Let's recap the current smartphone/tablet SoC landscape. Everything shipping today is built on a 4x-nm process, built either at Global Foundries, Samsung, TSMC or UMC. Next year we'll see a move to 28nm (bringing better performance and power characteristics) but between now and the end of 2012 there will be a myriad of designs available on the market.

The table below encapsulates much of what you can expect over the next 12 months:

The key is this: other than TI's OMAP 5 in the second half of 2012 and Qualcomm's Krait, no one else has announced plans to release a new microarchitecture in the near term. Furthermore, if we only look at the first half of next year, Qualcomm is the only company that's focused on significantly improving per-core performance through a new architecture. Everyone else is either scaling up in core count (NVIDIA) or clock speeds. As we've seen in the PC industry however, generational performance gaps are hard to overcome - even with more cores or frequency.

Read on for our analysis of Qualcomm's Krait architecture and the MSM8960.

The more enclosures we get in, the more amazed I am at just how competitive the market is for $99 cases. That market is made only more competitive by younger, hungrier companies like BitFenix and Fractal Design, along with new entries from Corsair and NZXT. In another welcome change of pace, these enclosures tend to be slicker, more streamlined, and less gaudy than the gaming cases of yore while providing oftentimes excellent thermal and acoustic performance. With those things in mind, today we look at our first of hopefully many cases from Fractal Design: the Arc Midi.

We've heard a lot of requests for a Fractal Design case review, and the company answered by sending us their $100 offering. Targeting the popular mid-tower segment with a reasonable price and good features, let's see just how well this newcomer can stand up to the competition.

Marking the fourth time we’ve taken ASUS’ G7 gaming series for a spin, the G74SX actually changes up the formula from the last-iteration G73Sw in some meaningful ways. Superficially, the two notebooks look the same, but when you crack open the spec sheet and take a closer look you’ll find some nice updates. It’s pretty easy to list what exactly has changed: the keyboard layout is better—nearly perfect in my opinion—and ASUS has finally decided to ship a high-end notebook with an SSD + HDD storage combination. ASUS also bumps the GPU up to the GTX 560M from the GTX 460M, and memory in our test unit checks in at a hefty 16GB (4x4GB).

There’s one remaining update we expected to see that’s still missing, however: NVIDIA’s Optimus Technology. This tends to be a polarizing technology, and while the best-case solution would be a GPU that can run as fast as the GTX 560M when needed but drop down to HD 3000 power use levels when it’s not, for the time being such a solution doesn’t exist. ASUS has taken the “safe” approach of using only the discrete GTX 560M GPU, which means you sacrifice battery life and Intel’s Quick Sync technology, but you gain some simplicity at the same time. Is the end result worth your hard earned pennies? Read on.

While we've had a chance to check out a few cases in the $200+ club and the majority of the enclosures we've tested have floated around the $99 price range, we haven't really put the screws (so to speak) to a truly budget case. That changes today, when we tackle the least expensive case we've yet tested: the BitFenix Merc Alpha. At just $39 it would be reasonable not to expect much, but as you'll see this case can hang with enclosures at twice the cost or better.

I understand the appeal of tablets. Regardless of OS, they all provide a far more intimate experience when browsing the web and reading emails. I genuinely prefer doing both of those things on a tablet than on a notebook or desktop. Then there are the apps. Photos, maps, ebooks, videos and even IP cameras are comfortably accessible from tablets. Obviously you can do the same on a notebook or desktop, the tablet form factor combined with a responsive touch UI simply means you can do these things in a more relaxed position.

What has always frustrated me with tablets however is what happens when you have to give any of these apps a significant amount of input. While the virtual keyboards on tablets are pretty mature, the form factor doesn't allow for quick typing like on a smartphone. A smartphone is easily cradled in both of your hands while your thumbs peck away at the keyboard. A tablet however needs to be propped up against something while you treat it like a keyboard. Put it on your lap and you have to hunch over the thing because the screen and input surface are on the same plane (unlike a notebook where the two are perpendicular to one another). Try to type in a reclined position on a couch and you end up lying awkwardly with your thighs and thumbs supporting the tablet. Ever see the iPad billboards and note the really awkward leg placement in them?

ASUS' latest attempt to deal with this issue is the Eee Pad Slider. The follow-on to the Eee Pad Transformer integrates a sliding keyboard into ASUS' Honeycomb tablet. How does it fare? Read on to find out in our full review!

It's easy to build a powerful desktop if you take a big, beefy enclosure like SilverStone's FT-02 or the Thermaltake Level 10 GT and just fill it with the highest performance parts on the market, overclock them, and call it a day—and certainly we've seen our share of those. Taking all of that raw performance and shrinking it into a MicroATX case can be a little more difficult, though, especially when you're dissipating a cumulative TDP of at least 730 watts. Yet when we saw that AVADirect had produced another compact but incredibly high performance gaming desktop, we had to take a look. Gulftown may be on its way to bed soon with the advent of Sandy Bridge-E, but let's see if we can't give it one last hurrah in the process.

