Ben Funk

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NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is underway and CEO Jensen Huang just wrapped up the company's keynote, full of software and hardware announcements. It seems the company is working pretty hard to make sure that robotics and AI engineers can view NVIDIA as a one-stop shop with not only the brains behind the...
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NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit: Starting At $199 (4GB), $299 (8GB) The new NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit offers a massive performance boost over the previous generation, at an affordable price point. More affordable than Jetson AGX Orin Low power and small form factor Huge improvement over Jetson...
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AMD Xilinx KR260 Robotics Starter Kit: MSRP $349 AMD Xilinx upgrades the industrial robotics market with the KR260, an affordable starter kit that packs a whole lot of I/O. Affordable entry point for robotics Powerful, programmable logic gate array Plenty of IO, both legacy and modern Compact daughterboard...
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AMD's RDNA 3 GPU architecture found in the Radeon RX 7900 family of graphics cards was a tremendous leap in performance over the previous generation found in the Radeon RX 6000 series. Therefore, it only stands to reason that the next generation of AMD's high-performance and adaptive computing accelerators would...
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Alienware and Dell make some of the fastest gaming laptops around. It seems like clockwork that year-in, year-out, the combined company manages to iterate and jump into the latest technology. Of course, 2023 is no exception, and today the company announced some big changes to its lineups with updated form factors...
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Dell, through its gaming brand Alienware, is no stranger to new and interesting computing concepts that open new market opportunities and new ways for people to game and connect. Back in April of 2022, the company teased Concept Nyx as a way for people to connect with each other across the internet using...
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Dell XPS 13 9315 - Starting MSRP $899.00 Dell's newest premium ultraportable takes battery life and portability to a new level while also being affordable. As thin and light as any laptop Good performance for power usage Great battery life Beautiful design with great build quality Nice bright...
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Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 - Starting MSRP: $1,218.50 Lenovo's latest AMD-powered ThinkPad has been endowed with Ryzen 6000 for great performance and it is built from sustainable materials too. Great Performance Lightweight At 2.76 lbs Typical Fantastic Keyboard Accurate 16:10 1200p Touch Display Very Quiet With Great Surface Temps...
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Kioxia XG8: Starting At $XXX A new NVMe controller and the latest 3D NAND combine to make a very solid product for OEM markets. It won't officially come to retail channels, though. Excellent sequential throughput Very good latency and IOPs at high queue depths Solid performance in system drive workloads Mediocre latency...
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It wasn't all that long ago that we had our first experience with Intel's 4th-generation Scalable Xeons, code-named Sapphire Rapids, and checked out some live benchmarks. In the demonstration, Intel put its pre-release silicon up against the current best from AMD, a server with a pair of Milan-based EPYC 7763 64-core...
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ASUS TUF Dash F15 - Starting MSRP: $879 This NVIDIA RTX Laptop for STEM Students program is very portable, with a nice display, excellent performance, good-enough battery life. NVIDIA's Drivers Accelerate STEM Apps GeForce RTX Delivers Great Performance Lightweight 15-inch Form Factor Nice Build Quality...
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At the launch of its Ryzen 6000 mobile processors, AMD made some bold claims about power efficiency. While the first systems out of the gate, like the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, boasted some pretty impressive performance and good battery life, it was the ASUS Zenbook S 13 OLED (above) that really took...
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Lenovo ThinkPad X13s - Starting MSRP: $1085 Lenovo's new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 notebook brings a big performance uplift over previous models without sacrificing its incredible battery life Big Windows on Arm performance increase Friendly pricing for the battery life-conscious Premium...
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Machine learning is everywhere. It's an integral part of our smartphones and smart home appliances, running customer service chat bots for big retailers, and hard at work recognizing people and actions in security systems, among numerous other applications. Neural networks are the backbone of the robotics and...
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While it's only been about six months since Apple introduced the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs that would power the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pro, the architecture within those chips can trace its roots back another full year to the dawn of Apple Silicon in the Mac mini's M1 processor. This is when Cupertino left Intel...
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Artificial intelligence and robotics go together like peanut butter and chocolate. To be truly useful, a service robot needs to be smart enough to perform its assigned tasks, stay out of danger, and not run over its human coworkers in the process. Nearly a decade ago, NVIDIA recognized that the hugely parallel...
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The USB Type-C connector was devised to be the be-all and end-all of external connectivity. Whether it's carrying DisplayPort video signals, Thunderbolt high-speed data transfers, power delivery, or plain old USB, this port can do just about everything. For the most part, device manufacturers have swarmed towards this...
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The pixels output by your PC's graphics card are only as good as the monitor that displays them. Attach a shiny new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to a bargain basement, slow 1080p panel with a refresh rate of 60Hz and you'll likely get what you had coming: blurring, color shift, dull images, and an unpleasant experience. We...
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By most accounts, Intel's 12th Gen Core processors based on the hybrid Alder Lake mobile architecture have been a smashing success for gaming laptops. From class-leading desktop performance to outstanding mobile prowess, the blue team's Alder Lake family has shown strong gains in workloads of all kinds. The first notebooks we looked at,...
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At the heart of every autonomous machine, modern industrial robot, and automated manufacturing apparatus is some form artificial intelligence. These things are amazingly complex, too—not only are there models to train, but there are sensors to interpret and reactions to formulate. NVIDIA has been at the forefront of...
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The trend of OLED displays in laptops is typically reserved for flagship devices that cost a pretty penny. Logically, the extreme contrast ratio, total lack of ghosting, and colors that pop are the sort of thing that most PC shoppers lust after in a premium product. OLED TVs also flank the high end of that...
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Acer's Predator series of gaming displays is one of the longest-running lines of high-refresh monitors with G-Sync in the PC industry. The newest X32 and X32 FP entries really push the bar on what a gaming monitor can be with some pretty impressive HDR specifications that we don't find too often in gaming monitors...
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