Hasta La Gadget!

It’s taken longer than we thought for a honest-to-goodness NVIDIA ION-powered within arm’s reach, but sure enough the HP Mini 311 accomplishes just that. Laptop’s managed one of the first reviews, and much like what the site intimated with earlier benchmarks, you’re looking at a surprisingly capable and sleek $400 netbook with good battery life. In fact, the only major complaint seems to be a trackpad that’s a bit too rough for the reviewer’s tastes — probably a sacrifice worth making if you’re definitely in the market for a new ultraportable right now. Hit up the read link for the full review.

Filed under: Laptops

HP Mini 311 reviewed with earnest, ION-enhanced affection originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flash 10 already supports HD video on the desktop, but 10.1 — announced this week at Adobe’s MAX conference in Los Angeles — is being billed the first to really reap the full benefits of the Open Screen Project by unifying feature sets across a wide variety of platforms on the desktop, the laptop, and the pocket. As usual, Windows, Mac, and Linux will all get hooked up with the latest release, but public betas of 10.1 for Windows Mobile and webOS will be hitting before the end of the year as well followed by Android and Symbian in “early” 2010. RIM’s also gotten official with its rumored membership in the Open Screen Project, though the lack of a timeline for 10.1 support in BlackBerry OS is a stark reminder of the long technical road that lies ahead for Waterloo as it tries to match the smartphone competition tit-for-tat in the multimedia space. At the end of the day, mobile Flash means nothing without the horsepower to properly drive it, so let’s hope that Tegra, Snapdragon, and next-generation architectures like OMAP4 start to come on board en masse just as these builds come out of beta.

Speaking of fast chipsets, the other big news out of the show is that Flash 10.1 will take advantage of GPU acceleration on a number of key mobile platforms, including both nVidia’s Tegra and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon alongside ION for smooth (well, theoretically smooth) 720p and 1080p video on the latest generation of netbooks and smartbooks.

Update: Added video of the Palm Pre running three instances of Flash in parallel after the break.

Read – Flash 10.1 announcement
Read – RIM joins the OSP

Continue reading Flash 10.1 announced for just about anything with a screen, webOS and WinMo betas this year (update: Pre video!)

Filed under: Software

Flash 10.1 announced for just about anything with a screen, webOS and WinMo betas this year (update: Pre video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA had told us it would be accelerating its CUDA program to try and get an advantage over its competitors as OpenCL brings general-purpose GPU computing to the mainstream, and it looks like that effort’s paying off — the company just announced its new Fermi CUDA architecture, which will also serve as the foundation of its next-gen GeForce and Quadro products. The new features are all pretty technical — the world’s first true cache hierarchy in a GPU, anyone? — but the big takeaway is that CUDA and OpenCl should run even faster on this new silicon, and that’s never a bad thing. Hit up the read links for the nitty-gritty, if that’s what gets you going.

Read – NVIDIA Fermi site
Read – Hot Hardware analysis
Read – PC Perspective analysis

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

NVIDIA launches Fermi next-gen GPGPU architecture, CUDA and OpenCL get even faster originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We dare say NVIDIA’s ION platform hasn’t been the quickest to go from announcement to market availability, but at long last we’re seeing a number of pretty decent options cropping up. The Samsung N510 is a great test case for the prowess of the chipset, as it boasts the otherwise entirely unremarkable Atom N280, 1GB RAM and 160GB HDD spec, meaning that whatever performance gains it exhibits will be down to the ION infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, the 11.6-inch machine showed marked improvements over standard netbooks in the graphics department, with hardware-accelerated 1080p video decoding and mildly graphically-intensive games made possible. With six and a half hours of battery life and a matte 1366 x 768 screen, the N510 was well received by the PC Pro team, who could only bemoan the uncompetitive pricing of £382 (about $613). Hit the read link for their full impressions.

Filed under: Laptops

Samsung’s ION-enriched N510 reviewed approvingly, still needs price trim originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been a long wait since NVIDIA and Adobe announced their plans for GPU-accelerated Flash video back in January of this year, but it looks like the pair now finally have something to show for themselves. While it’s not quite clear how official it is just yet, the folks at NotebookJournal have nonetheless published a video that shows 720p Flash video running smoothly on a netbook (an ION-powered HP Mini 311, to be specific). Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll still have to wait until sometime in the first half of 2010 to see the technology become publicly available (at least if the slides in the video are any indication), but you can now check out the demo for yourself after the break. Just be sure to stick with it for a while or skip ahead to the 1:20 mark — they show a non-accelerated video at the beginning for an all too painful comparison.

[Via Liliputing]

Continue reading GPU-accelerated 720p Flash video gets demoed on a netbook (smoothly)

Filed under: Laptops

GPU-accelerated 720p Flash video gets demoed on a netbook (smoothly) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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