Samsung Electronics today announced the global availability of its all-new Smart Monitor, an innovative, do-it-all screen that brings together an unprecedented suite of features for work, learning and entertainment in a single display.

Designed to meet the new needs of today's consumers, who are now working, learning and consuming entertainment at home, Samsung Smart Monitor incorporates powerful mobile and PC connectivity, remote home office and learning features as well as Smart Hub, a comprehensive entertainment hub, similar to Samsung's built-in Smart TV platform.

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices, announces a new addition to its M700 series of NVMe M.2 SSDs with the high capacity 1 TB. Complying with the NVMe 1.3 standard and using PCIe Gen3 x4, gamers and content creators get up to 3 times performance increase from traditional SATA III drives, a clear advantage for improved productivity and uninterrupted gameplay. With its lightweight, small form factor, and high storage capacity, the M700 1 TB might just be the only drive you will need to build the ultimate budget-friendly system.Update Jan 14th: Our review of the SSD can be found here.

Oracle, which inherited the SPARC CPU machine architecture from its big Sun Microsystems acquisition from way back in 2010, made its biggest SPARC-related announcement ever since. The company is developing a new multi-core SPARC processor, codenamed "M7." This chip, according to Oracle, will not only be in the same league as today's contemporary enterprise CPU architectures, but will also feature Oracle's on-chip optimizations, such as special on-chip firmware, that improves performance and security of applications.

A large, on-chip micro-code would work to ensure security of in-memory databases (the chip would feature an integrated memory controller), and hardware-accelerated compression/decompression of very large databases for near real-time analytics. The M7 is the first SPARC-based processor designed from the ground-up by Oracle, and it will go on sale later this week, as part of the company's new T-series and M-series servers. It will also be offered in upgrade kits for Oracle Supercluster, a high-density machine designed specifically for Oracle.