Nvidia has announced that it plans to integrate a high-speed interconnect, called NVLink into its future GPUs, enabling GPUs and CPUs to share data five to 12 times faster than they can today. This will eliminate a longstanding bottleneck and help pave the way for a new generation of exascale supercomputers that are 50-100 times faster than today's most powerful systems, the vendor said. Nvidia will add NVLink technology into its Pascal GPU architecture - expected to be introduced in 2016 - following Nvidia's new Maxwell compute architecture for 2013. The new interconnect was co-developed with IBM, which is incorporating it in future versions of its Power CPUs. With NVLink technology tightly coupling IBM Power CPUs with Nvidia Tesla GPUs, the Power data center ecosystem will be able to fully leverage GPU acceleration for a diverse set of applications, such as high performance computing, data analytics and machine learning. Today's GPUs are connected to x86-based CPUs through the PCI Express (PCIe) interface, which limits the GPU's ability to access the CPU memory system and is four- to five-times slower than typical CPU memory systems. PCIe is an even greater bottleneck between the GPU and IBM Power CPUs, which have more bandwidth than x86 CPUs. As the NVLink interface will match the bandwidth of typical CPU memory systems, it will enable GPUs to access CPU memory at its full bandwidth.

Samsung Electronics has launched its 840 EVO mSATA SSD line-up, including a one terabyte (TB) version. The Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD is an extension of the 840 EVO line-up which was introduced in July at Samsung SSD Global Summit. The new SSD features the mSATA form factor which is approximately a quarter size of a 2.5-inch SSD, and offers the same level of high density and high performance. The new 840 EVO mSATA SSD utilizes Samsung's 128Gb NAND flash memory based on 10nm-class process technology. To form a 1TB version SSD, a total of four flash memory packages are used, each package having 16 layers of 128Gb chips. Based on the advanced memory technology, the 1TB mSATA SSD comes in a thickness of 3.85mm and a weight of 8.5g, which are approximately 40% and a 12th of a typical hard disk drive (HDD) respectively. The 840 EVO mSATA SSD line-up is available in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. The 1TB version offers 98,000 random read and 90,000 random write IOPS, as well as sequential read and write speed of 540MB/s and 520 MB/s. The 840 EVO mSATA SSD line-up will be available starting from December 2013 globally.

Apple has updated MacBook Pro with Retina display, with prices starting at US$1,299. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display features fourth-generation dual-core Intel Core i5 processors up to 2.6GHz. New integrated Intel Iris graphics deliver up to 90% faster performance than the previous-generation MacBook Pro with Retina display, Apple said. The 13-inch model can be configured with faster dual-core Intel Core i7 processors up to 2.8GHz. The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display features Intel quad-core Core i7 processors up to 2.3GHz. The 15-inch model includes Intel Iris Pro graphics or Iris Pro and GeForce GT 750M discrete graphics with 2GB of video memory. The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display can be configured with faster quad-core Intel Core i7 processors up to 2.6GHz. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display delivers up to nine hours of battery life, two hours more than the previous generation, and up to nine hours of iTunes movie playback, according to the vendor. The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display delivers up to eight hours of battery life, one hour more than the previous generation, and up to eight hours of iTunes movie playback.