Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and its Taiwan rival Acer (TPE: 2353) finished its fiscal year of 2014 with similar number of shipments for laptops, TrendForce said in its latest research.

Last year, Apple posted a spectacular 46.4% annual growth in laptop shipments, owing to its price-lowering strategy for its MacBook laptops, which resulted in a takeover of the mid-range and premium market segments, TrendForce said.

The high growth boosted Apple’s global market share to 9.3% in 2014, vaulting the company into sixth place in the global rankings, one spot behind Acer, which had a 10% market share.

Acer depended on its remarkable performance of its Chromebook laptops to maintain its shipment volume in the market. Although there was no significant rise in Acer’s total shipments, the company managed to slow its slide, dropping only one place in the global rankings last year, the research firm said.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Asus (TPE: 2357) expanded its global market share to 11%, leaping into fourth place in the rankings.

Its performance was attributed mainly to the success of its 10.1-inch, 2-in-1 model T100 laptop, which accounted for over 10% of the company’s total shipments in 2014.

Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) remained the lead in the 2014 global laptop market with a 20.1% share, followed by Lenovo (HKG: 0992) with a 17.5% share, and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) with 12.3%.

TrendForce said that global notebook shipments in 2014 totaled 175.5 million units, up by an annual 3.6%, boosted by the replacement of the Windows XP operating system and the promotion of low-priced notebooks by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

“In 2015, the laptop market will only be able to maintain the same overall shipment level as last year, and the growth of some brands will come at the expense of others,” said Caroline Chen (陳虹燕), assistant research manager for TrendForce’s WitsView.

She forecasted that HP and its major rival Lenovo will continue to hold the top two spots this year, while the competition will remain tight between the third and the sixth places.

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Dell launched the 2015 version of the XPS 13, which comes with several improvements from last year’s model. The notebook now comes with an edge to edge display, is overall thinner and has subtle design changes that makes it one of the best notebooks to have come out of Dell in a long time.

The XPS 13 checks a lot of boxes for those looking for a high-end Windows-based Ultrabook: the 13.3-inch touchscreen is offered in a QHD+ resolution (3200 x 1800), the keyboard is backlit, the design features aluminum in abundance (as well as carbon fibre), and the whole thing is powered by Intel’s latest fifth-generation processors. The icing on the cake is the pricing, which starts at just $800.

You also get a 15-hour battery life on the full-HD variant, with the QHD+ panel offering a nine-hour battery life on a full charge. The borderless edge to edge screen is a sight to behold, with Dell managing to fit a 13.3-inch display into the chassis of a 11-inch notebook. The weight has also been reduced, and is at barely over a kilogram. The XPS 13 still has a full chiclet keyboard, but the trackpad is now an all-glass precision affair that allows you to undertake Windows 8.1 gestures with ease.

The $800 variant of the XPS 13 will come with a full-HD screen, Intel Core i3, 4 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD, Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 4.0, two USB 3.0 ports, mini DisplayPort as well as an SD card slot. You can get a Core i5 for $900, and a Core i7 variant with 8 GB RAM for $1,000.

The QHD+ version starts from $1,300, with the highest configured model with Intel Core i7, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD retailing for $1,900.

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Over the weekend, Dell started selling the Alienware Alpha, a mini-PC that decidedly looks like a console. It comes with a similar style as the Alienware-branded Steam Machine that is scheduled to launch next year, but features Windows 8.1 with a custom UI that is designed to have a console-like feel to it.

Dubbed Alpha-UI, the interface allows you to navigate using the bundled Xbox 360 controller. The custom interface is loaded by default in what Dell is calling a Console Mode, but there is also a full-fledged desktop mode if you’re more comfortable with a traditional layout. The desktop is disabled until you plug in a mouse and keyboard. There’s Steam Big Picture mode and compatibility with over 3,000 titles on the Steam store.

Although building your own rig has gotten significantly easier over the years, there are several users that want the convenience of a console combined with the prowess of a full-fledged gamin rig. This is the market Dell is looking to target with the Alpha. That being said, the hardware that is being offered leaves a lot to be desired for.

