Tatum and Denim blog

Filed under: Laptops

All set to one-up the 2.6GHz X7800, Intel has reportedly launched the 2.8GHz successor, unsurprisingly dubbed the Core 2 Extreme X7900. The processor purportedly relies on a 65-nanometer die, but boasts updated specs to go along with the 200MHz jump in speed. The chip will apparently offer up an 800MHz front-side-bus, chew through 44-watts of power, and arrive at OEMs unlocked and ready for a (likely minor) does of overclocking. At the GC Press Day, an Intel representative was said to be demonstrating the new CPU on the Asus G2 and a Dell M1730, but nothing was mentioned about a release date.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops

Hot on the heels of Intel’s mobile Core 2 Extreme X7900 comes word that the chip maker has eleven 45-nanometer CPUs in the backroom just waiting to take the laptop scene by storm. DigiTimes has it that Intel will indeed launch the five Penryns we heard about recently “in the first quarter of 2008,” and also notes that Q2 holds six more chips destined for the Montevina platform. More specifically, “sources at motherboard makers” suggested that the Q2-bound processors will consume between 25 and 35-watts of energy, sport a 1,066MHz front-side-bus, boast between 3MB and 6MB of L2 cache, and feature clock speeds ranging from 2.13GHz to 3.06GHz. As expected, no model numbers have been assigned just yet, and considering that Intel “declined the opportunity to respond to this report,” we suppose you should tuck this all away in the rumor folder for the time being.

[Via TGDaily]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Handhelds

Apparently, VIA is hoping to stretch the battery life of devices that sport its forthcoming ULV processor, as the chip manages to hum along at 500MHz yet only consumes one-watt of power. According to DigiTimes, the company announced the CPU during a press conference held yesterday, and also noted that it will “adopt the same VIA V4 bus and 21- x 21-millimeter nanoBGA2 packaging as other Eden models.” Reportedly, several industrial PC makers “including Advantech have already adopted the new Eden ULV processor” and hopes to have products shipping to market later this month, and if this thing actually does sip power as its creator suggests, we’ve all ideas Advantech won’t be the last firm placing an order.

[Via Wired]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

It looks like Intel has come to the realization that its product naming scheme has gotten a little out of hand and, as Ars Technica reports, it’s now taking some measures to simplify things a bit. Apparently, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, and Core 2 Solo will all simply be known as “Core 2″ starting on January 1st, 2008 (presumably with some other means to differentiate then), and Intel Viiv Processor Technology and Intel vPro Processor Technology will henceforth be known as Intel Core 2 Duo Processor with Viiv (or vPro). Further on down the line, Pentium D and Pentium Dual-Core will both be shortened to just “Pentium,” while the server-centric Itanium 2 gets demoted to plain old “Itanium.” According to Ars, Core 2 Extreme, Celeron, and Xeon will all stay as they are. Simple, right?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

Calm down, you haven’t overslept by a couple of months or anything, as the Wolfdale we’re talking about here is in fact simply a 2.33GHz engineering sample of the forthcoming dual-core processor. Nevertheless, HKPEC labs was able to pit it against the 2.33GHz E6550, and the results weren’t too shabby. In a slew of tests including PC Mark, CineBench, Science Mark, SiSoft Sandra, and individual application trials, the Wolfdale managed to best the E6550 in every single facet. Of course, it didn’t exactly blow the current Core 2 Duo out of the water, but increasing performance by nearly 11-percent in Doom 3 and Far Cry, 5.53-percent in PC Mark, and around 8-percent in Office applications isn’t anything to sneeze at. Still, we’ve got quite a ride ahead before seeing a finalized Wolfdale, but feel free to humor yourself with the preliminary benchmarks below.

