Computer Systems News - Page 9

Zotac will be on hand at Computex 2023, showcasing several new products, with one of the highlights being a range of new ZBOX Mini PC products. As per the headline, one of these is set to be tiny - with the ZBOX PI430AJ with AirJet being hailed as the world's first solid state active-cooled Mini PC.

AirJet is a new revolutionary bit of technology from Frore System, with Zotac noting that in the ZBOX PI430AJ, two AirJet Minis can remove a significant amount of heat thanks to their rapid airflow. Small and silent, users can boost performance with increased thermal limits to make the most out of the internal hardware. And all without increasing the unit's overall size - which, per the imagery, looks like a small external USB drive.

Hardware-wise, it features an Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, and M.2 SSD storage in a pocket-sized PC.

Anyone worrying that Apple is going to kill the Mac Studio powerhouse desktop machine after just one release looks to have been doing so prematurely. A new report claims that Apple is not just working on refreshing the product, but it's also said to have two of the things in the works.

That means that Apple could be about to update the Mac Studio for the very first time, although details on what that will entail have so far been very hard to come by. We don't even know for sure when either of the two Mac Studios will arrive, but the fact that they're even being discussed is good news for many.

The Mac Studio first debuted a little over a year ago in 2022 and can be configured with a maximum M1 Ultra chip. However, with Apple thought to be keen to ship its first Apple silicon Mac Pro, it was worried that the Mac Studio wasn't long for this world. The Mac studio was considered to be something of a stop-gap solution for Apple, allowing it to offer something for high-end power-hungry users who didn't want to wait for that Mac Pro to ship.

ChatGPT can be put to a lot of uses, as we've seen - such as its recent introduction to gaming chat platform Discord - and the latest one is the AI being recruited to help consumers build a PC over at major US retailer Newegg.

In fact, Newegg is putting the AI's skills to use for a raft of things across the retailer's site, but primarily to beef up the PC Builder tool, which is now labeled as 'Build with AI' - and a clear caveat that this is still a beta experience.

As you might expect, if you want to put together a PC, ChatGPT will help provide recommendations for various components that will go together well, or fit a certain budget.

The new ASRock DeskMini 4205 might be a Mini PC designed for commercial use thanks to its all-in-one fanless and efficient design powered by the Intel Celeron Processor 4205U. Still, the optional RGB add-ons make it a great home theatre option.

Though on that front, this Mini PC is limited to DisplayPort 1.2, but that's still capable of 4K 120 Hz with 10-bit color.

The ASRock DeskMini 4205 features dual LAN ports, support for three displays, and four bits of storage - two M.2 2280 PCIe slots and two 2.5" SATA 6Gbps. Three simultaneous displays, as per ASRock, make it a great fit for "digital signage and advertising."

Aston Martin is renowned for creating high-performance automobiles with a focus on style and luxury - and the brand has been the vehicle of choice for fictional spy James Bond for decades. Lenovo, which has been in the PC game for quite a while, creating products for enthusiasts, everyday consumers, and businesses for years, has partnered with Aston Martin for its new range of ThinkStation PX, P7, and P5 workstations.

These high-powered machines are designed for high-compute workloads, equipped with up to 120-core Intel Xeon processors, NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs, and beefy 1850W PSUs.

So instead of pushing Call of Duty to triple-digit frame rates in native 4K, they're more likely to be used for machine learning, scientific research, engineering, virtual production, and other applications where workstations sit at the core of cutting-edge computing.

After months and months of hearing nothing about a new 24-inch iMac to replace the 2021 M1 model, a new report claims that Apple will now refresh it sooner rather than later.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, writing as part of the weekly Power On newsletter, says that Apple is hard at work getting an M3 version of the colorful computer ready for primetime. And the big release could be sooner than we had previously expected.

Gurman says that Apple is now testing an updated version of the current M1 iMac that looks the same and comes in the same colors. That also means that it will come in the same 24-inches screen size, too.

If you've been saving your pennies and waiting for Apple to update the current 24-inch M1 iMac to the newer, beefier M2, you're going to be in for a long wait. Because it isn't happening.

That's according to one well-connected reporter who says that Apple will instead choose to skip the model entirely, launching an updated M3 iMac towards the end of 2022. That means that the current model will have been on the market for well over two years before it gets its replacement.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is the man with the plan, reporting via his Power On newsletter that Apple doesn't look set to give buyers anything to spend their money on any time soon.

Dell Technologies Inc. is set to cut 6,650 jobs as the demand for PCs drops dramatically after a pandemic-era boom that saw an influx of people and businesses buying hardware. According to reports, the company's sales in Q4 2022 saw a massive 37% decline compared to the same period in 2021.

The bulk of Dell's revenue comes from PC sales, over 50%, and these job cuts represent around 5% of the company's global workforce. For PC gaming hardware, this includes Dell's Alienware brand too, which covers PCs designed and explicitly marketed for high-end gaming.

Ahead of the job cut announcement, Dell had already put a hiring freeze in place in addition to other cost-cutting measures. It wasn't enough. "We've navigated economic downturns before, and we've emerged stronger," Dell Co-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke Clarke wrote in a memo sent to employees obtained by Bloomberg. "We will be ready when the market rebounds." Dell is positioning the cuts as critical for the company's long-term health.

The Apple Lisa home computer first hit the scene forty years ago, and even though it launched for USD 9995 in 1983, which works out to be over 30K with inflation, it brought several ground-breaking additions to the world of PCs. It introduced the idea of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to interact with a desktop home computer, plus a crazy new concept called a computer mouse.

Thanks to the Computer History Museum (CHM), you can grab the complete source code for the Apple Lisa, which includes system and applications software. As part of the announcement, the CHM mentions one of computing history's most talked about stories. That time Steve Jobs and Apple visited Xerox and saw it was sitting on a potential killer feature in the form of a GUI. And so they "borrowed" the idea for the Apple Lisa.

The simple idea of windows for different applications, folders, and point-and-click navigation was something that the Apple Lisa brought to the masses. And it did all of that with only 1MB of RAM. That's not a typo; we're talking 1 Megabyte of memory - which was considered huge at the time. It also featured a 32-bit Motorola 68000 processor and a 364 x 720 resolution bitmap display.

Although worldwide PC shipments of 65.3 million units in Q4 2022 sound like a lot, it's a 28.5% decrease compared to Q4 2021. The data comes courtesy of Gartner, Inc, with economic uncertainty as one of the underlying factors.

Undoubtedly, the last couple of years have been strange for PC hardware, from hardware shortages to a pandemic to a substantial increase in people working from home. Gartner notes that the high demand and low supply issues of 2021 did a complete 180 to turn into an excess of supply once the demand slowed down.

"The anticipation of a global recession, increased inflation, and higher interest rates have had a major impact on PC demand," said Mikako Kitagawa at Gartner. "Since many consumers already have relatively new PCs that were purchased during the pandemic, a lack of affordability is superseding any motivation to buy, causing consumer PC demand to drop to its lowest level in years."