Hardware configurations for the Alienware Alpha start from $549, which includes a 2.9 GHz dual-core Intel Core i3-4130T CPU, 500 GB mechanical hard drive, 4 GB DDR3L RAM clocked at 1600 MHz and a 2 GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M GPU. Not the fastest machine in the world, but it is targeted at gamers looking to play recent titles at decent frame rates without breaking the bank.

There are configurations that offer better CPUs and more memory, with the $899 version giving you a 3 GHz Intel Core i7-4765T CPU, 8 GB DDR3L RAM (1600 MHz), 2 TB mechanical hard drive and the GeForce GTX 860M. 

The hardware on offer sounds decent, but when you look at the system requirements of games like Assassin’s Creed Unity, it becomes clear that you would need a configuration that costs at least as much as $799 to be able to play the title. Seeing as how current-gen consoles like the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 cost half as much, for now, you’re better off with a console until a better alternative comes along.

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Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) may have been the first vendor with a 5K display out, but Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) is hot on its heels with its own 5K display that’s set to launch in December.

But according to a report by TFT Central, Dell will not be launching the display at the original $2499. Instead, according to the publication’s sources, it will be launching the screen at $2000.

The 27-inch display has a resolution of 5120 x 2880 pixels, a PPI of 218, 1000:1 contrast ratio, viewing angles of 178°/178°, a maximum brightness of 350 cd/m², and a response time of 8ms.

Dell has not yet given its monitor an exact release date, only promising it for December.

If Dell’s 5K monitor is commercially successful, it will invite more vendors to also develop 5K monitors to bring prices across the board down. Of course the actual market for 5K displays is rather nice; photo and video editors as well as designers will be the primary audience. An ecosystem of content at 5K resolution is still a long way away so the mainstream appeal for these displays is rather niche. That being said, 4K was still a highly niche segment of the market a year ago. Now, with investment from content producers it’s finally becoming mainstream.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has launched its latest Tesla CUDA compute card, the Tesla K80 today at Supercomputing 2014 (SC14) in New Orleans.

This follows Nvidia’s announcement last week that it had been awarded a $325 million Department of Energy grant with IBM to help build two 100 Petaflops+ machines for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Those supercomputers are expected to be built in 2017 and will use Nvidia’s yet-t0-be-built Volta GPU which comes after Pascal which comes after Maxwell, which is what Nvidia is currently using in their consumer graphics cards, but hasn’t quite started to use in professional just yet. So, until then, people looking for the fastest compute cards are going to want to look at Nvidia’s new Tesla K80.

Nvidia’s new Tesla K80 dual GPU compute card is an interesting product because it once again brings back Nvidia’s dual GPU Tesla products and increases the amount of compute you can squeeze onto a single card. Logically, you would think that the K80 would naturally be two K40’s smacked together into a single card, but that’s not accurate. In order to build the K80, Nvidia actually went with GPUs with similar shader core counts as the Tesla K20, but what’s most important is that they actually did double the onboard memory of the K80 from the K40 to 24 GB of GDDR5. Whenever we talk to anyone looking to do large simulations or scenes, their number one complaint is that they can never have too much VRAM and Nvidia appears to be listening to them by packing a whopping 24 GB of GDDR5 per card or 12GB of GDDR5 per GPU.

According to Nvidia’s specifications for the Tesla K80, it has 4992 shader cores (double that of the K20) which turns out to slightly less than double that of the K40, this is because Nvidia is using two GK-210 GPUs rather than the K40’s GK-110B. However, if you look at Nvidia’s performance claims, they state that the Tesla K80 is capable of 8.74 teraflops single-precision and 2.91 teraflops double-precision. This is more than double that of the K40 GPU which it seeks to replace and almost double that of the K10, Nvidia’s first dual GPU Tesla card. That’s the fantastic thing about Nvidia’s own Tesla cards, the K80 is a Kepler based dual GPU card while the K10 is also a Kepler based dual GPU card and the performance difference is nearly double simply by going from the GK-104 GPU design to the GK-110 (full-blown) Kepler GPU design. The Tesla’s K80 two GK210 GPUs each have 13 SMs that are clocked at 562 Mhz base, 875 Mhz boost thanks to Nvidia’s new GPU boosting features for this Tesla card, a Tesla first and something that came over from the consumer cards. Either way, its a great achievement and this is Nvidia’s next step before introducing a Maxwell-based Tesla compute card.

