AMD "crowns" the R7 entry-level graphics card series with the R7 265-- a mid-range card filling the performance/pricing gap left between the R7 260x and the R9 270.

It carries 2Gb DDR5 RAM on a 256-bit bus, promising up to 1.89 TFLOPS of compute performance and memory speeds of 5.6Gbps for a 25% performance boost over the aforementioned R7 260x. Connections come through PCI-E 3.

The popularity of the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) storage interface might be waning in the face of SATA and RAID but the interface trucks on-- the SCSI Trade Association (STA) got a new board of directors for 2014.

The standard even went through a number milestones during 2013, with the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface reaching the final standardisation of SAS-3 by T10, with volume deployments of 12Gb/s SAS products.

The decline of the W. European PC market continues Gartner reports-- Q4 2013 sees shipments decline by -4.4% Y-o-Y to 14.7 million units, with drops across all segments and territories.

Mobile and desktop PC shipments for the quarter decline by -6.5% and -0.3% Y-o-Y respectively. Shipments to the professional segment are down by -1.7%, while the consumer market drops by -7%.

"Shipments for traditional PCs (desktops and mobile PCs) in 2013 decreased -14%, but the rate of unit decline is moderate across geographies-— which could indicate that the impact of tablets cannibalizing PC sales in mature markets is fading," the analyst says. "Additionally, large numbers of professional PCs running on Windows XP remained in use, and the corporate market has been increasing its PC replacement-— making up for a weak consumer PC market."

IBM researchers claim they created a graphene-based circuit with performance 10000 times better than current options-- or at least one reliable enough to send and receive text messages.

As described in Nature the circuit features acts as a radio frequency receiver, meaning it translates radio waves into information one can understand, as well as send signals back and forth. Tests involved sending a message on a 4.3GHz carrier signal saying "IBM," which was sent and received distortion-free.

“This is the first time that someone has shown graphene devices and circuits to perform modern wireless communication functions comparable to silicon technology,” IBM says.