Latest news with #G1Pro
Tom's Guide
26-05-2025
- Tom's Guide
I didn't expect this mini PC that looks like a PS5 to be this powerful or customizable — and now I can't wait to try it out
It's not every day that a new mini PC comes along that wasn't even on my radar. However, that's exactly what happened with the upcoming Minisforum G1 / G1 Pro, which, with its white and black design and vertical orientation, sure looks a lot like a PS5 at first glance. After being spotted at the Japan IT Week Spring event in April, I finally got a chance to see it for myself in person at Computex 2025. In fact, it was sitting right next to the AtomMan G7 Ti I reviewed last year. Like the G7 Ti, the G1 Pro is also meant to be used in a vertical orientation and is designed for playing the best PC games. However, while the G7 Ti is incredibly thin and almost looks like one of the best gaming laptops without a screen or keyboard, the G1 Pro is a bit thicker with a more console-like appearance. Minisforum is putting that extra space to good use, though, and this mini PC has a trick up its sleeve I haven't seen anywhere else yet. While I'll definitely need to get a G1 Pro in for testing to see if it really is one of the best mini PCs when it comes out this summer, I already have high hopes for this one. That's because along with its sleek, eye–catching design, Minisforum has deviated from its usual formula by making this mini PC surprisingly upgradeable. At 12.4 x 8.5 x 2.3 inches, the Minisforum G1 Pro isn't nearly as tall or as thin as the AtomMan G7 Ti, and you'll definitely have an easier time fitting this in an entertainment center. Since it's designed with 1440p gaming in mind, it's more likely that you'll have it on your desk instead. However, with DLSS 4 enabled, you should be able to play games in 4K with some upscaling and frame generation on your TV. To make its white side panels stand out, Minisforum has added some grooves to both the one on the right and left sides of the G1 Pro. The latter also has ventilation holes cut out in the shape of a triangle, and there's one at the bottom and top of this side panel. While the G1 Pro comes with a plastic vertical stand included, since there are no cutouts for ventilation on the one side, you'll likely be able to use this mini PC vertically or horizontally, which you couldn't do with the G7 Ti. On the front of the G1 Pro, there's a USB-A port, a USB-C port, a headphone/microphone combo jack and the power button. All of these front ports are located in the middle of the device and there are RGB strips above and below them with a small Minisforum logo at the base of this mini PC. While I wish there was an SD card reader like on the G7 Ti, it makes sense that Minisforum omitted one as this is a mini PC designed for gaming after all. I do like how the RGB lighting is a bit more minimalistic this time around compared to the strip of downward-facing arrows on the G7 Ti. On the back of the G1 Pro, there's a single USB-C port, two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port and a 5 gigabit Ethernet port. It's worth noting that both the front and back USB-C ports are capable of outputting video as well as data, so you don't just have to rely on that HDMI 2.1 port. Compared to the G7 Ti, you're getting an extra USB-C port on the front, an extra USB-A port on the back and, most importantly, you won't need to lug around a bulky power brick to lug around since the G1 Pro has an internal 350W power supply instead. This way, you can use a Universal Power Cord like the ones found on other desktop computers and the best gaming PCs. The G1 Pro has another upgrade that I haven't seen on a mini PC since I reviewed the AtomMan G7 PT. This time around, though, it's even better. Minisforum G1 / G1 Pro Specs CPU AMD Ryzen 9 8945X GPU Nvidia RTX 5060 8GB GDDR7 (G1 Pro), Nvidia RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6 (G1) RAM Up to 96GB DDR5 Storage 2 x M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 Ports 1 x USB-A, 1 x USB-C, 1 x 3.5mm combo jack (front), 2 x USB-A, 1 x USB-C, 3 x HDMI 2.1, 2 x DisplayPort 1.4, 1 x 5 Gbps Ethernet, 1 x DC power port Connectivity Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 Power 350W (internal) Dimensions 350W (internal) Operating system Windows 11 If you look at the G1 Pro from above, you notice that there are additional vents on the top. Instead of cooling the PC itself, these are actually for its discrete graphics card. That's right, the G1 Pro comes with an Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU while the G1 comes with a slightly less powerful though cheaper RTX 4060 GPU. Normally, on mini PCs, you're working with a laptop version of a particular graphics card. However, that isn't the case here. Instead, you're getting a full desktop graphics card in a very compact package. With either an RTX 4060 or RTX 5060, you get two HDMI 2.1 ports and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports. This allows you to power four displays with either graphics card. When combined with the ports on the G1 Pro's motherboard, you could technically power six displays from this mini PC. However, this will depend on how Minisforum has configured the system's BIOS and motherboard. Even then, though, powering four displays from the G1 Pro is still impressive. What makes the G1 Pro even better is the fact that its graphics card is upgradeable. Not only does this give you an upgrade path down the line, it also means that you could go with the cheaper G1 to save money in the short term and then upgrade its graphics card from an RTX 4060 to an RTX 5060 when you've saved up enough money. Even though they're much smaller than your standard desktop, most mini PCs provide you with some upgradeability. Usually, this includes the option to add a second M.2 SSD or even a 2.5-inch SSD or HDD along with being able to add more memory. With the G1 and G1 Pro, Minisforum is doing things a bit differently by also giving you the option to upgrade its graphics card. At Computex 2025, Minisforum told me that the G1 Pro should be ready to ship this summer. However, pricing for both the G1 and G1 Pro hasn't been revealed yet. Given that the AtomMan G7 Ti had a list price of $1,600, I'd expect this new mini PC to go for slightly more. Still though, the G1 Pro will likely be cheaper than the more powerful version of the Asus ROG NUC 970 I reviewed last year or the new ROG NUC (2025). I absolutely plan on getting a G1 Pro in for review, so stay tuned. With its white and black design, it could be the perfect mini PC for the same colored desk setup I'm currently putting together for another review. The Minisforum G1 / G1 Pro shows that just because a mini PC is small, that doesn't mean it can't be mighty too and I'm really excited to test one out for myself.