Nvidia’s Tesla K80 Compute Card – Note, no display out since this is a compute card

Also, if you look at the double-precision performance, it is more than 30 times faster than the original dual Kepler GPU card, the K10 and more than twice as fast as the K40 which means that Nvidia makes up for the lack of shader cores somewhere else. One of those places is in the card’s memory bandwidth which is pumped up to a whopping 480 GB/s which pretty much removes memory bandwidth as a bottleneck in most applications. Unfortunately, even though this card does have double the GPUs and double the memory of the K40, it doesn’t quite have double the memory bandwidth, which once again points to a likelihood of lower memory clock speeds than the K40. If one were to simply double the K40’s memory bandwidth, you would be looking at 566 GB/s, not the current 480 GB/s on the K80, but even so, this pretty much dwarfs anything on the market by over 150 GB/s anyways.

That card would be AMD’s own FirePro W9100, which has been very competitive with Nvidia’s K40 and offers 2,816 stream processors, 16GB GDDR5 memory and 320 GB/s memory bandwidth. This comes out to a peak performance of 5.24 teraflops peak single-precision floating-point performance and 2.62 teraflops peak dual-precision floating-point performance, meaning that now the ball is back in AMD’s court with today’s announcement.

In fact, Nvidia’s Tesla compute cards are also enabling some of the most recent scientific breakthroughs like the ongoing Rosetta mission that the ESA has embarked upon, which most recently landed a probe on a comet. “The Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators are up to 10 times faster than CPUs when enabling scientific breakthroughs in some of our key applications, and provide a low energy footprint,” said Wolfgang Nagel, director of the Center for Information Services and HPC at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. “Our researchers use the available GPU resources on the Taurus supercomputer extensively to enable a more refined cancer therapy, understand cells by watching them live, and study asteroids as part of ESA’s Rosetta mission.”

There is currently no pricing information available for the K80 based on the information we were given by Nvidia, however you can probably ballpark that it will cost upwards of $5000 since the K40 originally sold for that price but has since been discounted down to $3,000 very likely in anticipation of today’s announcement. In terms of availability, Nvidia Tesla K80 dual-GPU compute cards will be available from a variety of server manufacturers, including ASUS, Bull, Cirrascale, Cray, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Inspur, Penguin, Quanta, Sugon, Supermicro and Tyan, as well as from NVIDIA reseller partners.

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Michael Dell kicked off the Dell World conference by telling channel partners and the press in attendance that his company was “stronger” as a private entity. According to one report, taking the company private also provided a nearly triple-digit return on investment for Dell and his investment partners.

According to a report by Bloomberg, citing people with knowledge of the matter, Dell and Silver Lake Asset Management have made a return of approximately 90% on their initial investment of $24.9 billion. Personally, Dell put in $4.2 billion of his own money while Silver Lake invested $1.4 billion. The rest came from company cash. The value of the equity Dell and Silver Lake hold is now reportedly $10.8 billion — a big return on the $5.6 billion the two put in.

Partially this massive return is based on sheer luck. Dell’s turnaround coincided with a resurgence of the PC market as a whole. PC sales are up year-over-year and Dell has used this to increase its market share to 13.3% from the 11.9% it was a year ago.

However, the deal to go private almost never happened. Activist investor Carl Ichan said what Dell and Silver Lake offered to investors was far too low and threatened to launch a lawsuit to block the deal from going through.

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Dell World, Dell’s annual conference for its partners and customers, kicked off in Austin Tuesday with a keynote from the company’s CEO. The theme: going private was the right decision.

As Dell’s rivals Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) spin off their less profitable arms, or sell divisions to rivals, Dell told the crowd at Dell World that going private gave his company stability, and time to invest in new products and ventures.

