Asustek Computer unveiled its first supercomputer on Monday, the desktop computer-sized ESC 1000, which uses Nvidia graphics processors to attain speeds up to 1.1 teraflops.

One teraflop is one trillion flops (floating point operations per second), a measure of computing speed. Computers able to perform at such high speeds can be used in a variety of ways, including scientific research, image manipulation, engineering modeling or for medical purposes.

Boffins claim that there is life in the HDD technology yet with the costs falling and drive sizes increasing. A new study claims that by 2020, hard disk drives will likely be less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the competing technologies. The study gives the thumbs down to boffins who are developing nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies, saying it is unlikely to replace HDDs within the next decade.

Apple is a company that likes to control the experience of its customers. It likes to craft its products from top to bottom, both in hardware and software.

Ever since Apple went with Intel processors, the hardware differences between Macs and PCs became minimal. The software that runs on the hardware, however, remains very different mostly due to Mac OS X.

Today we were invited to the GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei. We were given an exclusive hands-on look at its upcoming and refreshed Intel P55 Express based motherboards for Core i5 and Core i7 Lynnfield based Socket 1156 processors. Namely, we are looking at the P55A-UD6 and the P55A-UD4P.

Multiple sources are suggesting that R800, the card codenamed Hemlock, is going to come out in late November.

Samples are already out in the wild and, as expected, the TDP is definitely exceeding 300W. Once it launches, this card will finally take over the performance crown from Nvidia's Geforce GTX 295, but there is a big chance that ATI's performance leadership might only last a few weeks, since Nvidia is still planning to launch its Fermi card in 2009.

HD5950 and HD5970 cards will certainly assure the top spot for ATI.

A couple of days back we wrote about a new Gigabyte motherboard with SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0. You might look at it as a sign of things to come, as other vendors are quietly developing boards along similar lines.

However, don't hold your breath when it comes to USB 3.0 support, as Intel isn't exactly in a rush to put its weight behind the new standard. According to EE Times, Intel won't support USB 3.0 in its chipsets until some point in 2011, and vendors who opt to add it to their motherboards will have to turn to costly third party controllers.

While Futuremark is busy with its Shattered Horizon game, Unigine has come forward and released the first ever DirectX 11 benchmark, dubbed Heaven.

In addition to DirectX 11 support, the Unigine engine also supports DirectX 9, DirectX 10, OpenGL as well as ATI's Eyefinity multi-monitor feature. In order to fully utilize ATI's HD 5000 series, the new Unigine benchmark uses tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion), dynamic sky with light scattering, volumetric clouds that are rendered by a physically accurate algorithm and interactive experience with fly/walk-through mode as well as the benchmark mode.

Not too long ago we published a feature called ‘Is PC Gaming Dying?’ which broached the continuing rumour that consoles are the future and tried to look at the issue as broadly as possible and from both sides. A lot of people who commented on it, we felt, had missed the point and ended up thinking that just because we had asked that question we must hold the opinion ourselves.

Core i5 520UM that is the cheapest of all Arrandale 32nm dual-core CPUs with four threads will end up at a not-so-cheap $241. The scheduled launch is Q1 2010 and this CPU runs at 1.06GHz and supports Turbo that can help it get all the way to pretty impressive 1.86GHz.

The CPU has 3MB of cache, supports DDR3 800 memory and its total TDP is at a very acceptable 18W. The graphics is still stuck at 45nm and will run at 166MHz, but with a "little bit" of Turbo it will be able to get all the way to 500MHz.

An interesting thing about NAND Flash SSD (Solid State Drive) technologies, beyond the fact that the market is flush with competitive product offerings, is that the technology itself is very flexible and adaptable to a number of different design approaches, other just the straight-forward SATA-based SSDs. Take for example the RAID 4-pack configuration we setup here with Intel's X25-M SSD or perhaps the omnipotent Fusion-io ioDrive. Granted, these are rather high-end, pricey setups, but you get the gist that solid state storage arena is just getting warmed up.