Historically, whenever NVIDIA or AMD launched a new mobile powerhouse GPU, AVADirect and Clevo were ready to ship us a high-end notebook to show us what the latest mobile GPUs could do. The problem is that NVIDIA and AMD have been playing a rapid game of oneupsmanship lately, while Clevo has been content with their dual-GPU + desktop CPU X7200. We've already looked at that notebook twice, so we wanted to see if we could find the high-end hardware elsewhere. Thankfully, Alienware was ready to step up to the plate with their M18x.

Perhaps even more interesting, we were able to pull some strings and get Alienware to agree to send us two M18x units back-to-back. Today we present to you the first of a two-part series where we begin with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580M (tested in both single GPU and SLI modes), and we'll also given a thorough overview of Alienware's M18x. We'll follow up in the near future with a second look at the M18x, but with AMD's Radeon HD 6990M (again tested in single GPU and CrossFire modes), at which point we'll be able to give a full rundown on how these two top-of-the-line mobile graphics solutions stack up.

Read on for the first part of our Alienware M18x coverage, with dual 580Ms and enough performance to put many a desktop to shame.

In a world where space is at a premium, the smaller motherboards get, and yet still retain full functionality, never ceases to amaze me.  With desktop Llano processors taking the integrated graphics crown, an all-in-one mini Llano system becomes ever more appealing.  To support this, ASUS have sent us their premium mini-ITX motherboard for review, which I have put through the bench suite.  Read on for the full review!

When Intel entered the SSD market one of its declared goals was to bring the technology into the mainstream. The goal was so important to Intel that its consumer drive was branded X25-M, with the M standing for mainstream. Intel's desire for SSD ubiquity wasn't entirely altruistic however. Mechanical storage acted as a potential gate to increasing CPU performance. Eventually, without significant improvements in IO performance, CPU improvements would be less visible to most users. SSDs would help alleviate this bottleneck.

It wouldn't be untrue to say that Intel accomplished its mission. The client SSD market was in a state of disarray before Intel arrived on the scene. Although we still have problems today, there are a number of affordable options for end users and lots of competition. Samsung, Marvell, Indilinx, JMicron and even SanDisk are now vying for control of the market.

With healthy competition, significant performance improvements and (hopefully) improved reliability in the consumer SSD space, Intel will actually begin defocusing itself from this market over the coming years. Intel needs to keep margins as high as possible to appease shareholders, and the consumer SSD business is in a race to the bottom. Dollars per GB are all that matter here once you deliver a certain level of performance and reliability.

Intel won't abandon the consumer SSD market completely, it will still compete in the high end space but there's a good reason that the mainstream moniker has been dropped from Intel's product names. Intel will shift more of its attention to the enterprise space, bringing that technology to the high end desktop/workstation users where it can (e.g. Cherryville will be focused on both enterprise and enthusiast desktop users). But as you have already seen, I wouldn't expect Intel to actively compete in driving mainstream SSD pricing down further. That market now belongs to the players I mentioned above.

What better way to kick off the shift in focus than with a new enterprise drive: Intel's SSD 710, the long awaited successor to the X25-E. Read on for our full review!

Roku is one of the pioneers in the media streamer market. They introduced the first Netflix streaming box in 2008. New models have been coming out every year. This time around, the rise of connected TVs and the Smart TV push from Intel have forced Roku to come out with something different compared to offerings from previous years. We had covered the launch of the Roku 2 lineup earlier and pointed out the casual gaming angle as the differentiating factor.

The top tier Roku 2 XS model was sent for review by Roku. How does it fare in our testing? Is a mixture of Internet video streaming and casual gaming on the big screen worth the $99 asking price? Read on to find out.

Each time we publish a new server platform review, several of our readers inquire about HPC and rendering benchmarks. We're always willing to accommodate reasonable requests, so we're going to start expanding beyond our usual labor intensive virtualization benchmarks. This article is our first attempt. It was a bumpy ride, but this first attempt produced some very interesting insights.

The increasing core counts on modern servers makes finding useful benchmarks difficult, and given how many businesses have chosen to use virtualization that has been our major focus. For this article, we decided to run the latest version of Cinebench and Stars Euler 3D CFD, as both seemed like they would be fairly easy to work with. That didn't end up being the case, but at least our testing results are a lot more interesting than we imagined they would be.

If you've been following along for a while, it should be pretty clear that around here, we're fans of doing a little computing. Awkward turns of phrase notwithstanding, we thought we'd seen the smallest HP had to offer when we tackled the Z210 SFF desktop not too long ago. But we were wrong, and today we present you with the smallest desktop computer in HP's enterprise lineup. Wearing its power supply on the outside, meet the HP Compaq 8200 Elite Ultra-Slim.

