Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Intel's been under some fire recently for issues affecting its top-end Core i9 processors from both the 13th- and 14th-generation Core families. Some of these chips, even when set to "BIOS defaults", will crash or otherwise fail in certain tests, most commonly Cinebench 2024 and especially, games using Unreal Engine...
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Frame generation isn't a solution to a stuttery, unsmooth experience. However, the ASUS ROG Ally comes with a 120-Hz Freesync display, and there are plenty of games that it can get to 60 FPS reliably, yet where it will struggle to hit the triple digits. If your favorite game falls into this category, you may be in...
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In case you haven't been paying attention, AMD's Zen 5 processors are expected to debut before long. In fact, many people are expecting AMD to announce the first wave, likely the "Granite Ridge" desktop processors sporting Zen 5 CPU cores, at Computex 2024. That's about six weeks from now, in the first week of...
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The next generation of AMD Radeon graphics cards might be quite a departure from its past products, if the rumors to date are accurate. The cards, which are likely to be part of the Radeon RX 8000 family, are expected to be based on the fifth revision of AMD's RDNA architecture, known as "RDNA 4" (with the fourth...
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We're big fans of the ASUS ROG Ally around here. It's not only one of the best-performing gaming handhelds in existence currently, but it's also one of only a very select few (including the Ayaneo KUN but excluding the Legion Go and Steam Deck OLED) to have a variable-refresh-rate display. That means that the...
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There's no two ways about it—AMD's Ryzen 8040 mobile CPU family and its Ryzen 8000G desktop CPU family are the exact same silicon: Hawk Point, the evolution of Phoenix featuring 60% better NPU performance. AMD takes the same chip, attaches it to either an LGA or BGA interposer depending on whether it's destined for...
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HighPoint is a name that will need no introduction to the people that will probably be interested in these products. Distinct from the budget firearms manufacturer with a similar name, HighPoint is a company who has been selling storage controllers since the 20th century. The latest products from HighPoint are...
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Hardware enthusiasts who have been around the block a few times will recall some concern over the reliability of chips based on Intel's 14nm FinFET fabrication process. With the fully-integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) being manufactured at such a tiny feature size, overclockers doing even minor overvolts might be...
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The company formerly known as Facebook made a couple of big announcements yesterday in cooperation with Intel, who may be providing some of the potent AI hardware to power Meta's new AI products. The big new things to know about are the Llama 3 AI model and Meta's new AI assistant, simply called "Meta AI".
Meta's...
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If you weren't there in the late 90s, it is very difficult to explain the particular cachet that "3dfx Voodoo" has among a certain generation of PC gaming enthusiast. 3dfx cards never had the best image quality, they rarely actually had the absolute best performance, and for the first two generations, the VGA...
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If you're a budding young tech enthusiast or simply a casual PC purchaser, you may have seen "cache" listed in the specifications for this or that processor and wondered what exactly that is. It's been a major marketing point for CPUs for decades, and recently it has even become a matter of discussion for...
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There can't really be any doubt at this point: AI is going to change all of our lives, and there's no going back from here. Still, there's quite a bit of debate over exactly how it's going to happen. If you listen to hardware vendors like AMD and Intel, they'll tell you that you absolutely need to upgrade your...
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Final Fantasy XIV Online is one of very few true success stories in the MMORPG space, and it comes as all the more of a surprise given the rocky launch of the title. Your author is one of many unfortunate fans of the previous Final Fantasy MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI Online, who pre-ordered the original release of Final...
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When OpenAI's GPT-4 hit the internet, it was pretty much the best large language model (LLM) around. Many of OpenAI's competitors have long since surpassed the original GPT-4 on various metrics, from Claude's enormous context window to Gemini 1.5's excellent performance with complex multi-modal datasets. Of course...
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We didn't cover it, but recently there was a story about how Intel's Raptor Lake -K processors—that's the overclockable members of the 13th- and 14th-generation Core family—were seeing extremely high return rates in certain circumstances, particularly in Korea. The problem seems to be that these CPUs are identified as...
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We were on-site at Intel's Vision 2024 earlier this week, and one of the coolest things that we got to see in person were some live AI demonstrations performed by Intel. These weren't restricted to just high-end server hardware, either—although Intel's folks were proud to show those off, too. If you'd like, you can...
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We were pleasantly surprised when AMD revealed that its current-generation Phoenix and Hawk Point processors would use its latest-generation RDNA 3 graphics architecture for their integrated graphics processors (IGPs.) That's because, historically, APUs have lagged behind discrete GPUs in terms of architecture. We may hit a sticking point
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At Intel Vision 2024, CEO Pat Gelsinger got up on stage to tell the live audience both in Phoenix and on the internet about Intel's vision for its role in the AI-powered future. He talked about many things, including the upcoming Gaudi 3 AI accelerators as well as revealing the name of the next-generation Xeon CPUs:...
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Tech companies have unilaterally decided that generative AI is the next big thing, and vendors at every level of the supply chain are pouring billions of dollars into developing AI hardware and software. That obviously includes Intel, whose presentation today at its Intel Vision 2024 event was heavily focused on AI...
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For quite some time, Apple's App Store guidelines have banned applications from running software that's not "embedded in the binary." In other words, an app that loads another app is a no-go. This, obviously, had the knock-on effect of banning all emulators from the App Store because that's exactly what they are: an...
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If you needed any further confirmation that AMD's "Granite Ridge" desktop processors sporting the Zen 5 architecture were on their way before long, the latest piece of evidence is an update for the popular MC Extractor binary microcode extraction tool. This update adds support for two different AMD CPU identification...
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Much has been written about the performance of Arm-based processors exceeding that of x86-64 CPUs, but depending on your perspective, that fully hasn't come to pass. There are Apple's M-series processors that do perform competitively in many tasks, along with an array of data center-focused products that emphasize...
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