Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
At the iPad 3 next-gen iPad unveiling this week, Apple flashed up a slide claiming that the iPad 2 was 2x as fast as Nvidia's Tegra 3, while the new iPad would be 4x more powerful than Team Green's best tablet. Nvidia's response, delivered...
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T-Mobile's Chief Marketing Officer Cole Brodman has an interesting idea for revamping the mobile industry -- and it involves killing the subsidy plans that have driven smartphone adoption over the past five years. Brodman was participating in a round-table at the Geekwire tech summit; other...
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We've been looking forward to Windows 8's Consumer Preview for months. This, after all, is Microsoft's big chance to show what they've been working on and unveiling bit by bit for the past year; a chance to evaluate the sum total of changes and advancements baked into the next-generation...
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Intel launched its new Xeon E5 family today, based on the Sandy Bridge-EP processor. The new chips fill a gap in Santa Clara's product line; the company's Xeon offerings are now Sandy Bridge top-to-bottom. If you've followed the launch of...
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The audio industry has a tendency to make utterly ridiculous claims surrounding its products, as evidenced by the existence of $550 RCA cables and an $80 iPod cable guaranteed to leave your rig "exploding with sound." Despite this, the...
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Several months ago, AT&T notified customers that it would begin throttling network speeds for users who exceeded a certain threshold, with the definitive throttle point defined as an imprecise "the top 5% of mobile data users." The company has issued a statement clarifying this policy...
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Toshiba and Western Digital announced a deal today in which the two companies will essentially swap some manufacturing equipment with each other -- though which is getting the better deal is debateable. Western Digital has agreed to sell...
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AMD's CEO, Rory Read, has made no secret of his plans to take the company in new and different directions, but the company's server announcement today caught the market by surprise. Sunnyvale has purchased SeaMicro in a deal worth ~$330 million, the majority of which ($281M) will be paid in...
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There's been no new Star Trek TV series since Enterprise limped off screens in 2005, but the huge success of the 2009 Star Trek movie and the gradual growth of Blu-ray has caught CBS' attention (CBS acquired ownership of the Star Trek...
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Ever since Bulldozer's less-than-spectacular debut, enthusiasts and investors have watched to see if the company would follow up with faster chips that improved overall performance. That's finally started to happen; AMD announced two new...
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Intel launched its Medfield platform only six weeks ago, but the company is moving ahead with plans for additional processors based on the 32nm SoC. At Mobile World Congress today, Santa Clara announced plans for two additional system on a chip (SoC) designs to flesh out its product roadmap. The current Z2460 that we covered in January...
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Texas Instruments has posted a new video at YouTube that claims to show a dual-core OMAP5-based Cortex-A15 at 800MHz beating the snot out of an unspecified "commercially available" 1.3GHz quad-core device. Given that the only quad-core...
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When AMD held its Analyst Day a few weeks ago, the company focused on how it was fundamentally changing its approach to semiconductor research and product development. Years of attempting to compete with Intel drained company coffers and...
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The hard drive shortage, Oracle's assault on Itanium, and highly competitive scenarios in its ink-and-printer business combined to kneecap HP's earnings this last quarter. The company's net revenue fell seven percent, to $30 billion, while overall margins dropped to just 6.8 percent -- a...
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Intel made headlines last year when it announced that it would fab 22nm products for FPGA designer Achronix. This week, the company has unveiled an additional 22nm partner. Santa Clara will also be building parts for Tabula and will build...
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NAND Flash and SSDs have become the darling of enthusiasts in recent years, thanks to a potent combination of improved read/write performance, virtually no latency, and lower power consumption compared to hard drives. A new report from the University of California San Diego, however, casts...
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Intel's presentations at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this year are focused on one of the biggest problems facing modern CPU designers—how to improve power efficiency without sacrificing compute performance. Intel isn't just tackling this problem through...
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It's been a long time since we saw much innovation in thermal interface materials. Back ten years ago, when OEMs tended to use pads made from camel hair, companies like Arctic Silver burst on the scene with compounds that offered...
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Last week, Windows 8's head developer, Steven Sinofsky, published an 8,600-word blog post describing virtually every facet of Windows 8's development, including the hardware Microsoft has used for system testing and simulation. One of the...
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AMD has confirmed that Eric Demers, AMD's graphics Chief Technology Officer and head of the graphics business unit, has left the company to "pursue other opportunities." His job will be taken over by Mark Papermaster until a replacement is found. AMD notes in a prepared statement that it "remains fully committed to our critical graphics IP...
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A few months back, we examined the performance of four liquid coolers for the Sandy Bridge-E socket LGA 2011 platform: Corsair's H80 and H100, Maingear's Epic 180, and Intel's own reference cooler. Liquid coolers are popular with high-end OEMs and some enthusiasts, but they aren't cheap -- and...
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Apple recently took a PR hammering after the New York Times published a report claiming that labor conditions at the company's Chinese partner Foxconn continued to be poor--and that Apple knew about it and chose to do nothing. CEO Tim Cook...
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