Hasta La Gadget!

Whoa, Nelly! Just weeks after Intel came clean with its new Pine Trial nettop and netbook platform, the company is today cutting loose with a few more. This go ’round, we’ve got the 32nm Arrandale (which consists of the Core i5 Mobile and Core i3 Mobile) heading for the laptops and the 32nm Clarkdale chips over on the desktop front. Starting with the former, most reviews found the CPU + GPU solution to be faster than rivaling Core 2 Duo + integrated GPU options, with the Core i5 being particularly potent in highly threaded applications. Better still, battery life didn’t seem to take a hit even with the extra performance, though high-end, high-res gaming was still a lesson in futility when working without a discrete graphics card. Overall, the chip was a welcome addition to the fold, but we got the feeling that the first wave was priced too high and offered too little of a performance increase on the gaming side to really warrant a wholehearted recommendation. As for the Clarkdale? The Core i5 661 that everyone seemed to snag was found to be blisteringly fast, with most folks deeming it the outright champion in the dual-core realm. Unfortunately, the integrated GPU was — again — not awesome for hardcore gaming, and the questionable pricing didn’t exactly thrill some critics. Do yourself a favor and dig into the benchmarks below — we get the feeling we’ll be seeing oodles of machines hit the wires this week with these chips within.

Arrandale reviews
Read – HotHardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – PCPerspective
Read – Legit Reviews

Clarkdale reviews
Read – NeoSeeker
Read – HotHardware
Read – HardOCP
Read – TechSpot
Read – AnandTech
Read – PCPerspective
Read – Legion Hardware
Read – Overclockers Club
Read – Bit-tech

Intel’s Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs get benchmarked for your enjoyment originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Get ready for the next generation of netbooks and nettops: Intel’s just officially announced the Pine Trail Atom N450, D410, and D510, along with the NM10 Express chipset, and we should see over 80 machines with the 45-nanometer chips at CES 2010. Nothing too surprising about the 1.66GHz chips themselves, which integrate the memory controller and Intel graphics directly onto the CPU die: the N450 is targeted at netbooks, while the single-core D410 and dual-core D510 are designed for nettops, and each chip should use about 20 percent less power than its predecessor. That was borne out in our review of the N450-based ASUS Eee PC 1005PE, which got 10 hours of battery life in regular use, but unfortunately we didn’t experience any performance improvements over the familiar N270 and N280. That jibes with other reports we’ve heard, but we’ll wait to test some more machines before we break out the frowny face permanently — for now, check out the full press release below.

Continue reading Intel’s next-gen Pine Trail Atom processors officially announced

Intel’s next-gen Pine Trail Atom processors officially announced originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Advancements in silicon-germanium have been going on for years now, but a team at UCLA is convinced that their discovery really is “the next big thing.” For scores now, microchip makers have struggled with miniaturizing transistors as the public at large demands that things get smaller and smaller. Thanks to researchers at the aforesaid university, it’s looking like silicon-germanium nanowires could be the key to making the process a whole lot easier. According to study co-author Suneel Kodambaka, the new nanowires could “help speed the development of smaller, faster and more powerful electronics,” also noting that they’re so small that they can be “placed in virtually anything.” Which is great, because the Adamo XPS is just entirely too pudgy.

UCLA nanowire discovery could lead to faster, stronger, smaller electronics originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember Intel’s budget-friendlier Core i3 line that we’ve been talking about since June? Despite recent leaks the company still hasn’t made it officially official, but it’s now unofficially officially thanks to a pre-order at a Canadian retailer. If you’re getting a little déjà vu right now don’t worry, it isn’t a glitch in the matrix; this is exactly the same scenario that played out with the Core i5 back in August, about a month before that proc was finally given its coming out party. In other words, expect this 32nm chip — with its 2.93GHz speed, 512KB of L2 cache, 4MB of L3, and $157 CAD asking price (a mere $10 lower in American) — to be given the full press release rigmarole sometime around the new year.

Intel’s Core i3 530 processor up for order, still unconfirmed by Intel originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Would you pay $1,200 for an as-of-yet unreleased Intel Core i9 chip? Hard to say if the transaction actually occurred, but an auction recently ended from a Taiwanese eBay user who claims to be selling a six-core, 2.4GHz Xeon Westmere Gulftown processor. We can’t vouch for the validity of the listing, but those are some pretty convincing pictures being tossed around — ones that aren’t blurred, which might give Intel an advantage in snooping out the leak. That’s not all, though — Nordic Hardware (via Tom’s Hardware) also reports that the OCTeamDenmark forums had it listed for on sale for $850. The 32nm fella had some promising benchmarks released recently, although its release isn’t slated until at best sometime early 2010. Sure, it’s great to be first, but with early adopter prices like that, we don’t mind waiting until it goes official.

Leaked Intel Core i9 chip makes its way to eBay? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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