“We don’t have that 90-day shot clock that [others] do,” Dell said on stage, explaining that his company can now focus “beyond the next quarter, the next year or the next shareholder activist.”

“We feel we are incredibly well positioned with some of the distraction and turmoil that is out there,” he continued.

While Dell no longer has to disclose its financials as it’s a privately held company, its CEO said on stage that Dell is still growing thanks to its solid fundamentals.

“We are seeing year-over-year growth in every region of the world,” Dell said, telling the crowd that Dell’s PC shipments in the US have grown 20 percent quarter-over-quarter citing IDC data.

Going back to the topic of new investments, Dell said that his company will soon launch a converged infrastructure system called PowerEdge FX that leverages servers, network and storage in the data center. Dell didn’t give too many details, promising that for later during the conference.

Dell said that this year’s Dell World conference will focus on four themes: transform, connect, inform and protect.

Dell World continues Wednesday in Austin.

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AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced late yesterday that Forrest Norrod, formerly Dell’s VP & GM for Server Platforms would be joining the company to take Lisa Su’s position which she had left vacant after ascending to the position of CEO. That puts him in charge of AMD’s entire Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom business unit (EESC) as well as managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering, and sales for AMD’s EESC business.

Forrest Norrod comes from over 10 years of working at Dell and having valuable enterprise and server experience, where AMD needs it most. What will be interesting to see is how he will help shape AMD’s future enterprise and server businesses in ways that will set them up for success, because as it stands right now they are in an awful place in terms of server market share and overall sales. Thankfully for Norrod, AMD is already building ARM server chips and shipping them to customers and is working on new ARM and x86 core IP as well, which should give him and his team even more ammunition, come 2016.

Forrest Norrod – AMD

The truth is that Norrod has a long road ahead of him and there’s no doubt that he’s a qualified person for the job, it also may result in AMD having a closer relationship with Dell and getting more AMD products inside of Dell’s own servers.

After all, AMD currently has quite a good relationship with HP, but that hasn’t been enough to get them serious amounts of enterprise design wins to the point where they could actually gain some market share. It is going to be a very big uphill climb, but it really seems like Su has picked the right man for the job and now we just have to see where it will go from here.

“Forrest is an industry veteran whose strong track record of establishing and growing businesses strengthens our leadership team. Forrest’s unique combination of engineering,” Su said in a press release about the new hire. “Business management and technical expertise at both the chip and system level make him ideally suited to lead AMD into an expanded set of markets where our differentiated technology assets provide a competitive advantage.”

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According to Gartner’s latest report on the PC market shipments and marketshare, the company is reporting that overall global PC shipments shrunk 0.5% year over year. However, if you look at the US and EMEA figures, you see that the US grew by a sizable 4.2% and Europe more than doubled that by growing a hefty 9.6%.

What this means is that even though the US and Europe, which are considered developed markets, saw significant growth, the losses in Asia and other global markets (Latin America and Africa) ate up all of those growths in shipments. Also, Gartner’s data does not include Chromebooks or non-x86 tablet PCs, which may even skew the US and EU PC market figures downward where we’re seeing a huge resurgence of Chromebooks.

As you can tell from Gartner’s PC Market table for the entire global market, Lenovo continues to see incredibly strong growth year over year mostly at the cost of ‘other’ PC market vendors who saw their shipments decreasee 15.5%. The reality is that the global PC market last quarter was effectively flat when compared to last year since 0.5% is almost within their margin of error. As such, any gains are very likely at the cost of some other competitor.

In the US, HP still continues to be the number one vendor in the PC market even though Dell seems to be catching up to them, showing the largest growth, a whopping 18.4% year over year. Apple also saw fairly good growth, meaning that their overall marketshare of the US PC market continues to grow. Toshiba was actually the only major vendor to see a significant decrease in shipments, which is very likely due to the fact that the company’s overall product line in the US is fairly weak. Globally, Toshiba is not even ranked top 5.

