear Phantom Gaming Edition memory, which is designed for use in small form factor systems. Available in frequencies ranging from DDR4-2400 to DDR4-3200, the Evo Spear Phantom Gaming memory is being pitched for use with ASRock's Phantom Gaming motherboards, with kits available specifically for both Intel and AMD models.

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Sony has finally given its flagship Xperia 1 smartphone an official launch date and price. The handset, which features a large 21:9 OLED display that supports wide color gamuts, will arrive on July 12th for $949.99.



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