[Via The Inquirer]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

AMD’s high-powered Phenom lineup should still be residing in the forefront of your memory, but the company has now loosed details on a series of processors that cater to the more energy-conscience crowd. The Phenom X2 GE-series CPUs currently consist of a trio of units, each reportedly scheduled to land sometime in the first quarter of 2008. The chips all sport thermal design power (TDP) ratings of 45-watts, and while the GE-6400 will clock in at 1.9GHz, the GE-6500 adds 200MHz but lags behind the flagship 2.3GHz GE-6600. The whole lot touts 2 x 512KB of L2 cache, 2MB of L3 cache, and an (estimated) 3,200MHz HT3 bus, so go on and start pinching those pennies for the moment these land in a Socket AM2+ motherboard near you.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

Those eager to lay down for the “industry’s first” native x86 quad-core processor have but a few months left to wait, as AMD just announced that its quad-core Opteron’s would begin shipping in August. Codenamed Barcelona, these CPUs will be launching in both “standard and low power versions,” hit frequencies of up to 2GHz, and should provide performance increases of up to “70-percent” over existing Opterons in select applications. Additionally, those who can hold off a bit can look forward to even speedier chips in Q4 of this year, and an elusive “Special Edition” version should also be just around the bend. Per usual, no hints on what kind of premium you’ll pay for this wee piece of silicon come August, but AMD did note that the processors wouldn’t hit mainstream systems until September.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops

Shortly after revealing that a quad-core laptop chip was indeed in Intel’s pipeline for 2008, the firm has decided to go public with even more laptop-based processor details over at Computex. Intel’s executive vice president Sean Maloney had the honors of “unveiling” the 3-Series chipset family (formerly known as Bearlake), which will of course support DDR3 RAM, PCI Express 2.0, HDMI, and can come stocked with G33 / G35 Express integrated graphics. More importantly, the outfit formally introduced plans for an Intel Core 2 Extreme mobile processor that should be released in Q3 of this year. According to Mr. Maloney, the chip is targeted to be the company’s “highest-performing mobile dual-core processor that still includes energy-saving power features for laptop designs.” No word just yet on whether or not this CPU will cost more than the rest of your laptop components combined (but we wouldn’t be surprised).

[Via Laptoping]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

Nah, 8,180MHz can’t hold a candle to 500GHz, but on the long road of overclocking Intel’s Pentium 4 where there is an increasingly brief amount of time available to brag before being trumped, the zany Italians have crowned themselves champs once more. Not content with just hitting 8GHz with a “Cedar Mill” Pentium 4 631, OC Team Italy managed to push that very model an additional 179MHz by tweaking the FSB. The final results yielded a 173-percent overclock, and while this here setup may run stable for a continued period if placed at the depths of Antarctica, we can’t imagine this being too feasible for the common man to replicate and actually utilize.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

IBM has most certainly been on a tear of late when it comes to microprocessors, as this tidbit comes right on the heels of the firm’s 4.7GHz POWER6 and self-assembling CPUs. Presumably thinking that two five heads are better than one, IBM has garnered support from Chartered, Samsung, Infineon, and Freescale to “develop and manufacture advanced 32-nanometer semiconductors.” Of course, we’re still not sure if the loose ends surrounding IBM’s 65-nanometer team effort are all tied off, but onward and upward they go regardless. The collaborative agreements between the firms “include 32-nanometer bulk complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technologies and joint development of process design kits (PDKs) to support that technology,” which basically means that the companies will attempt to work together at IBM’s East Fishkill plant through 2010 to produce “high-performance, energy-efficient chips at 32nm.” Unfortunately, we’ve no idea when these speedsters will be ready for the commercial world, but it’s pretty safe to assume it won’t be soon.

[Via PCWorld, photo courtesy of Semiconductor-Technology]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

Nah, it’s no BlueGene L supercomputer, but IBM’s latest dual-core microprocessor runs at a cool 4.7GHz while sporting 8MB of total cache per chip. The device reportedly runs “twice as fast” and packs four times the cache as the POWER5, and boasts a processor bandwidth of 300Gbps. Interestingly, the massive power increase doesn’t seem to come with a boost in energy requirements, as IBM claims that the 65-nanometer POWER6 somehow ups its game while “using nearly the same amount of electricity” as its predecessor. The company plans on shoving the new darling into the System p570 server, and preliminary testing showed that all four of the “most widely used performance benchmarks for Unix servers” were shattered by its CPU. Unfortunately, there’s no word on pricing nor availability just yet, but we’re anticipating a bit of sticker shock when it does finally land.

