Editor profile

Ben Funk

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Ben has been fascinated by technology since he got a Commodore VIC-20 as a child in 1984. By day he's a software developer working in education technology, and at night he's a husband, dad, musician, gamer, and freelance technology writer. If he's not at his PC, Ben can be found hanging out with his family, gaming on a vintage Sega console, or grippin' and rippin' with his beloved Paul Reed Smith guitar. 

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Recent posts

Somehow the news of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit flew under this author's radar when macOS Sonoma was announced at WWDC earlier this month. It wasn't until the developer sessions on using the kit and bringing games to the macOS platform that it really became apparent what Apple was doing. Running DirectX 12 games on... Read more...
content-first-image{ background: url('https://images.hothardware.com/contentimages/article/3302/content/small_dell-xps-15-9530-3.jpg') center no-repeat; background-size: contain; max-width: 100%; width: 100%; } Dell XPS 15 (9530) - Starting at $1,299 Dell's newest XPS laptop is an evolutionary upgrade, but its... Read more...
The highlight of Apple's keynote at the Worldwide Developer Conference yesterday was definitely Vision Pro and visionOS. However, the iPhone maker also has a whole slate of new operating systems on the horizon, and went to great trouble to demonstrate a whole host of new features. Yearly iterations are nothing new... Read more...
Apple's 2023 Worldwide Developer Conference got underway this morning at 10am Pacific time with a keynote full of product announcements like the M2 Ultra featured in an updated Mac Studio and the new Mac Pro. The most exciting news, though, that Cupertino took the opportunity to announce its new headset, the Vision... Read more...
Apple MacBook Pro 14" (2023) with M2 Pro - Starting at $1,999 The latest MacBook Pro doesn't blow the 2021 model out of the water, but for those clinging to legacy x86 Apple hardware, it's a compelling upgrade. Excellent performance Unrivaled battery life Premium materials and design Beautiful 120Hz display with mini LED brightness Solid keyboard... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
    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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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