CES 2012: Ultrabook, ultrabook, ultrabook. Say it three times in front of mirror and it'll haunt you for this entire year. I think that's all we're going to see from companies this year, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, either.

Samsung unveiled their Series 5 line of ultrabooks, which include a 13-inch model and a 14-inch model which sports an optical drive. Both Series 5 ultrabooks are powered by Intel Core i5 processors, sport 4GB of RAM, eight-hour batteries and Intel integrated graphics. They also feature the same matte, 300-nit (1366x768) display that was in the Series 5 Chromebook.

The 13-inch model includes a 128GB SSD option, but both the 13- and 14-inch models feature a standard 500GB 5,400RPM drive, with 16GB of express cache for that faster boot time you all want, as well as speedy application launches. The Series 5 ultrabooks from Samsung weigh in at 3.5 and 3.95 pounds for the 13- and 14-inch models, respectively. While they may weigh in a bit heavier than other ultrabooks we've seen lately, they do sport a tonne of connectivity.

CES 2012: It's not all consumer electronics to be used indoors at CES, there's also ourdoor-y type in the form of a car from Ford. Ford have just announced their 2013 Fusion, which is an all-new car packed to the rim with gadgets and tech like adaptive cruise control and comes in gasoline, hybrid and plug-in hybrid variants.

Effiency for the mid-sized sedan ranges from 26MPG city and 37MPG highway in the gasoline variant to 44MPG city and 44MPG highway for the lithium-ion-packed hybrids. The Fusion Energi plu-in sports an estimated 100MPGe, which is 7MPGe better than the Volt and 13MPGe better than the Prius plug-in. Not only that, the Fusion is actually bigger than the two models mentioned.

It can also drive for 20 miles on electricity before starting its engine, and will accelerate all the way up to 62MPH on battery power alone. This is a great feature for those who just want to duck out to the shops, or go out to dinner or see a movie.

CES 2012 - So as Jen-Hsun Huang gets into the gaming segment of their CES press conference, a FPS is loaded, and the camera for the big screen moves over to a couple of guys off to the side of the stage are connected via LAN, but it seems there are three actual players!

As the discussion continues, Jen-Hsun Huang starts talking smack to the two individuals, and asks them why are you getting hit so much, who is doing all that damage, who is doing all the PWN'ing on this match? While this is going on, the large screen was showing the odd man out's view of his screen, and the player in question was handing out punishment with little damage to his own character.

A few seconds later Jen-Hsun Huang spills the beans and informs the audience that he has enlisted the help of the World's top FPS gamer, Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel! As you can see he was sitting in the audience with a lady holding his tablet as he delivered the pain to the other two LAN combatants.

CES 2012 - We managed to sneak into the OCZ suite here in Las Vegas before anyone else and we got a look at their range of new enterprise storage solutions and the one that stood out for me was the demo of two Z-Drive R4 RM1616 PCI-E 2.0 drives running together in RAID 0 to produce some really mind-blowing performance numbers.

The Z-Drive R4 RM1616 is not a desktop part and easily out of reach for pretty much all consumers, if you have the big bucks, this is the ultimate storage though. The drives come with no less than 16 SandForce 2500 series controllers and up to 16TB of storage capacity. In the video of the demo you can see above, OCZ had two RM1616 drives setup in one system running together in RAID 0 mode.

This outrageousness is able to produce almost 13GB/s (yes - we are talking 13,000MB/s) and close enough to 100,000 IOPS with random 128k reads. And with random 4k reads IOPS hit a crazy 1.4 million IOPS and that is being limited by an Intel X79 system. With a faster computer, OCZ reckons the solution can hit up to 2 million IOPS in the 4k read range.

CES 2012 - We had a little treat today while visiting GIGABITE. Colin Brix stopped by with a hand full of new motherboards right from the R&D labs. We can't say too much about them but you can start to see how these will eventually become XXX-UD3, XXX-UD5 and so on.

Being the storage editor here at TweakTown I started looking closer at the storage options on these next generation motherboards. SATA III all over the place, check! Intel motherboards today are limited to just two SATA III ports but that will be a thing of the past really soon. What is even more impressive though is that most of these boards include either an mSATA or mini PCIe slot for HDD cache capabilities. We still need to determine if these boards are using mSATA or mini PCIe but will be digging for the information this evening. With OCZ showing their new Kilimanjaro, a joint OCZ and Marvell controller that uses mini PCIe 3.0 we have to wonder if mSATA is going to be replaced for Intel SRT with mini PCIe 3.0.

