Articles by Keumars Afifi-Sabet, Freelance Contributor

Keumars Afifi-Sabet is a freelance contributor for Tech Radar and Technology Editor for Live Science. He has written for a variety of publications including ITPro, The Week Digital and ComputerActive. He has worked as a technology journalist for more than five years, having previously held the role of features editor with ITPro. In his previous role, he oversaw the commissioning and publishing of long form in areas including AI, cyber security, cloud computing and digital transformation.

An NCTJ-qualified journalist who specialises in technology, his path into journalism began at university. He immersed himself in student media while studying for a degree in biomedical sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. After graduating, Keumars wrote for a variety of local and national publications as a freelancer, including The Independent, The Observer, and Metro. While studying for his NCTJ certification, his work was commended in the category of ‘Top Scoop’ in the 2017 NCTJ awards. He’s also registered as a foundational chartered manager with the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), having qualified as a Level 3 Team leader with distinction in 2023.

Articles by: Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Most formidable supercomputer ever is warming up for ChatGPT 5 — thousands of 'old' AMD GPU accelerators crunched 1-trillion parameter models

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 12 January 24

Scientists trained a GPT-4-sized model using much fewer GPUs than you'd ordinarily need.

Press shots of The Portable Monitor's five-display laptop via two devices

Obscure Belgian startup wants you to connect four monitors to your laptop in a bid to boost your productivity — great for those looking to create their own hydra workstation

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 10 January 24

Portable Monitor lets you connect two of its devices to your laptop using USB-C to give you five interconnected displays in total.

"Blowing hot air": review of tiny Zotac mini PC that comes with innovative silent cooling chip finds out that it works pretty well — but heatsink and fan makers don't need to worry just yet

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 26 December 23

The Zotac ZBox PI430AJ mini PC, fitted with the Frore Systems AirJet cooling system, didn't exceed 70 degrees Celsius

"Stick them on disk": Plucky UK firm wants humble hard drives to win data war against tape, optical disks and cloud storage — and it plans to do so by getting rid of RAID and slowing down spinning disks to a full stop

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 24 December 23

The ALTO system spins up for only 50 hours a year, which extends lifespan by up to 15 years.

AMD is betting on strategic partners to one-up Nvidia — with 50-year-old Ethernet being at the heart of an alliance looking to promote a wider, more balanced ecosystem

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 24 December 23

Why AMD is buying into the Ultra Ethernet Consortium to improve its inter-chip networking technology

Google is rapidly turning into a formidable opponent to BFF Nvidia — the TPU v5p AI chip powering its hypercomputer is faster and has more memory and bandwidth than ever before, beating even the mighty H100

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 23 December 23

Google's latest AI chip is up to 2.8 times faster at training LLMs than its predecessor, and is fitted into the AI Hypercomputing architecture

Startup wants to rival Nvidia and end GPU shortage by going back to basics — betting on CPUs may not seem a great idea but just hear these guys out

By Desire Athow Published 23 December 23

With GPUs in really high demand, there might be a way to configure CPUs to be a reliable stopgap solution to getting your AI dream off the ground

SO-DIMM laptop memory sticks to disappear as CAMM poised to take over — new RAM format comes to market, but may be a mere stopgap before tech industry moves to on-chip system memory à la Apple

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 17 December 23

Your next laptop is about to get a massive speed boost, thanks to CAMM.

Nvidia produces a mysterious new powerful professional graphics card for the Chinese market only — something tells me there may be more coming

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 14 December 23

The Nvidia RTX 5880 is powered by the same GPU that's fitted into the banned RTX 6000 Ada series – but selling it in China won't be a problem.

Someone reviewed a stealth HDD that's not supposed to exist – meet Seagate's very unique 25TB hard drive, so special it's not listed anywhere, and won't work with Windows or Mac

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 13 December 23

The Exos X26z is the largest hard drive Seagate makes – but you currently can't buy it anywhere unless you're a very specific type of customer.

