Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
A leaked Intel roadmap for solid state technology suggests the company is pushing ahead with its plans to introduce new high-end drives based on cutting-edge NAND flash. It's significant for Intel to be adopting 20nm NAND in its highest-end data center products, because of the challenges smaller NAND nodes present in terms of data retention...
Read more...
There's a great deal riding on the launch of AMD's next-generation Kaveri APU. The new chip will be the first CPU to incorporate significant architectural changes to the Bulldozer CPU AMD launched two years ago and the first chip to use a graphics core derived from AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, which debuted on the desktop two...
Read more...
A new report from the Dutch news site NRC Handelsblad (NRC for short) is claiming that the NSA has used its own malware to infect and compromise some 50,000 additional networks. The revelation apparently comes courtesy of the treasure trove of documents Snowden released, though the NSA has refused to confirm or deny...
Read more...
With the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 both launched, the pressing question is: Which one should you pick? Comparing stats on the two is the typical way websites tackle this issue. I'm not going to. If you've read anything about the two devices, you already know the following: The PS4 is more powerful than the Xbox One...
Read more...
For decades, John Carmack has been an institution at id Software. The games id has built over the years may not have been huge innovators in terms of gameplay, but the engines behind those games have often pushed the envelope dramatically in terms of game detail levels and amazing environments. Now, he's moving on to...
Read more...
The PC market has tumbled throughout the past 18 months, but Intel believes the worst of the decline is over -- and that the tablet market is poised to boom. At its Analyst Day today, the company forecast stable PC sales through 2014, with gains in the market driven by an estimated 4x increase in tablet sales. And...
Read more...
When Intel debuted Haswell this year, it launched its first mobile processor with a massive 128MB L4 cache. Dubbed "Crystal Well," this on-package (not on-die) pool of memory wasn't just a graphics frame buffer, but a giant pool of RAM for the entire core to utilize. The performance impact from doing so is...
Read more...
The supercomputing conference SC13 kicks off this week, which means we'll be seeing a great deal of information related to multiple initiatives and launches from all the major players in High Performance Computing (HPC). Nvidia is kicking off their own event with the launch of a new GPU and a strategic partnership...
Read more...
Over the last few weeks, AMD has been on a massive PR and gaming blitz. The company has rebranded and re-priced its Radeon HD 7000 family as the R7/R9 series of cards and kicked off a new era at the high end with the Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X. Toss in the launch of two AMD-powered consoles and the discussion around...
Read more...
Bungie's Destiny is a new FPS/RPG hybrid set in the distant future, in the aftermath of an apocalyptic series of events that reshaped human civilization and destroyed an empire that spanned the solar system. The company has kept much of its development under wraps, sketching out tidbits of information on the various character classes and enemies,...
Read more...
One of the major planks of AMD's APU13 developer conference has been an in-depth discussion of its next-generation API, Mantle. Mantle, which first debuted at the company's Hawaii unveil in late September, has been billed as a high-performance alternative to DirectX 11. Prior to today, AMD has mostly discussed Mantle...
Read more...
At APU13 today, AMD announced a full suite of new products and development tools as part of its push to improve HSA development. One of the most significant announcements to come out the sessions today-- albeit in a tacit, indirect fashion, is that Kaveri is going to pack a full 512 GPU cores. There's not much...
Read more...
The Asus Transformer Book T100 packs an impressive list of features into a diminutive chassis and companion keyboard dock. After working with system, it's clear that Asus is hoping to capture lightning in a bottle, for the second time in a row. It's been six years since Asus launched the first Eee PC and kicked off a miniature revolution in...
Read more...
Apple's new A7 SoC that sits at the heart of the iPad Air and iPhone 5S is a fast chip. Benchmarks and analysis have shown that it picks up its additional performance over the older A6 thanks to a mixture of architectural tweaks and, in some cases, its new 64-bit architecture. On average, the gains are split about...
Read more...
The PS4 and Xbox One aren't out yet, but that's not stopping them from facing off in Battlefield 4, the next-generation, just-launched title from EA/DICE. We highlighted some of the visual differences we might expect between the console and PC versions of the game based on the performance of the in-game scaling...
Read more...
For the past few years, ARM has been steadily chipping away at rival PowerVR's domination of the Android and tablet GPU space. While Imagination Technologies dominated the early days of the industry, we've seen a number of competitors emerge since, thanks to aggressive products from Nvidia at the high end and...
Read more...
Making money while running a social media service is difficult. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have struggled to monetize their platforms on both desktop and mobile, while striking balances that don't royally tick off users with obnoxious advertising. But in a world where dubious advertising and branding...
Read more...
One of the greatest problems standing between companies like AMD and widespread adoption of the GPU as a mainstream accelerator is that it's extremely difficult to effectively leverage the GPU. Even after years of development poured into CUDA, OpenCL, and yes, HSA, the barriers between CPU and GPU have remained...
Read more...
Healthcare.gov, the new government website designed to help Americans find and apply for health insurance plans across 36 of the 50 states (14 states have their own health insurance exchanges) hasn't had a smooth rollout. Troubles have dogged the site from Day 1, and a recent discovery isn't going to help matters...
Read more...
AMD is holding an event / demo in Montreal today, offering to let anyone who likes come in, check out 4K gaming on their upcoming graphics card, and promising that the GPU will deliver performance over and above anything Nvidia's GTX 780 can offer. 4K gaming has increasingly become popular -- or at least, discussed...
Read more...
EA took the wraps off Battlefield 4 this past week, offering players a chance to experience a taste of what the game offers via an early beta. We've spent time with the game, tested its early performance, and come back to report the findings. AMD, of course, has been talking up the Battlefield 4 combination with a vengeance, highlighting the...
Read more...
Imagination Technologies has announced the first CPU based on its new version of the MIPS architecture. The new P5600 chip (codenamed Warrior) is a 32-bit CPU based on the MIPS Series 5 architecture and is designed to challenge companies like ARM in the embedded and mobile markets. Major features of the new chip...
Read more...
