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Tuesday, March 30th, 2021
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| 10:03a | Intel Rocket Lake (14nm) Review: Core i9-11900K, Core i7-11700K, and Core i5-11600K Today is the official launch of Intel’s 11th Generation Core processor family, given the internal name ‘Rocket Lake’. Rocket Lake showcases new performance gains for Intel in the desktop space, with a raw clock-for-clock performance uplift in a number of key workloads. In order to do this, Intel have had to retrofit its 10nm CPU and GPU designs back to 14nm, because only 14nm can achieve the frequency required. In exchange, the new processors to get this performance run hot, cost more for Intel to produce, have two fewer cores at the high end, but customers also get PCIe 4.0 on Intel’s mainstream desktop platform for the first time. In our review today, we will be going over Intel’s new hardware, why it exists, and how it performs, focusing specifically on Intel’s new flagship, the Core i9-11900K, which has eight cores and can boost up to 5.3 GHz. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2:00p | Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade Today, as part of Arm’s Vision Day event, the company is announcing the first details of the company’s new Armv9 architecture, setting the foundation for what Arm hopes to be the computing platform for the next 300 billion chips in the next decade. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 3:45p | Mushkin Launches DELTA And GAMMA PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs
Mushkin has announced two new product lines for PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. Following on from last year's introduction of the ALPHA series, the new DELTA and GAMMA drives continue Mushkin's recent trend of using Phison's SSD controllers and reference designs. The ALPHA uses the Phison E12S controller and QLC NAND, the new DELTA uses the Phison E16 controller and QLC NAND, and the new GAMMA uses the Phison E18 controller and TLC NAND.
The new Mushkin DELTA series and their existing ALPHA series both use QLC NAND, but the DELTA is not a complete replacement for the ALPHA. The DELTA does offer a performance boost due to the faster controller supporting PCIe 4.0, but that faster Phison E16 controller also takes up more PCB area than the compact Phison E12S controller used in the ALPHA. That prevents the DELTA series from offering an 8TB option. The ALPHA series is focused specifically on extreme capacities since it only includes 4TB and 8TB models, while the DELTA is a bit more mainstream with 1TB through 4TB capacities.
The new GAMMA series is Mushkin's new flagship based on the Phison E18 controller. Performance specs are similar to other drives based on the same reference design, with sequential read speeds of over 7 GB/s and peak sequential write speeds starting at over 5.5 GB/s for the 1TB model.
For both the DELTA and GAMMA series, Mushkin's initial pricing is in line with street prices for other drives based on the same hardware. Among that club, Corsair's MP600 CORE and MP600 PRO SSDs come with substantial heatsinks, while Mushkin is following the approach taken by Sabrent, Inland and other brands by keeping the drives slim and leaving any heatsink up to the end user. Mushkin hasn't specified the exact NAND used in these new drives, but we expect them to both be using 96-layer 3D NAND. Later this spring we will see a new round of high-end Phison E18 drives adopting Micron's 176-layer 3D TLC for marginal performance improvements, but it's still a bit early for Mushkin to be including the new NAND on the GAMMA. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4:30p | Kingston Introduces NV1 Entry-Level NVMe SSD
As previewed at CES, Kingston's newest entry-level consumer NVMe SSD is now shipping. The new NV1 uses a similar strategy to Kingston's entry-level SATA drives like the A400, where Kingston is not guaranteeing a specific set of internal components and expects to mix controllers and NAND to hit the cheapest price points. That results in very conservative performance and endurance specifications: sequential transfers around 2GB/s and endurance ratings around 0.2 DWPD for three years.
The Kingston NV1 uses DRAMless SSD controllers like the Phison E13T and Silicon Motion SM2263XT, which are both getting a bit old but are still sufficient to offer a step up from SATA performance. The NAND will tend to be TLC on the smaller capacities and QLC for at least the 2TB model, but realistically Kingston could use either type of NAND on any of the capacities depending on what kind of leftover NAND they have lying around. The NV1 is a more low-end drive than Kingston's existing A2000 NVMe SSD, which uses TLC NAND and has DRAM, but uses the 4-channel SM2263 controller rather than a more mainstream 8-channel controller. The NV1 does reflect the market's shift toward higher capacities, with the product line starting at 500GB and going up to 2TB. We expect retail prices for the NV1 will end up cheaper than the A2000, but for the moment the pricing direct from Kingston is only marginally cheaper. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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