Hasta La Gadget!

If you think Intel chips are just for PCs, take a look at this touchscreen kiosk that the company has created for retailers.

The hulk of metal, plastic and glass looks like a Star Trek prop but it promises to replace the traditional CRT monitors with green-tinted screens that are still at the check out point in most stores.

The kiosk tries to bring the best features of online shopping, such as recommendations, history and easy check-out to retail stores, says Ryan Parker, director of marketing and architecture. We first wrote about this last year but Intel had a polished and slicker-than-ever demo ready Wednesday.

When a customer swipes a card or slides their purchase across the horizontal screen, the display will show the price and payment options –which include the option to pay by cellphone. As you scan the items, the kiosk also makes recommendations on what else you can buy and gives you a quick snapshot of it.

The entire kiosk is powered by Intel’s Core2Duo processors and it uses a solid state drive that helps the overall system work faster and consume less power than existing registers.  The chips also include Intel’s vPro technology, a virtualization technology that Intel builds into the chip itself, to make it secure and easy to manage.

The whole set-up is pretty neat, especially when you compare it to the self-check out counters at a Safeway or Lowes. But I can also see something like this potentially slowing down the check out process and longer lines at exit are not something consumers want.

Intel says it retailers don’t have to buy this whole idea as it is. They can pick the pieces they want and integrate it into their existing stores.

See Also:

• Why Intel Wants to Get into Energy
• Intel Introduces Ultra-Low-Power Processor for Smartphones
• Intel Researchers Turn Counter Tops Into Touchscreens
• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet

Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? Or when a rumor plays out perfectly? We’re looking at a case of the latter here today, as HP‘s oh-so-lovable 12-inch TouchSmart tm2 is now available to order with a Core i5 processor. Just months after gaining Core i3 support, the convertible tablet can now be ordered with a 1.2GHz Core i5-430UM (capable of hitting 1.73GHz with Turbo Boost). Said CPU can be paired with integrated Intel graphics or with a discrete ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450, and 4GB of DDR3 RAM is standard on either configuration. Hit the links below to investigate further, but be sure to keep your plastic far, far away unless you’re kosher with impulse buys of a rather significant caliber.

HP TouchSmart tm2 gains Core i5 CPU option, a whole new level of respect originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just this once, DigiTimes has turned out to be spot on with its prognostication. The six-core Core i7-970 rumor we heard earlier this month has now transmogrified into a retail product, and just as promised, it brings most of the goodies of the sublime i7-980X at a moderately more affordable $899 price point. Based on the same 32nm Gulftown architecture as its costlier brother, the 970 will run at 3.2GHz by default, though presumably it too will be able to crank up speeds using Intel’s Turbo Boost. Aside from that, you get a healthy 12MB of on-chip cache and the standard triple-channel DDR3 memory controller. UK speed freaks can order one up as well now, clearly a tiny bit ahead of Intel itself making things official, so we’d advise checking with your nearest super-CPU purveyors in case they too have received some early units of this multithreaded code cruncher.

[Thanks, Polytonic]

Intel’s 3.2GHz hexacore i7-970 now shipping originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Right now, Intel has every right to lay contentedly atop the laurels of its biggest quarterly profit ever, but that’s not what the company is doing at all. Instead of protracting the life of its current-gen processors unduly, Intel is planning to accelerate the roadmap for its next generation of multicore parts, codenamed Sandy Bridge. The difference between the Nehalem-based stuff we have today and the upcoming chip is that the Sandy Bridge architecture takes everything down to 32nm — including the graphics processor and memory controller which are built at 45nm at present — while keeping it all within the same enclosure. Enthusiastic feedback from customers who were given tasters of the Sandy stuff has been to blame for this haste on Intel’s part, and we’re told that with additional investment in 32nm infrastructure, the chip giant plans to make deliveries late this year. That in turn could potentially result in some eager vendor pushing a Sandy Bridge laptop or desktop out before 2010 is through — which would be all kinds of nice.

Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs to arrive ahead of schedule, could be with us this year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When we met with Finnish startup Aava Mobile today, they pulled out the same old prototype phone… then, to our great surprise, dropped a brand-new device right alongside to show us how their Moorestown-based ambitions have grown. This is the Virta 2 reference design, which will ship to developers soon, with the same basic hardware inside but a few important tweaks. First of all, you’ll note that’s MeeGo on this screen, not the droid we were looking for, but that’s because the development kit can switch between operating systems by merely swapping out the microSD card.

Whereas the original prototype had a thin, flimsy shell, the Virta 2’s gone downright rugged, ditching the iPhone chrome for a more durable gunmetal frame, and there’s a full compliment of sensors (compass, accelerometer, ambient light and proximity) alongside quad-band radios, WiFi, Bluetooth and a pair of cameras for your video chat testing needs. At €1900 (roughly $2393) per unit, the dev handset isn’t exactly cheap, but where else are you going to get an Atom Z600 to play around with? Devices ship late August or early September, and Aava expects the platform (but not this exact handset) to see commercial availability next year. Find preorders at our source link, if you’ve got the bankroll.

Aava Mobile reveals Virta 2 smartphone development kit, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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