Meta has done something that will get Nvidia and AMD very, very worried — it gave up on GPU and CPU to take a RISC-y route for AI training and inference acceleration

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 12 December 23

The RISC-V ecosystem has a huge supporter in the form of Meta, which sees the ISA as a means to acheive its AI ambitions

Panmnesia's CXL 3.0 technology winning a coveted award

Obscure startup wins prestigious CES 2024 award — you've probably never heard of it, but Panmnesia is the company that could make ChatGPT 6 (or 7) times faster

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 11 December 23

This AI accelerator could make large language models perform dozens of times faster than current-day hardware

AMD new Instinct MI300A is the most powerful APU ever with 24 Zen 4 cores and an ultra-powerful GPU that matches Nvidia's best — it is shipping today and could be the biggest threat yet to Nvidia H100's hegemony

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 9 December 23

The AI arms race continues apace with AMD's first APU for data centers and HPC.

You will need an Nvidia GPU to achieve some of the fastest SSD speeds ever — here's how and why

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 8 December 23

The configuration reached speeds of up to 260GB/s

The Ayar Labs optical light technology on show at SC23

Nvidia-backed startup uses Intel chip to replace electrical signals with light to reach Tbps speeds – here is what it looks like in the flesh

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 7 December 23

The optical system could be foundational to technologies like 6G, company claims

Somebody holding a pane of glass on which you can store data

Microsoft inches closer to glass storage breakthrough that could finally make ransomware attacks impossible in the data center and hyperscalers — but only Azure customers will benefit from it

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 6 December 23

The technology is strikingly similar to ceramics-based storage and may replace current day technology soon

An AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor seated into a black motherboard

The fastest 'storage device' you can buy — enthusiast uses AMD Ryzen's 3D V-Cache to produce tiny, uber-fast pseudo SSD that could pave way to exciting prospects

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 5 December 23

The best SSDs out there can't exceed 150GB/s yet – but the AMD CPU hit speeds up to 180GB/s

A slate from a line of storage media being removed

Video of ceramic storage system prototype surfaces online — 10,000TB cartridges bombarded with laser rays could become mainstream by 2030, making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 1 December 23

Ceramics-based storage medium consumes very little energy and lasts more than 5,000 years, creators say.

Image of a data center seen through glass with water dripping off it

'A mini data center village under the sea' — China sinks tens of thousands of powerful servers in fresh seawater as it grapples with demand for more power

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 30 November 23

China's underwater data center facility could save 122 million kWh of electricity and 105,000 tons of water each year

Hard drive prices could go up significantly after the rumored 'collapse' of key player — paving the way for growing SSD domination in the storage market

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 29 November 23

With hard drive shipments collapsing already, supply chain disruption could be a major setback for Seagate and Western Digital

AMD's 96-core behemoth just sent Intel's best processor into oblivion to claim 19 world speed records — and it's only just getting started

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 29 November 23

Workstation speed demon could be set to dominate the charts for many, many months to come

Western Digital finally unveils 28TB HDD as race for 30TB reaches boiling point — but the Ultrastar DC HC680 remains a data center HDD that no consumers will be able to use

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 26 November 23

Both companies are hoping to launch more-than-30TB hard drives next year… but who will strike first?

China in a bull shop: One of the largest Chinese tech companies has announced a 'game-changing' 3,072-core RISC-V server that used an indigeneous CPU — on US soil

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 25 November 23

China hits a key milestone with Alibaba demonstrating the first cloud server powered by a RISC-V chip.

Seagate has launched a massive 29TB hard disk drive that almost nobody noticed — but you can only buy the biggest ever HDD in a 2500TB storage device

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 24 November 23

Seagate's Corvault HAMR drives won't be sold separately.

I think Microsoft Azure “Eagle” is probably the most important tech news of 2023 that you haven't heard of — here's why

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 23 November 23

Microsoft's Eagle supercomputer is the most powerful cloud-facing system in the world.

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