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

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

"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.

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

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