Europe is a fantastic story for the PC market and overall the top four vendors saw fantastic growth with HP seeing 14% growth while Lenovo and Acer both saw over 40% growth year over year. Even ASUS saw over 33% growth in the third quarter compared to last year, which bodes really well for the Asian manufacturers. In fact, the companies’ contraction in Asia is very likely offset by growth in Europe where ASPs are generally higher.

Overall, it appears as though the PC market is nowhere near finished and that tablets are not having the impact that many would have you believe. The developed markets have had their time with tablets and the saturation of tablets has pretty much reached its peak. The PC Market in Asia and other markets is either struggling due to reduced overall economic demand (like in China) or due to tablets still not having reached saturation levels that they have in the developed markets. If you consider that the developed markets are generally more profitable for most PC manufacturers (regardless of where they’re from) then most PC manufacturers will consider the third quarter a good one that could be better.

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According to Glenn Greenwald, who seemingly quotes himself in his own titles, the NSA has routinely been intercepting US-based networking hardware bound for countries abroad. While Glenn Greenwald doesn’t specifically implicate any networking companies, it would be safe to assume that companies like Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Dell, HP and many more. This is in the face of the fact that the US government had been criticizing the use of Huawei networking hardware due to the beliefs that the Chinese would be presenting a security risk to the US. They essentially claimed that Huawei was bugging their networking equipment for the Chinese government and that their routers weren’t safe, meanwhile the NSA was doing exactly what the US was accusing the Chinese of doing.

Glenn Greenwald states that this is among many other revelations in his new book due out tomorrow, called No Place to Hide which chronicles Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. It is a bit curious that he would release such news from Edward Snowden a day before his book’s release and alluding to the fact that there would be more details buried within his book. A lot of people are going to look at this as an obvious money grab and are going to question his motives and whether he’s doing all of this to personally enrich himself. While he doesn’t address this in his interview with GQ directly, he clearly has a lot to say about a multitude of topics, including Edward Snowden himself. This is in addition to having left The Guardian, the publication that had originally helped him run all of the Snowden documents and gain worldwide attention to the US’ vast surveillance apparatus to start The Intercept.

So, How does the NSA do it? Well, according to a 2010 NSA document obtained by Glenn Greenwald, they would receive (intercept) routers, servers and other computer networking devices planned on being exported from the US before they were to be delivered to their final international destination. The NSA’s secret division would then implant backdoor surveillance tools and repackage the hardware with a factory seal and send them on their way. The NSA would then be able to gain access to those companies’ networks and all of their users and possibly data through these backdoors. He even states that the NSA document gleefully states that, “SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!),” clearly alluding to their physical tampering with hardware. Eventually, the bugged hardware connects back to the NSA and provides them with the data they want. The report continues, “In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network.”

Clearly, the NSA has a very detailed and well-established structure for these activities and likely has been doing so for quite some time. The NSA are probably much more careful about how they do things nowadays with all of the attention drawn to them because of the Snowden disclosures, but it would be foolish to assume they’ve stopped.

If you’re interested in getting Glenn Greenwald’s book, I recommend you head over here.

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So, remember when TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) built the Stampede supercomputer using VERY preferred pricing from Intel for using Intel Xeon Phi cards back in 2012? Well, that Stampede supercomputer in conjunction with the Lonestar Supercomputer at TACC are responsible for some pretty interesting research. The TACC at the University of Texas, Austin houses many supercomputers, but the two that were utilized for this project were the Stampede and Lonestar. The team of scientists from Houston’s Methodist Research Institute (HMRI) found that Alzheimer’s disease and cancer share a pathway in gene transcription, a fundamental process of cell production and growth. They published their findings in the December 2013’th issue of the open access journal Scientific Reports by the Nature Publishing Group.

