Thursday, March 3, 2016



















How Dell designs its master class laptops

Dell XPS 15

Dell has shoved off its tarnished reputation for faulty PCs and its cheesy "Dude, you're getting a Dell" ads from the '90s to become a true juggernaut in the computing world. In its XPS profile alone, Dell produces some of the industry's best designed laptops.
As we've previously seen, the Round Rock, Texas firm takes a great deal of time and care into designing the impressive Dell XPS 13. But what exactly is the process of taking a device from concept to prototyping to a final product?
"We do an incredible amount of research," Frank Azor, Dell GM of XPS and Alienware, answers with a grin. We are sitting in the very board room where the company spent two long years deliberating over its latest iteration, the magnificent Dell XPS 15.
Azor continues to explain that the XPS team looks at everything from market data, customer research, customer reviews, new trends in the industry as well as media outlets' reactions.
"We put all of that input together – that's the hardest part of the job, really – to create a hypothesis to what kind of a product do we think is going to be a winner for us," he continues. "We have guiding principles at the same time. With XPS, it has to be better by every measure, so every component has to be the best that's available at that given time."
Dell XPS 15
The Dell XPS 13 in one of its earliest renderings

Better by every measure

These guiding principles help Dell carry a device from the hypothesis stage to working concepts. All too often the final product will look nothing like the original idea.
Case and point, Azor explains this as he picks up the Dell XPS 15 and says, "the hypothesis notebook had thin border bezels on it, but it was maybe a different color, different dimensions, didn't taper off like this in terms of its industrial design [or] this carbon fiber weave might have been darker or lighter."
Motioning to the rest of Dell's Parmer campus in Texas, Azor says this is where it goes through all those iterations of the XPS 15. It all starts with deciding on the internal components and creating industrial design models.

Samsung begins shipping ridonkulous 15.36TB SSD

Aimed at enterprise customers, Samsung's new SSD is the world's largest drive of its kind.


15.36tb ssd 02

Goodbye, hard drives. Samsung said Wednesday it has begun shipping its 15.36TB SSD to customers, making it the largest drive—flash or mechanical—on the market.   
The PM1633a packs all that solid-state storage into a single 2.5-inch enclosure. Stacked 256Gb V-NAND chips comprise 32 dies to reach the 15.36TB total.
Why this matters: Hard drives have been fighting an uphill battle with SSDs for years. While magnetic media has firmly lost the performance battle, it still led the way in capacity—until now.
As it’s meant for enterprise applications, don’t expect to plug the PM1633a into a standard desktop or laptop. The drive features a 12Gbps SAS interface, and Samsung claims it will hit sequential read and write speeds of 1,200MBps. The drive will hit 200,000 IOPS of random read performance, Samsung said.
While standard desktop and laptop applications will likely never wear out an SSD, data center applications can push the limits of flash durability. To address those fears, Samsung said the drive can hit one drive write per day, which means the entire contents of the drive can be written every day without risk of it dying prematurely.
Samsung said it is offering the drive in capacities from 15.36TB down to 960GB, with a 480GB version on tap for later this year. Pricing was not disclosed but the PM1633a isn’t expected to win the price war with magnetic media.
samsungGORDON MAH UNG
Samsung’s crazy-large SSD packs in 15.3TB of storage.