speed up technology

LONDON’S ICONIC BIG BEN TO FALL SILENT FOR FOUR YEARS London’s iconic landmark Big Ben will fall silent on Monday (August 21, 2017) for renovations for four years. And Londoners are not too happy about it, for it will be the longest time that the Big Ben has been silenced in its 157-year history. In keeping with health and safety rules, the 13-ton bell will go in silent mode to protect the hearing of construction workers on site while extensive repairs are done on Westminster. The last time the Elizabeth Tower (fondly known as Big Ben) got some major TLC was over 30 years ago, and authorities think it will not need any more attention for at least 60 years after the £29 m renovations. The Big Ben is a favourite tourist attraction and efforts are being made to ensure that at least one working clock face is visible as work goes on. Tours to the Elizabeth Tower (not open to overseas visitors but they do involve 334 steps for UK residents!) will be suspended for the

HP gets in on the external GPU hype with a pretty, large box Alongside the announcement of a bunch of gaming computers today, HP is introducing a series of accessories so that it can try to sell gamers the entire package. That includes two displays, a gaming mouse, a mechanical keyboard, and an external GPU enclosure. The external GPU may be the standout of the bunch (at the very least, it takes up the most room). It’s called the HP Accelerator, and it’s mostly just a big box with a power supply and space to hold a single graphics card and a hard drive. It also includes several additional ports, including four USB 3.0 and a single USB-C, and connects to a laptop over Thunderbolt 3. Products like the Accelerator are meant to be plugged into a laptop to transform it into a much more powerful machine. It lets you leave some of the power of a desktop at home, while still running everything off of a relatively standard laptop. HP’s solution is a pretty nice alte

Apple's MacBook refresh buys time for bigger changes Overshadowed by new hardware "sneak peeks" and software news, Apple on Monday updated its MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups with Intel Kaby Lake processors, while giving the MacBook Air a minor speed boost. With today's refresh, all MacBook models, from the 13-inch MacBook Air to the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, receive processor upgrades to keep their performance in line with the competition. Starting at the top, Apple is giving the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar the Intel Kaby Lake treatment. The high-end laptop is now available with seventh-generation Core i7 processors that range from 2.8GHz quad-core to 3.1GHz quad-core variants. Kaby Lake operates on the same core as sixth-gen Skylake processors, but is built on a 14 nanometer process and is able to achieve higher clock rates. The CPU family also features onboard support for HEVC encoding and decoding, an important consideration with Ap

Apple’s latest desktop powerhouse is a pro variant of its all-in-one iMac, which will start shipping in December starting at $4,999. The device has all sorts of top-notch specs, including a Xeon processor that scales up to 18 cores and an all-new AMD Radeon Vega GPU. But the computer’s most aesthetically pleasing perk happens to be an all-new space gray finish alongside space gray accessories, which we’ve never seen from Apple before. Unfortunately, the company says these new color options for the wireless Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Keyboard will be restricted to buyers of the iMac Pro, according to 9to5Mac.

Samsung Exynos 9610 octa-core chipset reportedly being developed If an unverified report out of China is believed, Samsung is developing the octa-core Exynos 9610 chip as a competitor to the mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor. Samsung’s new chip is said to have similar performance to the Snapdragon 660. It’s claimed that the Exynos 9610 is going to have four Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores and that it will be manufactured on the 14-nanometer manufacturing process. The processor may also be hooked up to a Mali-G72 MP3 graphics processor as well as a Netcam Cat. 13 modem. It’s interesting to note that this is possibly going to be the first Exynos processor that properly follows the “Exynos 9″ series branding. The Exynos 8895 processor found in the Galaxy S8 is of the same series but doesn’t follow the proper nomenclature. The leak claims that Samsung is going to start using the Exynos 9610 processor in consumer devices by the fourth quarter of this y

Intel Announces Skylake-X: Bringing 18-Core HCC Silicon to Consumers for $1999 There are days in this profession in which I am surprised. The longer I stay in the technology industry, they become further and further apart. There are several reasons to be surprised: someone comes out of the blue with a revolutionary product and the ecosystem/infrastructure to back it up, or a company goes above and beyond a recent mediocre pace to take on the incumbents (with or without significant financial backing). One reason is confusion, as to why such a product would ever be thought of, and another is seeing how one company reacts to another. We’ve been expecting the next high-end desktop version of Skylake for almost 18 months now, and fully expected it to be an iterative update over Broadwell-E: a couple more cores, a few more dollars, a new socket, and done. Intel has surprised us with at least two of the reasons above: Skylake-X will increase the core count of Intel’s HEDT platfor