Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 14 gets Core i7 option, extra vroom vroom

We’ll be straight with you, we’re typing away on a Core i3-equipped Edge 14 right now and we rarely feel the need for more power, but then it’s not like Lenovo can afford to keep one of its prettier models sated with just i3s and i5s now, is it? Of course not, so here we are, gazing at a fresh new Core i7-620M upgrade option on the ThinkPad Edge 14, which will set eager buyers back an extra $350 over the more budget-friendly i3-330M default. Opting to splash that hard earned cash will net you Turbo Boost up to 3.33GHz and a not too shabby 2.66GHz regular clock, plus 4MB of cache. The Edge 15, which has so far been just a slightly larger twin to the 14, hasn’t yet felt the warm embrace of upgrade mania, but we suspect it too will soon start offering options from Intel’s top tier.

[Thanks, Jeremy]

Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 14 gets Core i7 option, extra vroom vroom originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell hit by Intel’s antitrust aftershocks, prepares for $100 million settlement

Hounded by international antitrust allegations, Intel fired an initial $1.25 billion salvo’s worth of settlement last year, but now Chipzilla’s biggest distributor of silicon is feeling the heat as well. Dell publicly announced it has set aside a $100 million reserve fund to head off investigations at the pass with a potential settlement of its own. While the company doesn’t admit wrongdoing, it recognizes “alleged violations of negligence-based fraud provisions,” also known as accepting Intel’s controversial chip rebates without reporting them to the government. Dell’s actually been under SEC investigation since 2005 for accounting-related transgressions and the company now hopes to tie up all loose ends at once — here’s hoping we see cheaper Core i7-infused laptops whether or not execs pull it off.

Dell hit by Intel’s antitrust aftershocks, prepares for $100 million settlement originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Startup Builds Power-Efficient Servers With Netbook Chips

Atom chips are the underpowered CPUs inside most netbooks. But one company has found a way to stitch 512 of them together to create a single powerful server.

SeaMicro has used 1.6-GHz Intel Atom processors to create a system that consumes just a fourth of the power and space as a traditional server, while aiming to deliver comparable computing performance.

The concept eschews the use of specialized, high-performance server chips in favor of the Atom processor, which was been designed for netbooks and other mobile devices. Atom is a low-power chip that is designed for tasks such as surfing webpages and checking e-mail among other things.

“We are trying to to build a single big server out of a lot of little chips,” says Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro. “”We can have 2,048 Atom-based processors on a rack delivering the highest density of CPUs in the market.” SeaMicro’s Atom-based server will be available starting July.

Traditionally most servers use Intel’s Xeon or Itanium processors, or AMD’s Opteron chips. These processors deliver high computing strength but also suck power, making utility bills one of the most expensive costs for a data center. Based on its measurements, an Atom chip can deliver half the performance of a Xeon processor for a sixth of the power, says SeaMicro.

“For a server of this nature, this is the first time we have seen Atom chips used,” says Cal Braunstein, chief research officer for research firm Robert Frances Group.

SeaMicro’s server module uses just three components: Intel’s Atom chip, memory and an ASIC designed by the company.

The Atom-based servers target a few specific tasks performed by data centers. In the past, servers were largely used to solve a small number of complex data-based problems, says Feldman. But the internet changed this. In the internet-focused data center, the challenge is to handle millions of small tasks such as searching, mapping and viewing pages quickly, and to do this in a way that can handle unpredictable bursts of traffic.

SeaMicro is going after this market, says Braunstein.

“They are going after boxes in the data center that are really not doing a lot of high-performance computing or database computing,” he says. “By addressing that niche and tightly packaging everything, they can offer a low power processor for a very specific use.”

SeaMicro says it has shrunk the server unit — which it defines as a processor plus memory unit — to the size of a credit card and removed 90 percent of the components that lie on a traditional server. Eight of these credit card-sized servers rest on a 5 inch by 11 inch board. Sixty four of these boards go into a SeaMicro system that’s about 17.5 inches tall and 30 inches deep — approximately 10 rack units in a data center.

Just changing the CPU to a low-power chip, though, isn’t enough says SeaMicro. The trick lies in creating a new architecture that can pull all the chips together and manage their power requirements.