In a move that has been anticipated for sometime, Amazon has introduced their own branded Android tablet, the Kindle Fire. Though based on Android, you won't be confusing this device with any of the growing army of Android tablets joining the market, nor will you see much of the Android you've come to expect. The 7" slate is designed to deliver Amazon services in a user friendly walled garden that bears little resemblance to vanilla Android. We've got first impressions and details along with a gallery after the break.

We've been wanting to get Lian Li enclosures in house for review for a while now, and we're pleased to report we finally have a contender on hand (with more on the way!) in the form of the PC-V353. Lian Li touts this case as having been designed to cool through use of extensive ventilation instead of fans, but surprisingly they don't advertise what may be one of its more interesting aspects: the enclosure is comprised almost entirely of aluminum and is likely to feel surprisingly light. Can an aluminum, well-ventilated enclosure take the place of steel and fans?

In our last SandForce SSD roundup I talked about how undesirable the consumer SSD market is, at least for those companies who don't produce their own controllers and/or NAND. There's a downward trend in NAND and SSD pricing, which unfortunately squeezes drive manufacturers as they compete for marketshare. The shrinking margins in the consumer SSD space will ultimately drive companies out of the business, consolidating power in those companies who are fine operating with slim margins. There are other effects, such as insufficient validation testing that result from this price crunch.

Public companies are under an even greater pressure to maintain high profit margins. Investors don't care about good product, they care about good returns. What is a public SSD manufacturer like OCZ to do? Go after the enterprise market of course.

OCZ has quietly addressed the enterprise SSD space for a while now. Today you can custom order an OCZ Deneva 2 SSD which is an enterprise focused SF-2000 based solution. OCZ's enterprise drives are fully customizable down to the controller, firmware and NAND type on-board. If you want an SF-2000 drive with SAS support and SLC NAND, OCZ will build it for you.

In the enterprise segment where 1U and 2U servers are common, PCI Express SSDs are very attractive. You may not always have a ton of 2.5" drive bays but there's usually at least one high-bandwidth PCIe slot unused. The RevoDrive family of PCIe SSDs were targeted at the high-end desktop or workstation market, but for an enterprise-specific solution OCZ has its Z-Drive line.

Read on for our review of OCZ's Z-Drive R4.

First revealed at CTIA, alongside it’s big brother the Tab 10.1, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 has been a long time coming. At today’s launch event Samsung gave the device little fanfare, preferring to give media attendees as much hands-on time as possible. We picked up our review sample at the event so expect our full review shortly. For now, we have a hands-on of Samsung’s littler tablet, along with the Galaxy Player 4.0 and 5.0. Jump past the break to find out how the latest additions to the Galaxy fare.

For years now Dell has been one of the few companies that consistently offers a range of displays using IPS panels for desktop displays instead of only the more affordable TN panels. Now with the availability of e-IPS panels, Dell has been able to offer even more models and lower the price all the way down to $319 for a 23” 1080p display.

Considering most IPS displays use S-IPS or similar panels and cost north of $500 for 23", E-IPS promises improved viewing angles compared to TN and can hopefully avoid any other negatives. How does Dell's U2311H stack up to other displays, and is it a worthwhile compromise between TN and S-IPS? Read on to find out.

Samsung is a dangerous competitor in the SSD space. Not only does it make its own controller, DRAM and NAND, but it also has an incredible track record in terms of reliability. Samsung SSDs were among the first I reviewed and while they weren't anywhere near the fastest back then, every last one of those drives is still working without issue in my lab today. It's also worth pointing out that Samsung SSDs are also one of the two options Apple rebrands and delivers in its Mac lineup. To continue to hold on to Apple's business for this long is an impressive feat on Samsung's part.

In the early days Samsung actually sold reference designs to companies like Corsair and OCZ. Its partners could then rebrand and resell the drives, which they did. Samsung was still learning the market and after being overshadowed by Indilinx in the performance segment, Samsung retreated. Returning last year to the consumer market Samsung had a new strategy in mind: go directly after the channel. Seeing no point in reselling its designs to third parties, Samsung made its SSD 470 available to both OEMs and consumers alike. OEMs were free to obscure the Samsung name but consumers were told upfront what they were getting. Samsung even spent a good amount on packaging for their drive just to develop its brand.

Although the 470 was a downright decent 3Gbps drive, it was competing in a world dominated by 6Gbps alternatives. Crucial's m4, Intel's SSD 510 and OCZ's Vertex 3 all offered better performance, at a similar price point. The only leg Samsung had to stand on was reliability, which believe it or not can sometimes take second place to performance depending on the target market. What Samsung needed was a faster drive that didn't sacrifice reliability and didn't move price points up. That's exactly what the Samsung SSD 830 is designed to do.

Read on for our full review!