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How this Ukrainian walkie-talkie maker caught the attention of the US military
Himera is a Ukrainian tech startup that makes electronic warfare-resistant walkie-talkies. It was founded after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its products are being tested by the US Air Force. The Ukrainian defense tech industry has boomed in recent years. From drone and robotics makers to electronic warfare system providers, Ukrainian innovation has been on full display since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022. One company to have sprung up since the conflict began is Himera, which makes electronic warfare-resistant walkie-talkies. Its products include the G1 Pro — a tactical handheld radio — and the B1 repeater, which extends communication ranges. Despite only having launched in 2022, the company has quickly caught the attention of the defense tech industry, as well as the US military. The product's major selling point is that it offers a potential solution to one of the defining challenges of the war in Ukraine — electronic warfare. The G1 is EW-resistant, using frequency-hopping technology to help evade electronic warfare interference, which seeks to disrupt and jam certain signals like GPS, radio, and video. Reticulate Micro, which supplies Himera's radios in the US, announced the first US delivery of G1 Pro radios to the US Air Force in October 2024. The company said the Air Force would test the G1 Pro alongside Reticulate's Video Assured Secure Transmission (VAST) technology, which delivers real-time video streaming. In a press release at the time, Joshua Cryer, then the president and CEO of Reticulate Micro, said: "By combining the Himera G1 Pro with VAST, we're aiming to democratize secure video transmission on the battlefield—empowering every warfighter with video-capable radio technology for enhanced situational awareness." Misha Rudominski, one of Himera's cofounders, told Business Insider that Himera's tech "bridges the gap" between tactical and commercial communications solutions. "We take the best from both worlds," he said. "We provide all the tactical relevant functionality like low probability of detection, low probability of interception, and low probability of jamming, which you don't find in commercial spec solutions." "But we do it in a very user-friendly way," he continued. "We want the lightest radio, we have one of the longest battery lives on the market." The G1 Pro has a battery life of around 48 hours and weighs just 300 grams. It can support the transmission of multiple information types, such as GPS, voice data, and texts, and is programmable by an encrypted app on a mobile or tablet device. "We make a very scalable and affordable solution," Rudominski added. "The scalability is a big point because we only use commercial off-the-shelf components." Representatives for Himera told Ukrainian news outlet Militarnyi in March that the company was "producing up to 1,000 radios per month" and that it had the capacity to "scale quickly to 2,500 units." "For large-scale orders, we are prepared to supply 10,000 to 15,000 radios per month," they said. Innovation has been crucial to Kyiv's fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces, and Ukrainian firms have continually adapted to meet the battlefield's ever-evolving demands. Rudominski told BI that this had also been key to Himera's success. "Over the last three years, we've done more than 80 versions of firmware updates," he said. "We've done more than probably 20 versions of separate kinds of hardware products. Most of them didn't go into production, but most of them have at some capacity been tested on the battlefield." Along with Reticulate, Himera has also partnered with Quantropi, a Canadian quantum security company, to integrate its security solutions into Himera's products. "We have our own software, but they can enhance our capacity," Rudominski said. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Don't try to build a whole new drone:' How one Ukrainian wartime startup got into quantum encryption — and the West
One Ukrainian startup has rebuilt the humble walkie-talkie to weather the waves of modern electronic war with Russia. With thousands of Ukrainian soldiers already using their handheld comms devices, NATO is tuning in. Himera, the walkie-talkie startup in question is about to get a new layer of encryption that founder Misha Rudominsky says will guard their devices against the impending arrival of quantum computing on the battlefield — a technological threat that is rattling wartime communications experts worldwide. More immediately, $1.2 million in fundraising, active EU manufacturing, U.S. Air Force testing, and a distribution deal with a Canadian firm are putting Himera on the threshold of selling to NATO and the U.S. Defense Department itself. Himera is one of Ukraine's first startups born in response to Russia's 2022 invasion to get a shot with the broader world's biggest armies. Himera grew out of