“If you just replace the chips in a traditional server with Atom processors, the power consumption actually goes up,” says Feldman.

Integrating features such as storage, networking and server management into a single ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) helps manage power better, says the company. It has also virtualized the CPU input-output so those modules that would have otherwise occupied space on a board and consumed power don’t anymore.

Though SeaMicro has used Atom processors for its chipset, the company says it has designed its architecture to be flexible and support any CPU. So any low-power chip included that from ARM, which runs on most smartphones today, can become a part of SeaMicro’s system.

But Atom remains the best choice for now, says Feldman. ARM processors used in cellphones consume much lower power than an Atom chip but they also cannot deliver the same kind of computing performance, he claims.

SeaMicro’s Atom servers, though, are not for everyone. They are geared for a very specific kind of server operation — one that involves throwing out a lot of web content, says Braunstein.

That should be good enough for internet giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo to replace some of their servers in their gigantic data center, hopes SeaMicro.

See Also:

Photo: SeaMicro Atom server/SeaMicro


Computex 2010 wrap-up: tablets, a Windows 7 eatery, and a few more tablets

Taipei’s been far too kind to us Westerners, and with Computex drawing to a close here on this side of the world, we can’t help but pull ourselves together for a moment and look back at the trade show that was. It’s been a fairly wild week in news, in large part thanks to the smorgasbord of tablets that have surfaced for the first time during the 30th running of this great event. Both Intel and Microsoft dropped bombshells on the tech world this week, with ASUS, iiView and even the xpPhone making bigger-than-life impressions. If you missed any of the blow-by-blow action over the past week, we’ll work on forgiving you, and while you can relive the memories by visiting the links below, you simply can’t move on with your life without living vicariously through us during our trip to the one and only Windows 7-themed ‘100 Seafood’ restaurant. So long, Taiwan — we’ll be back before you know it.

Major news / product releases:

Hands-on / previews:

Everything else:

After all of that, we’re still just skimming the surface. For the full monty, be sure to check out our Engadget Computex 2010 landing page right here.

A huge, huge thanks goes out to Andy Yang for his invaluable translation skills and all-around amazingness during the show. Another major thank you to the entire Engadget Chinese team for their hospitality and kindness. One final thank you to the nation of Taiwan and city of Taipei — without you, the world would be far less awesome.

Computex 2010 wrap-up: tablets, a Windows 7 eatery, and a few more tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba redesigns Satellite ultrathin laptops, we go hands-on

It’s no secret that the Toshiba Mini NB305 is one of our favorite netbooks on the market, mostly because of its chiclet keyboard and wide touchpad. Thankfully for us, it looks like Toshiba is planning to spread the same design to its ultrathin Satellite lineup sometime soon. Shown above is what appears to be a minty fresh update to the Satellite M135 on the Computex show floor. The 13-inch laptop looked mighty attractive — it’s about an inch thick, and as mentioned has the same sturdy keyboard as the Mini NB305. We’re not the biggest fans of the pattern etched into the metal palmrest, but on the plus side its touchpad has dedicated right and left buttons. We can’t tell you much in the way of specs, but it was on display at the Intel booth with a Core i5-U520 processor and also hanging out at the AMD booth with one of those new Athlon II Neo CPUs. This thing is bound to be official sometime soon, but in the meantime check out the hands-on shots below and start saving up for what could be one of the best ultrathins headed to the market.

Toshiba redesigns Satellite ultrathin laptops, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 09:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 7 tablet roundup from Computex, nay Tabletex

Tabletex. Yep, that’s what we’re calling this year’s Computex since you truly cannot go a few steps on the show floor without stumbling upon a new tablet of some kind. If you’ve been reading our coverage for the past few days, you know that Intel and Microsoft didn’t show up in Taipei empty handed — both of their booths are incredibly well stocked with new slates. Most of them, which range from early prototypes to quite functional, have 10-inch displays, run Windows 7 Premium and pack Intel Atom Z or N series processors — in essence they’re very much netbooks sans the keyboard panel. There are way too many of them to count, but don’t you worry, we’ve rounded up some details and shots of the most appealing ones on display here at the show. Follow on after the break for a look at some of the newest Wintel tablets. And check the gallery below for a variety of hands-on shots.