The Stampede supercomputer, Image Credit: TACC

They used the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers at TACC to analyze and compare data collected from thousands of genes in order to narrow their search for a common signaling pathway between the two diseases. The two systems are part of TACC’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, dubbed XSEDE, which is a single virtual system that scientists use to share computing resources and much more. The research was made possible thanks to a donation from the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation which has donated tens of millions of dollars to education, health and environmental research. This includes the establishment of BRAIN center at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, which was involved with the discovery of this link between cancer and Alzheimer’s. The TT and WF Chao foundation were primarily funded by Ting Tsung Chao’s cration of Westlake Chemical [NYSE:WLK] which has revenues exceeding $3.8 billion annually and a market cap of nearly $9 billion. Family members of the Chao family are worth billions of dollars since Ting Tsung’s passing in 2008. Even so, the foundation continues to be funded by the family’s wealth and continues to do good for mankind. The research was also supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, which currently only has a $30 billion budget per year as part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Lonestar supercomputer, Image Credit: TACC

Stephen Wong, a bioengineer and medical researcher at Houston’s Methodist Research Institute said that his study was able to find a new link between Alzheimer’s disease and glioblastoma multiform, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. He said, “This is the first time people have found that at the molecular mechanism level there are linkages between the two diseases.” 

These findings contrast a 2013 study of public health in Italy and a 2012 study of public health in Taiwan that showed an inverse association between Alzheimer’s disease with cancer, making those findings possibly less relevant. Wong said, “No one understands why this link is there, in a biological sense. And that’s the reason we did this study. I think we are among the first to study it this way. Once you identify the mechanism, the particular pathway, we can use that information to design a new therapeutic strategy.”

More about these groudbreaking scientific research can be found on the TACC’s website that has a much more detailed explanation of how their research methodology was assisted by the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers at the TACC.

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Netebook with Ubuntu linux for 199 greenbacks - is this impressive or not?

After seeing this, there is nothing else to say but – computers just became an everyday thing even for non-tech savvy consumers.

There is no reason why grandpa or grandma should not have something as cheap as this, and staying in touch could be much cheaper than it used to… kudos to Dell.

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Is it possible that my 2408WFP is already out-dated?

What makes this very interesting is the explanation what Splendid video engine actually is. It is obvious that Splendid is a name for custom design C-Media chips that enhance the sound (on Xonar cards) and video (on selected graphics cards) quality. In case of displays, “Splendid Video Intelligence Technology” is a name for color engine that analyzes and modifies the video playback. There are five presets that should enhance your experience, but one of most important features to us is the fact that this technology clears distortion when playing 4:3 content on these 16:10 screens.
Out of launched displays, we like VK266H the most. This display comes with rotatable 2.0 MPixel camera and those mics that enable seamless internet communication. One of things that pissed me the most was the fact that if you used video conferencing, your notebook would be better equipped than the desktop. I had numerous video conferences where my notebook camera was capturing my face while I watched at 24″ screen, and that just looked odd.
If you haven’t tried working on 24 or 26″ screens, I would personally recommend that you switch from limits of 4:3/5:4. Could any of these four monitors be your ideal candidate? Only time will tell.

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Label that nobody reads...

Intrigued by this one, we’ve called our friends and visited them and saw that many of computers that have Seagate drives on – have the SATA-I jumper on. Seeing that jumper on in Dell OptiPlex 700 series machines only goes to show that even large OEM vendors don’t care about user experience.
We learned from one Seagate representative in EMEA region that the company made the call to disable SATA-II by default, in order to enhance the compatibility with older motherboards. OEM vendors can ask for delivery of the hard drive with SATA 3.0 Gbps mode turned on, but so far, nobody asked for it. If you jump the gun from WD or Samsung to Seagate, make sure that you pull one small jumper from behind the drive… that jumper locks the drive to SATA-I mode and that’s it.

White jumper that limits the performance of your drive...by default.

I took several 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 and did a quick test in HDtach 3.0. It turns out that every hard drive experienced a major improvement in burst performance. Read speeds were positively affected as well.

This is performance of 250GB Barracuda 7200.10 by default (jumper on)...

...and this is what you get with the jumper removed. This is the same drive, same SATA cable, same power cable.

Given these numbers, I would advise that if you have a Seagate drive, check to see if your drive has SATA-I jumper on. If the jumper is there, remove it and experience the full speed of these silent drives.

Of course, if you have a motherboard with SATA 3.0 Gbps controller.

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