Rudominsky's earlier project, Promin Aerospace — like so many Ukrainian startups, a drone company. It's a market that Rudominsky found saturated, saying, 'There are a hundred companies in every niche who have tried everything,' and advising anyone with startup aspirations not 'to build a whole new drone.' Battlefield communications were, he found, a wide-open area for advancement. Ukrainian soldiers have largely depended on cheap Motorola walkie-talkies never meant to function in battle. By targeting that market, Rudominsky and his team have sold something like 6,000 of their G1 and G1 Pro models to Ukrainian units. They are not feats of physical engineering — their components are off-the-shelf products that are easy to find within Ukraine or at other workshops in the European Union. But the software is resilient, Rudominsky says. The hand units link up to mobile phones, allowing encrypted texting and exchange of battlefield planning through apps via radio rather than depending on cell service or Starlink satellites. The complete set-up boasts coveted Ukrainian battlefield testing. The real inventiveness was in going small — cheap tactical handhelds that operate on low radio frequencies and tiny electrical charges that slip by Russian sensors and jammers. A new algorithm securing communications between Himera's devices, says Jay Toth, a representative for Canadian encryption startup Quantropi, will also minimize both required computing power and battery consumption. 'Radio communication, satellite, and video are the three really important data streams on the modern battlefield and we've got a pathway to help with the encryption and security on each one,' Toth told the Kyiv Independent. In February, Himera announced a deal with Quantropi to put the Ottawa-based startup's quantum-prepped encryption algorithms into their systems. Like top-secret encryption among the U.S. government and elsewhere worldwide, Himera currently uses Advanced Encryption Standard 256, or AES 256 — for decades the gold standard but now under threat from quantum computing. Quantum computing is forcing cryptographers to reconsider how safe their communications are. In August, the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology released new algorithms that jolted cryptographers with a warning to prepare for 'quantum computers that would operate in radically different ways from ordinary computers and could break the current encryption that provides security and privacy for just about everything we do online.' Toth says Quantropi's default encryption keys are four times the size of AES-256's, but thanks to different math it runs between '10–14 times faster.' The G1 Pros will, however, still have AES-256 as an option so they can link up with non-Himera devices. Specifically, says Rudominsky, this matters as more and more of their radio repeaters — larger less mobile units that handle more data — head out to market. These bigger terminals are prime targets for the 'record now, decode later,' in which cyber powers are gathering data encrypted with AES-256 assuming that they'll be able to break it in a matter of years. 'At some point, we'll have quantum computers,' says Rudominsky. 'Is it going to be in five years, 10, or 15 years? We don't really know. But what everyone is betting on — what the Chinese are betting on, what the Americans are betting on, I don't know if the Russians are betting on it yet, but if you have enough capacity as a country to record a lot of information, you can break into some database, you might not be able to decode it, but you can at least record the encrypted information.' Toth said Himera immediately catches the eye of representatives of upwards of half a dozen NATO militaries he has spoken to. As one of the 17 firms in NATO's DIANA defense tech accelerator, Quantropi is also getting in on a distribution deal to sell the walkie-talkies Himera is building in the EU to NATO countries. And conversely, Himera is helping Quantropi fulfill its pitch to get its technology on the battlefield. 'What we proposed that got us into the program was using our encryption on these small, resource-constrained devices in the battlefield,' Toth explains. 'It wasn't any more specific than that when we made the pitch.' Himera is consequently coming close to the prized market of the U.S. Defense Department. The U.S. Air Force's Research Lab is currently testing out Himera's radios, says Toth, who estimates that a report on the lab's findings will go out in about a month. 'We've been told anecdotally that everything is going to be very positive,' he continued. 'The price point of a G1Pro is at a minimum five to ten times less expensive than most tactical radios on the market today,' says Toth. 'Every NATO nation I've talked to, every NATO Defense Ministry I've talked to did a double-take when I told them what the price point was and said 'Yes, follow up, I'm sending this to my people.'' Rudominsky similarly foresees a major market among less wealthy militaries in, especially, southeast Asia facing a technologically savvy and increasingly belligerent China. The U.S. Defense Department in contrast pays tens of thousands of dollars for individual military-grade walkie-talkies from brands like L3Harris. Rudominsky notes that the U.S. radio giant formally launched its Falcon IV model six years ago but hasn't released a more compact screen-less version ready for soldiers, despite teasing it. For comparison, he says, 'In less than three years, we've already launched and sunset our first product.' 'A lot of those companies are lacking in innovation,' says Rudominsky. 'They used to be the most advanced products — 10 years ago, I would say at that point, they probably were at the top of what could be done. But then everyone slowed down.' Read also: Ukraine's long-awaited weapons tech investment boom is finally kicking off We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
