Blackhats Clan

pc gamer

Even I’ve been forced to admit that PC hardware has seemed pretty dull lately. While there’s been no shortage of new launches, there’s been no must buy upgrade. That might have changed today with the launch of AMD’s Radeon HD7850 and HD7870 graphics cards.

Based on ‘Pitcairn’ revisions of the Southern Islands processor design, the HD7800s are slightly cut down versions of the hugely powerful but hugely expensive 7900s, with the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) tech at their heart. They’re fast, futureproof and with prices for both cards around the £200/$300 mark, they’re also relatively affordable.

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According to august engineering journal the EE Times, solid state storage specialist SanDisk is working on bringing a new form of system memory known as ‘ReRAM’ to market, a fact apparently revealed in a job ad posted on the company’s website last week.

Why is this interesting? Because ReRAM, or ‘resistive RAM’, is one of those disruptive technologies like wireless power or 4G that’s been under development for years, but is suddenly looking like it might happenin our lifetime. ReRAM could, if manufacturing kinks are worked out, replace both system RAM and hard drives in PCs of the future.

ReRAM is being touted as the successor to both current system memory chips and hard drives. And it’s not just SanDisk that’s been showing an interest in this super-storage of late.

The importance of ReRAM is that it combines the read/write speeds of DRAM – the stuff on those memory chips in your PC – with the non-volatile nature of flash memory. In other words, they don’t forget stuff when you turn the power off. Potentially, it’s the best of all existing technologies: bulk storage that runs at system memory speeds.

Theoretically, a PC with enough ReRAM memory in would mean no more loading times, ever. All your data would always be kept in the equivalent of today’s system RAM.

On top of that, ReRAM is expected to require little power, and it can be manufactured on tiny manufacturing processes with high yields.

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Pathological hatred of the Start button got you down? Wish those pesky windows on your desktop would just manage themselves a bit more like an iPad? Quite fancy the look of an ARM-powered tablet but can’t face the fact it will giving up Windows? Fear not, for Windows 8 is almost upon us and by the end of the month, you should know whether it exceeds or disappoints your expectations.

Microsoft previously committed to getting the public beta for Windows 8 online by the end of February. Yesterday, people started receiving invites for the ‘Consumer Preview’ of Windows 8 on February 29th. Most commentators seem to think that 8+29 equals a very obvious 4, and that this means the beta will be going live on that date. Seems like a reasonable deduction to us.

Which means that those of you not taking advantage of all the rare opportunities afforded by the quadrennial date (such as a birthday or when girls traditionally propose to boys) will instead be able to head over to Microsoft.com and download what is – in all but name – the beta version of the next Windows.

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Gaming system specialist Alienware launched its console sized X51 desktop for the second time in London last night. The machine was originally announced a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco, since when we’ve only seen it in pictures. Now we’ve played with it for a bit, had a go at building a cheaper alternative and spoken to the team behind it, it’s time to gather our thoughts.