Continue reading Windows 7 tablet roundup from Computex, nay Tabletex

Windows 7 tablet roundup from Computex, nay Tabletex originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 07:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ARM, Samsung, IBM, Freescale, TI and more join to form Linaro, speed rollout of Linux-based devices

My, my — what have we here? No, seriously, what is this hodgepodge of (rival) companies, and why have they suddenly decided to high five each other here at Computex? Frankly, we’re still trying to piece it all together, but after sitting through a Linaro launch event in Taipei, we’re beginning to get a better handle on the relationship that Samsung, ARM, IBM, Freescale, ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments and the Linux Foundation have just made official. The outfits mentioned above are coming together to form the UK-based Linaro (a not-for-profit entity), which currently has 25 engineers but will see that figure shoot up to nearly a hundred around the world in the coming days. In short, the new firm — which will have an annual budget in the “tens of millions of dollars” but below “$100 million” — is seeking to “speed the rollout of Linux-based devices,” with one of the key points being this: Linaro will “provide a stable and optimized base for distributions and developers by creating new releases of optimized tools, kernel and middleware software validated for a wide range of SoCs, every six months.”

Read on for more

Continue reading ARM, Samsung, IBM, Freescale, TI and more join to form Linaro, speed rollout of Linux-based devices

ARM, Samsung, IBM, Freescale, TI and more join to form Linaro, speed rollout of Linux-based devices originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aava Virta Android reference platform will be the first shipping Moorestown smartphone

Sure, Intel might not be planning for Moorestown-based smartphones to hit the market for at least another six months, and the LG GW990 might have died a quiet death, but that’s not stopping Aava from getting right in the game with its Virta Android, an Atom Z600-based reference smartphone designed for developer testing. Slated to ship in Q3, the Virta features a Moorestown processor, a 3.8-inch 864 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, quad-band EDGE radios with AT&T 3G support, WiFi, Bluetooth, a five megapixel video camera, and a microSD slot. We’re assuming the shipping version will look a lot like the prototype Aava device we’ve been seeing for a while now, but Aava has some fancier renders up on its site, so we’ll see what happens and how much this costs when this thing arrives.

Continue reading Aava Virta Android reference platform will be the first shipping Moorestown smartphone

Aava Virta Android reference platform will be the first shipping Moorestown smartphone originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Telefonica gets behind MeeGo, says ‘smartphones, netbooks, tablets, and internet connected TVs’ are possibilities

Virtually all of the MeeGo buzz since Intel and Nokia’s tie-up back in February has been focused on high-end smartphones, tablets, and netbooks, but Telefonica reminds us that there’s another potential target for the platform, too — connected TVs. The Spanish wireless, fixed internet, and cable operator has thrown its weight behind MeeGo this week (which is a pretty big deal considering that the company has global reach across 25 countries and about a quarter billion subscribers), hinting that “services could potentially include content and applications that can be accessed from devices such as smartphones, netbooks, tablets, and internet connected TVs for Telefonica’s wireline and wireless operations.” We’ve yet to see any set-top box announcements in the MeeGo space, but with Google trying to light fires under the connected TV market, we imagine some competitors are bound to emerge — and it’s probably a good sign that they’ve got the backing of a cable company.

Telefonica gets behind MeeGo, says ‘smartphones, netbooks, tablets, and internet connected TVs’ are possibilities originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Intel Moorestown tablets will arrive before smartphones, won’t hit for at least six months

Digging all the Moorestown tablets and phones we’ve been seeing at Computex? Yeah, us too, but it looks like we’re still going to be waiting a considerable amount of time for them to hit the market. According to Intel’s Anand Chandrasekher, the first Moorestown devices won’t pop up for at least six to twelve more months. That may be after the end of 2010 mark we had heard before, but let’s hope Intel is using the time to get things just right. Anand also said that the first Moorestown products will be tablets rather than smartphones, the latter arriving sometime in the first half of 2011 — not too surprising given handset manufacturers’ history of designing and optimizing around ARM silicon and the fact that the smartphone flavor of the Intel-friendly MeeGo OS is still in development.

Intel Moorestown tablets will arrive before smartphones, won’t hit for at least six months originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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