Hasta La Gadget!

Today’s the day, trivia fans, when “Paul Otellini” stops being the answer to the question “Who is the CEO of Intel?” A fortnight ago, after a prolonged bout of speculation, current COO Brian Krzanich was anointed as the Silicon Valley giant’s sixth leader — giving him a mere two weeks to order a new desk and buy a fancier sports car. He’ll be joined by Renée James, who is assuming the mantle of company president today. The pair is taking control of a company that is top of the PC food chain, but which has yet to mount a credible challenge to ARM’s mobile dominance — but the strategic stuff can wait until tomorrow, once they’ve settled in.

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Intel

Comments

AMD might have already unveiled their HD 8000M series graphics back in December and at CES 2013, but they left out a certain chip in particular and saved it for today. The company unveiled the Radeon HD 8970M, which they claim is the world’s fastest laptop graphics chip, saying that it outpaces NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 680M graphics.

The new chip features AMD’s new “Graphics Core Next” architecture, and it’s quite a big jump up from the company’s HD 8800M series. The 8970M features 1,280 stream processors, and a clock speed of 850MHz with a memory speed of 1.2GHz. The new chip should be able to handle pretty much any new game you throw at it on your laptop.

As for the first laptop to get the new 8970M, it’ll be the MSI GX70, which will come with an AMD A10 quad-core processor, Eyefinity support, Killer gaming network card, and will have a 17.3-inch display with a 1920×1080 resolution. However, we should be seeing more laptops with the new graphics chip later this year, possibly next month at Computex.

Of course, you’ll be paying a pretty penny for any machine that will run AMD’s latest graphics chip, with the GX70 most likely exceeding well over $1,000, but they also have slower 8000M series chips that the company unveiled in January, including the 8500M, 8600M, and the 8700M. Of course, the 8500M may not live up to AMD’s 8970M chip, but the 384 stream processors along with the 650MHz clock speed and 1,125MHz memory speed should keep you humming along with most games while on the go.

AMD Radeon HD 8970M claims world’s fastest laptop graphics crown is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Who says a carbon fiber chassis with sufficient cooling for a Core i7 has to be heavy? The ThinkPad X230s, revealed on Lenovo’s Chinese site following a partial leak in January, looks like a significantly more portable version of last year’s X230, with a weight of just 1.28kg (2.8 pounds) and a minimum thickness of 17.7mm (0.7 inches). There’s room inside for up to 8GB of RAM, either a 240GB SSD or 1TB HDD, fingerprint reader, 720p webcam, VGA and Mini DisplayPort outputs, two USB 3.0 ports and keyboard backlighting. It’s a Windows 8 machine, of course, with shortcut keys and a gesture-optimized TrackPad. We’re on the lookout for further details, including any pricing, and will update this post soon as we have some.

Update: We’re going to hazard a guess that the resolution is 1,366 x 768, based on the January leak. Chinese pricing looks to be around 7,399 yuan ($1,200).

[Thanks, Os]

Filed under: Laptops, Lenovo

Comments

Source: Lenovo

We’re still a few weeks away from Intel officially unveiling its fourth-generation Core processors (codenamed Haswell), but NEC has already popped up and unveiled its latest laptop which runs on the new Intel chips. The LaVie L isn’t really much to look at, but it packs quite a punch performance-wise with the new Haswell chip inside.

It’s the company’s first Haswell-based laptop, and other than the processor, the machine runs on 8GB of memory, a 1TB hard drive, and a 32GB solid state drive. The laptop also boasts a 15.6-inch IPS display with an impressive 1920×1980 resolution, which something we don’t see everyday on a lot of laptops.

Of course, there will be different configurations for the LaVie L, with the highest-tier model expected to cost just under $2,000. A wealthy amount of details isn’t quite available yet, as NEC probably knows to wait until Computex next month to fully detail the new notebook as well as the rest of their Haswell lineup, but we certainly can’t blame them for wanting to jump the gun and tease some impatient buyers.

Intel will be announcing its next-generation Core chips at Computex on June 3, at which point we should be seeing a huge slew of desktops, laptops, and hybrid tablets make their way to the market at that point. It’s certainly been a busy time for computer manufacturers, as it was reported that Intel started shipping Haswell chips to OEMs early last month.

We’ve actually already heard some details about Haswell’s graphics portion, which is codenamed Iris, which will bump up the company’s HD Graphics series to 4600 and 5000. These new graphics chips will see a boost in performance over Intel’s previous HD 4000 graphics, as well as battery life improvement. Performance and battery life are the two kickers with Intel’s new Haswell chips, so we should be seeing new laptops that not only contain better graphics performance, but also longer battery life, assuming that OEMs pack in a big enough battery to see an increase.

VIA: CNET

SOURCE: NEC

NEC LaVie L comes out from the dark with Intel Haswell on board is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Looking to save some coin on your tech purchases? Of course you are! In this roundup, we’ll run down a list of the freshest frugal buys, hand-picked with the help of the folks at Slickdeals. You’ll want to act fast, though, as many of these offerings won’t stick around long.

Let’s start off the week with a piece of new tech, shall we? Dell is offering up a 60-inch Samsung slim HDTV with a $500 eGift card and the 11.6-inch ASUS TAICHI is on today’s list as well. Details on that pair and a few more items reside on the other side of the break.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Laptops, Portable Audio/Video, Storage

Comments

Source: Slickdeals