Articles about Hardware

Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, has a new IT solution, thanks to a partnership between the service, IBM and Computacenter. It will allow the Met Office to process greater volumes of weather data faster.

Currently, the service collects and safeguards around 200 million weather observations every day. The new environment includes two new mainframes with 44 cores, and 200 terabytes of attached storage.

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Inateck has for a long time been producing good quality, reasonably priced sleeves and cases for laptops and tablets. It's now added to its selection with two new offerings.

There's not a great deal to say about the Inateck LC1302, it's a simple neoprene sleeve designed to fit 13-inch laptops and notebooks or larger tablets like the Surface Pro. A wide opening zipper allows for easy access, waterproof material keeps the contents safe from rain and spillages, and three layers of fabric protect from shocks.

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Fujitsu and Oracle have teamed up to deliver new, ulta-fast servers, as they give cloud computing and digital transformation another push forward. Named SPARC M12, these servers come equipped with an all-new SPARC64 XII processor.

Fujitsu claims this processor allows the SPARC M12 server to "achieve the world's highest per CPU core performance."

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If you are looking for the perfect weather app, let me save you the trouble of reading all those roundups out there: there isn't one. They are all flawed. And it's not necessarily because of their design, functionality or support, but rather what they can -- and do -- often get wrong: the forecast.

The forecast is based on information from a weather station that is usually miles and miles away. And while I have no doubt that you can get accurate predictions for that respective area, it's been my experience that things can be totally different in your area. So, how do you fix that? Enter the personal weather station.

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Security researchers can make a lot of money by reporting bugs to software and hardware vendors. Microsoft, for instance, pays up to $15,000 for vulnerabilities in Office Insider, while Intel, through its first bug bounty program, takes things up a notch with a top reward of $30,000.

Intel's first bug bounty program was announced on HackerOne, and targets firmware, software and hardware products. Hardware vulnerabilities have the highest top reward, followed by firmware and then software.

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Blueprints for a new hyperscale GPU accelerator have been introduced recently, jointly by Microsoft and NVIDIA. The two companies are saying the accelerator would "drive AI cloud computing."

The accelerator is called HGX-1 hyperscale GPU. It is released in conjunction with Microsoft’s Project Olympus, as an open-source design.

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Around a year ago I took a look at the iClever Tri-folding Backlit Bluetooth Keyboard, having previously examined the iClever Portable Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard. The latest addition to the range follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, but this time boasts a trackpad.

This is a Bluetooth keyboard that can be configured to connect to up to three devices -- phones, tablets, laptops, and so on. The keys are nearly full-sized (just 9 percent smaller than normal), and the right-hand side of the fold-out unit is occupied by a laptop-style trackpad that allows for easier control of the device you connect to, and eliminates the need to carry a mouse as well.

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After the successful launch of its new Ryzen processors last week, AMD has announced the first details of its upcoming Naples CPUs intended for servers and data centers.

These processors were designed around the same Zen architecture as Ryzen though they will be a great deal more powerful. AMD has described them as having "superior" memory bandwidth and some models will even feature up to 32 cores in order to handle a more demanding workload.

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If you've ordered yourself a Nintendo Switch you had better prepare to crack open your wallet and splash out on an SD card. Nintendo has shared details of the size of the console's digital games, and at least one of them simply won’t fit on the internal storage.

The company reveals that Dragon Quest Heroes I·II weighs in at a sizeable 32 GB -- exactly the same size as the Switch's built in storage, which is already home to the required system files. Other games are big enough to mean that even if you're not interested in Dragon Quest Heroes I·II, an SD card is going to be pretty much essential.

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USB flash drives are great for storing personal files on, so you can have easy access to them wherever you go. But what happens if you lose a drive or it gets stolen? All of your personal data could be at risk.

While there are ways to secure the contents of a flash drive using software, you need to remember to do so every time. The datAshur PRO, from iStorage, offers a hardware solution that’s simple to use and will protect your data with military grade XTS-AES 256-bit encryption.

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Last year we reviewed the Aegis Secure Key 3.0 encrypted flash drive. Apricorn, the company behind it, has now launched a new 3z version delivering even more security.

The Secure Key 3z offers top-level security innovation (FIPS 140-2 level 3 validation pending) at a lower cost and in a smaller form factor than before. It's accompanied by Aegis Configurator, a Windows-based software package that allows 10 or more compatible Aegis Secure Devices to be set up and configured simultaneously.

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The USB 3.0 standard has been around for a while, first appearing on consumer devices in 2009. It's likely therefore that any new PC purchased in the last few years will have USB 3.0 built in. If you have an older machine, or you need more ports, then you can add a PCIe card to add extra USB 3.0 capability.

Inateck's KTU3FR 4-port card is an easy way to boost your USB 3.0 options. It's easy to install though it does need more power than the PCIe slot can provide so it comes with SATA and Molex cables, one of which needs to be connected to your machine's power supply. Drivers are supplied on a CD and should work with all versions of Windows from XP up to Windows 10.

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There’s a fair amount of news coming out of the Windows Hardware Engineering Community event (WinHEC) in Shenzhen, China at the moment, but potentially the most exciting announcement is that Windows 10 is coming to ARM.

A partnership with Qualcomm means that we’ll soon see a range of Snapdragon-powered Windows 10 PCs with integrated cellular connectivity that run x86 Win32 and universal Windows apps.

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At the Windows Hardware Engineering Community event (WinHEC) in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft made several announcements, including news that it is working with Intel on a new venture, called "Project Evo".

The aim of this, according to Microsoft, is to "deliver all-new ways for devices to light up with the latest in advanced security, artificial intelligence and Cortana, mixed reality, and gaming".

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When it comes to backing up a computer, I am a big proponent of the cloud. While local backups should also be part of your plan, redundancy is key. If there is ever a disaster, such as a flood or fire, you will be very glad for the cloud backup. If the cloud storage company goes out of business, you will be thankful for the local copy. In other words, don't just rely on one method.

Seagate has an interesting new product, called "Duet", that it developed with Amazon, and it aims to create a positive redundant backup experience. The hardware itself is rather basic -- a 1TB 2.5-inch portable USB (Type-A) hard disk drive. The magic is in the software (Windows and Mac only), however, as it creates automatic cloud backups of the HDD contents to Amazon Drive in the cloud.

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