Hasta La Gadget!

We had a hunch this refresh was coming, and according to information gathered by CNET, it’s all going down on Monday. The 2.53GHz SP9600, complete with its 6MB of cache memory and $316 sticker, will reportedly be revealed alongside the 1.6GHz SU9600, which will be pegged at $289. Furthermore, we should see a single-core 1.4GHz SU3500 ($262) with a thermal envelope of only 5.5 watts, which will obviously cater to those really, really low-power applications where horsepower isn’t a concern. Interestingly, these newfangled pieces of silicon won’t be those rumored CULV chips we heard about in January, as those won’t be good and ready ’til summertime. There’s also a slight chance that we’ll hear a bit more on Intel’s reemergence in the GPU field, but we’re not holding our breath quite so much on that. Dig in below for lots more, or just be patience and wait for the 30th. Totally your call.

Read – Intel CPU details
Read – Intel GPU details

Filed under: Laptops

Intel to officially refresh laptop chips next week? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re interested in SSD, chances are you’ve been paying attention to the allegations of performance degradation in Intel’s X25-M drives. AnandTech dives into the issue (and many, many more topics) in 31 page exploration of the state of solid state. It’s a spine-tingling read, in part explaining how write-speed degradation is largely thanks to partially used pages containing portions of deleted files. We all know deleted files typically aren’t really gone until they’re overwritten, a problem in SSDs because to clear a section of a page the entire page needs to be cleared. That entails moving anything you want to keep to the cache, wiping the whole page, then re-writing that good data from cache. The hope is that a new delete command dubbed TRIM (set to find support in Windows 7) will speed up writes by forcing the system to perform this work during deletes, but ahead of that the article still recommends Intel’s drives; even at their worst they’re still generally faster than the comparably priced competition when it comes to average use — not to mention faster than your platters.

Filed under: Storage

AnandTech explores the virtues and woes of today’s SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This economic crisis has been tough for nearly every business worldwide, perhaps best evidenced by the number of corporate spats we’ve seen develop lately as everyone gets more and more protective of their respective turfs. While Intel and NVIDIA have lately been engaged in an epic war of PowerPoint presentations, fewer disputes have been bigger or longer-running than the one between Intel and its more direct competition, AMD. That “us inside” company just earned some bragging rights, being named the biggest processor manufacturer in the world again by iSuppli, with a 13.1 percent global market share. AMD, which came in tenth last year, dropped down to the number twelve position in 2008 after its revenue declined 7.8 percent compared to 2007. News was also bad for Texas Instruments, which dropped a position largely thanks to the success of mobile processors from Toshiba and Qualcomm. Don’t be so glum, TI, maybe successes from Russell Crowe’s favorite flavor of pico projector will make up for the difference.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Intel rated leading chip manufacturer again, AMD slips out of top ten originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IBuyPower’s been on a pretty good roll of late with these new gaming desktops, and it’s keeping things interesting with its latest two. Rather than just shoving the latest processors from AMD and Intel into the Gamer Fire 640 and Gamer Paladin F830 and calling it a day, it has thrown in a 22-inch Samsung SyncMaster LCD and NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision system with each rig. As for the Gamer Fire 640 specifically, it comes loaded with an AMD Phenom II X3 720 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a GeForce 9800GTX+ (512MB), dual-layer DVD writer and Vista Home Premium 64-bit. The Paladin gets loaded with a Core i7 920, 6GB of memory, a Blu-ray drive and a GeForce GTX 260 GPU. Detailed specs (along with the full release) are just past the break, but if you’re scouting base prices, they sit at $1,349 and $1,999 in order of mention.

Continue reading IBuyPower trots out GeForce 3D Vision-equipped desktops

Filed under: Desktops, Displays

IBuyPower trots out GeForce 3D Vision-equipped desktops originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We can see it now: the four former members of ‘N Sync (minus Justin Timberlake) showing up in an HP-inspired television spot, their heads cut off from the frame while they individually sing about what how each of their MIDs knows them personally and proceed to show what they can do in a array of spectacle and CG. Suddenly, they all hold their devices next to each other in a two-by-two grid pattern and the four screens become one as their voices, too, join in harmony — which is exactly what Intel touts its newly-developed multi-client display linking can do. Except for the harmony part, that’s all ‘N Sync. In a word? Beautiful. It’s all part of Intel’s MID-centric “Carry Small, Live Large” initiative. We’re not taking bets on whether or not this feature will make a cameo in its upcoming joint venture with LG or any device in the foreseeable future, but it’s definitely something’s that piqued our interest.

Filed under: Displays, Laptops, Tablet PCs

Intel develops multi-computer display linking, the commercial writes itself originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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