2015 was a super year for hardware – here are eight great progress for the computers – IDG.se

Mobile devices high performance, lightning-fast routers and razor-sharp graphics. When PC World concludes in 2015, one can easily conclude that it has been a fantastic hårdvaruår.

Here are eight of the biggest advances.

Nvidia Geforce GTX 980

Yes, the GTX 980 was released for the desktop already last year. Now we’re talking about the graphics card for laptops.

What makes the GTX 980 immensely impressive is one little detail: there is no “M” indicating “mobile” in the name. Nvidia has managed the feat of building a graphics card that fits in a laptop, without sacrificing performance.

So far, the new Geforce chip only in the very sharpest portable game machines, those with price tags north 30 000. But it bodes well for the both want to sit on the train and play Crysis with the best settings.

Storage war

There is nothing as cheap and easy way to shake new life into an old computer to replace the mechanical disk to an SSD. But the new generation of flash storage, the SSD taught us love to feel the stone age.

PCI-E connectors and NAND disks with a vertical (rather than horizontal) stacked chip has taken the market by storm with their speeds. Since even looked slow when nvme disks hit everything and everyone on your fingers.

Intel’s monster counter DP P3608 that was shown at the end of the summer, for example, a read speed of matchless 5 GBps – ten times faster than a standard sata ssd,

The catch? 1.6 terabyte will cost just over 36 000.

Intel Skylake

Skylake was no huge progress in terms of performance, what attracts is instead added features.

Series have both support for DDR4 frame and has 16 pieces of the third generation of PCI-E lanes – or up to 20 pieces of additional paths if you use Skylake together with Asus motherboards Z170. In plain language: it is possible to run lightning fast SSDs without stealing bandwidth from the graphics card.

Addition, Skylake a broad catalog of extra features. From security and power saving graphics boost.

Xeon in portable

Another milestone: the world’s first laptop (or” mobile workstation “as Intel calls it) with Intel’s powerful Xeon chip under the skin . First up was a couple of Lenovo Thinkpad models and more will soon be able to try on the chip previously mainly been seen in supercomputers.

Little later in the fall, Intel announced that that they release a 72-core Xeon processor to a limited number of desktop PCs in 2016.

nice cords

Sure, we are tired of technology companies insist replace the power cord standard wholesale and retail but in 2015 we had two positive examples. USB Type-c does admittedly average user can discard an entire garbage bag old usb cords, but think of the benefits. It is faster, smaller, and can plug in to any direction. Additionally, it might as Apple demonstrated, cause enough current to recharge a laptop battery.

Next delighted surprise is Intel’s decision to adapt the Thunderbolt USB c. It means that the Thunderbolt 3.0 gives crazy fast transfer speeds without having to take up a full port of the computer.

Phones that are computers

A perfect example of what can be achieved with a usb c partnership is Microsoft’s mobile efforts. Lumia 950 and 950XL can, with the help of a USB dock, turning into fully usable mobile workstations.

Continuum function, as it is called, is not without teething problems, but it shows how quickly technology advances .

Graphics card capable 4k

For years, 4k resolution not only demanded one, but two powerful graphics cards. But that changed in 2015 with the Nvidia beefy Titanium X – the first graphics card alone is able to run games at 4k with high graphics settings.

Since then, a steady stream of 4K-capable graphics pytsats out at the market. From Geforce GTX 980 TI to AMD’s water-cooled Fury X, and air-cooled Fury.

G-sync and Freesync

But a snag with our hardware now living in the future is that all the parts do not always hang out with. Sure, it is possible to deliver 4k with a video card, but the rate may suffer – it takes some gunpowder to draw eight million pixels on the screen.

Lucky then that 2015 is also the year when the screens and graphics cards learned sync refresh rate.

Nvidia directory called function G-sync, while AMD refers to it as Freesync. Colloquially referred the most of an opportunity to avoid having to shed a tear every time the frame rate drops below 60. The only drawback is that in the current situation must purchase a screen that fits either the company’s graphics cards.