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

Intel's first blockbuster chip was the 8088 – and it changed everything 45 years ago

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 1 April 24

This chip that powered one of the most iconic computers in the world – the IBM PC

Looking back at the chip that changed how we accessed the World Wide Web, 30 years on

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 31 March 24

Internet speeds shot up from roughly 56kbps to 100Mbps thanks to the Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set – which propelled DSL into the mainstream

30 years ago, a merger marked the beginning of the end for Aldus and the birth of the Adobe we know today

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 15 March 24

While Adobe was prospering, Aldus was struggling, but the two companies came together to change the foundations of the desktop publishing industry

Looking back at the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X — the first mobile phone that was ever sold 40 years ago today

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 13 March 24

The first mobile phone offered 30 minutes of speaking time on a single charge, but was "revolutionary" for what it has paved the way for since

30 years of the Dell Latitude – from impressive battery-powered productivity to AI PCs

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 12 March 24

The $3,399 device boasted enough battery life to get you from London to New York and back if you were flying on Concorde.

The World Wide Web just turned 35 years — and please, stop calling it the Internet

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 12 March 24

The internet has vastly changed since its inception in 1989, with big data, AI and faster connections transforming how people use it

1/100th of the cost: CPU startup Tachyum claims that one of its processing units can rival dozens of Nvidia H200 GPUs — with a 99% saving that could turn the AI market on its head if true

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 26 January 24

The 5nm Prodigy processor can dynamically switch between AI, HPC, and cloud workloads and costs $23,000

Isometric server-side processing concept

‘Future servers could have a shared DPU’: Could the next decade see a rise in socket heterogeneity?

By Desire Athow Published 21 January 24

Dual-socket servers may no longer be the 'be all and end all', with single-socket and quad-socket servers more viable than we thought.

AI helps the world's biggest tech firms smash $10 trillion market capitalization ceiling — Nvidia replaces Facebook as the new kid on the block while Microsoft displaces Apple at the helm

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 21 January 24

Meta has yet to go above $1 trillion, despite recently pivoting to generative AI

Promotional image for the Crucial T700 Gen5 NVMe SSD.

Revolutionary cooling system helps Micron unleash SSD solution that tops a whopping 45GBps — Airjet delivers yet another convincing tour-de-force to keep four PCI 5.0 SSD running

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 20 January 24

By using four AirJet Minis, Micron is cooling four PCIe 5.0 SSDs enough to sustain peak performance for longer.

A representative abstraction of artificial intelligence

If you want to run AI training and inference on almost any GPU, then this startup may be the answer

By Desire Athow Published 14 January 24

Akash augments existing IT infrastructure to optimize it for the AI age.

Hard disk drives are next in line to become mostly enterprise hardware — as Nvidia (and AMD) could be planning to focus on AI, leaving consumers as second-class citizens

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 13 January 24

With hard drive shipments down, and enterprises keen to get in on the AI action, will the likes of Nvidia and AMD eventually ditch the consumer market altogether?

Company behind most powerful mobile workstation ever vanishes — say goodbye for your dreams of owning a 192-core transportable computer with 3TB of RAM

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 13 January 24

MediaWorkstation's wild six-screen a-X2P workstation may sadly be no longer.

Intel bets on a secret weapon to beat AMD in some AI workloads — AVX-512 instructions will help Xeon beat Epyc in specific scenarios but Intel will have to work much, much harder to worry AMD

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 13 January 24

Enabling AVX-512 more than triples performance on various AI-related workloads, according to benchmarking.

"Thousand times brighter than OLED": How cheap material bound to revolutionize solar panels could one day also make your laptop display finally readable in bright sunlight

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 12 January 24

Scientists swapped out carbon for perovskite semiconductors to demonstrate the power of a future PeLED technology.

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

Dell cosies up with AMD to expand its generative AI portfolio to offer more choice to customers — it's also embracing standards-based networking, a thinly veiled dig at Nvidia

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 25 December 23

Dell's PowerEdge XE9680 system features eight AMD Instinct MI300X AI accelerators each.

"Simply the best OEM SSD ever made": Micron's new SSD gets glowing reviews thanks to new controller and new NAND — Expect it to come to a workstation PC near you

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 25 December 23

Micron's 3500 1TB SSD is a four-channel PCIe Gen4 SSD that is faster than "99.9%" of its eight-channel rivals.

"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.

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