Kioxia, at the 2023 China Flash Market conference (CFM), unveiled its next-generation enterprise SSD powered by 2nd Gen XL-NAND flash memory that promises up to 13.5 GB/s of sequential reads on drives with PCIe Gen 5 x4 interfaces. This puts it higher than the 12-12.5 GB/s offered by the first crop of Gen 5 SSDs, and a 118% over its current crop of Gen 4 x4 SSDs. The drive also offers up to 9.7 GB/s of sequential writes.

4K random-access performance is of a lot more importance to enterprise customers, and here, the drive is said to offer up to 3 million IOPS random reads, with up to 1.06 million IOPS sequential writes. All this comes at a slightly reduced read-latency of 27 µs, compared to 29 µs for the previous generation. Kioxia also expects PCIe Gen 5 and CXL 1.0 to be the prominent I/O interfaces for enterprise SSDs from now until the end of 2025. It's only with 2026 that we could see the emergence of PCIe Gen 6 in the enterprise space, promising a doubling in interface bandwidth.

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Elden Ring Update 1.09 Brings Ray Tracing
FromSoftware and Bandai Namco have released a new major patch for Elden Ring, implementing ray tracing on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X, as well as adding some gameplay improvements and fixing some bugs. Unfortunately, the game still does not support any upscaling technologies, so there is no support for DLSS or FSR, meaning that those ray tracing effects will have a rather high impact on frame rates.

The ray tracing patch for Elden Ring was announced back in November last year, and it certainly took a while before it was implemented. As detailed earlier, the ray tracing update for Elden Ring adds ambient occlusion and ray traced shadows, but does not include ray traced reflections.
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(PR) MINISFORUM Unveils Mini PCs with Dual Ethernet Ports and Intel i7-12650H CPU
The long-waiting dual Ethernet ports MINISFORUM mini PCs are finally here! MINISFORUM releases its NAB6 mini PCs. For processors, NAB6 uses Intel i7-12650H CPU. i7-12650H has 10 cores (6 performance-cores and 4 efficient-cores) and 16 threads with 24 MB cache, doubling the cache size of i5-12450H. More over, its boost clock is 4.7 GHz. It can easily handle office work. Thanks to the Intel 12 gen iGPU, it supports quad 4K displays.

Design wise, MINISFORUM uses the white chassis with the logo on the top for their intel chip mini PCs as always and it looks very clean and simple. The chassis is designed to be very upgrade friendly as well. Simply press the top plate with hand and the plate will pop up immediately for users to upgrade its RAM and SSD. No other tools are needed. For the cooling part, NAB6 uses the brand new active SSD heat sink design and side cooling vent. It can effectively dissipate heat from RAM and SSD.
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