I'll update this post when I know more.

OCZ Technology have been snapping up companies lately and today is no different with the acquisition of SANRAD Inc., an Israel-based provider of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware. The addition of intellectual property to OCZ's growing portfolio is expected to increase the adoption of PCIe SSD storage solutions specifically in VMware and Citrix Zen environments.

SANRAD currently sells its flash caching and virtualization software to OEMs such as NEXSAN and Brocade. The deal between OCZ and SANRAD is reportedly worth approximately $15 million, which consists of approx. 2.1 million shares of OCZ stock. From the press release:

SANRAD's VXL software delivers SANRAD's flash caching and virtualization technology for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen into server virtualization platforms. VXL software enables efficient dynamic distribution of host-based flash resources to guest virtual machines via its application optimized cache engine. The VXL SCSI connectivity enables support of most modern operating systems including all variants of Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux servers, in contrast to other caching solutions which require an installation of an agent or driver on each VM.

CES 2012 - It took me a couple of days to get the spelling right but now I'm ready to talk Kilimanjaro. OCZ was ready to talk Kilimanjaro today as well so.

Usually when we start talking about PCIe to flash controllers (as opposed to SATA to flash) we are talking about Fusion-io. Well there is a new game in town and this game is being played on the PCIe 3.0 field. The Kilimanjaro controllers I've seen so far were branded with both OCZ and Marvell names.

In the shot above we see the enterprise Z-Drive R5 which uses an 8x PCIe 3.0 slot, can push up to 3GB/s and churn around 1.8 million IOPS as long as your processor or processors can handle the load. OCZ it talking about capacities up to 12TB. There should be a few different models based on capacity and flash type, either MLC, eMLC or SLC. No word on pricing but I think Honda Civic range should sound about right.

CES 2012 - GIGABYTE just got done holding their "Meet the Executives" event at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas and one of the big points for staying ahead of their competition (ASUS) was to be first out with new technology.

One big new piece of technology coming out sometime later this year is Intel's Ivy Bridge platform. We are already bound by an NDA, so there is little we can say. A quick search on Google though shows things like native USB 3.0 and PCI Express 3.0 support. It will be a mid-range platform, you can think of it as an updated Z68 Express for upcoming Intel processors.

After giving attending media a rundown on GIGABYTE's aims for 2012, Colin Brix of GIGABYTE started bashing on the door of a nearby room in the hotel suite and asked if we could interrupt and show off the Taiwanese company's range of upcoming Ivy Bridge boards. We got see the full model range including the G1. Sniper 3, G1 Sniper 3 M3 (Micro-ATX), Z77X-UD5H, Z77X-UD3H and B75M-D3H.

First up - this does not surprise me. I've thought for a very long time that this happens, as with most things, right under our noses and no one even knows. I'm sure it goes much deeper than this, and we'll never find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes, but on with the news. A group of Indian hackers known as "The Lords of Dharmaraja" had posted documents that were pillaged during the hack of an Indian military network. It was removed, but thanks to Google Cache, you can see an image of it below, and if that's not good enough, click here to read it directly.

Slashdot had reported on it too, and unveils some more info:

The memo suggests that, "in exchange for the Indian market presence" mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as "RINOA") have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices. The Indian government then "utilized backdoors provided by RINOA" to intercept internal emails of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on 'the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship' between the U.S. and China.

CES 2012 - Newer Technology, part of the MAC Sales clan which includes OWC SSDs displayed a product I'm sure everyone reading this can appreciates. USB ports built into power sockets aren't anything new but all of them we've seen continually power the USB ports. This is a big waste of power since you don't have devices connected all of the time to the USB ports.

Phantom power draw is a big issue when you are paying the electric bill but Newer Technology has come up with a simple solution to turn the ports off when not in use. The USB ports provide up to 2 amps of power when the USB door opens. A micro switch gets activated and your iPad, iPod, cell phone or other device gets the juice.

The Newer Technology Power2U is currently available at MACSALES.com for less than 30 Dollars.