[Via LinuxDevices]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops

If you haven’t noticed by now, the laptop industry is going Santa Rosa crazy today, and for good reason: Intel’s next-gen chipset is officially “out” as of now, following up the Napa / Yonah combo of last year. Intel is sticking with the Core 2 Duo “Merom” processor for the time being, but is releasing new, faster versions that take advantage of Santa Rosa’s faster front-side bus, which is up at 800MHz, compared to 667MHz of prior versions. The new processors are odd-numbered to set them apart, and include the 1.8GHz T7100, 2GHz T7300, 2.2GHz T7500, 2.4GHz T7700, 1.4GHz L7300 and 1.6GHz L7500 — with the latter two being low-voltage versions. As seen on many of the models announced today, or leaked in the recent weeks, the new Intel 965 Express Chipset includes more than the FSB goodies, with support for the new DirectX 10 and Vista-friendly Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics and the Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN 802.11n chip. That’s the gist of the consumer-oriented Centrino Duo, while the Centrino Pro adds in a Gigabit Network Connection that supports remote wake-up over WiFi. Unfortunately, while the processors and front-side bus are all ready to go, laptop memory is still stuck at 667MHz, and Intel hasn’t made it clear whether the Santa Rosa platforms will be able to handle the 800MHz memory due to launch later this year.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

When it’s been nearly six months since we’ve seen an elusive PowerPoint slide pointing to future AMD processors, it’s been far too long, but it looks like the forecasting can begin again thanks to information about AMD’s star-packed Q3. According to a roadmap slide charting out the future of AMD’s “Stars” family of processors, a number of dual- and quad-core processor options will be headed to the desktop market sometime in the third and fourth quarters, and while the firm’s “value” Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron chips will also see minor overhauls headed into Q1 of 2008, the focus seems to be on the Phenoms in the crew. The flagship quad-core Phenom FX (dubbed Agena FX) will clock in from 2.2GHz to 2.6GHz, sport 4 x 512KB of L2 cache, 2MB of L3 cache, and sport bus speeds of 3,200MHz or 3,600MHz. The X4 chips ratchet down in speed a bit, and only handle the AM2+ socket while the top-end FX plays nice with the 1207+. The X2 CPUs go the dual-core route, top out at 2.8GHz, but won’t be ready for ordering until Q4 of this year. Be sure to hit the read link for a (larger) peek at the chart — unless you just completed an order for a current-generation chip, that is.

[Via RegHardware]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Someone should seriously tell IBM’s research and development team to take a much-deserved vacation, as these folks have been cranking out the goods at an alarming rate of late. Most recently, the company has announced the “world’s first application of self assembly used to create a vacuum around nanowires for next-generation microprocessors,” which just so happens to mimic the natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and enamel on teeth. Essentially, the process forms “trillions of holes to create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip,” which should aid electrical current in flowing around 35-percent faster while it eats up about 15-percent less energy. This newfangled approach to insulation, dubbed airgaps, creates vacuums that enable the substantial boost in speed, and the self assembling process is reportedly “already integrated” into IBM’s manufacturing line in New York. The chips will initially be used in the firm’s server lineup sometime near 2009, and shortly thereafter, we can expect IBM to start cranking these out for other companies that rely on its CPUs.

[Via BBC, thanks Josh]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: GPS

Just when you think things couldn’t get any more gloomy in the world of in-car navigation systems, here comes news that high frequency processors surrounding your GPS system could actually cause some seriously screwy routing. According to a study by the Swedish Defense Research Agency, “computers used near a NAV could disturb the signals utilized in the GPS receiver.” More specifically, Intel CPUs with clock speeds of 1.7GHz, 3.0GHz, and 3.2GHz were pinpointed as potential troublemakers, but a member of the study actually went so far as to suggest that a variety of other (untested) chips could indeed wreak the same havoc. The study showed that “modern computers produce interfering signals that reach as far as the frequency bandwidths used for GPS systems,” and while specific reactions weren’t apparent, testers did suggest to move any computer equipment further away from the GPS unit if it began to “play up” for no ostensible reason. Of course, we’ve huddled our own laptops and GPS systems together on many occasions with no ill consequences, so as always, your miles may vary.

[Via NaviGadget]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops

Honestly, we don’t exactly know how to take the news that Intel’s already looking beyond next month’s Santa Rosa release to a reported quad-core Penryn mobile processor. On one hand, our eyes relish the opportunity to play the latest titles at the highest resolutions whilst bragging aimlessly to our online pals, but then again, we don’t look forward to the presumed third-degree burns that could likely develop from tossing these in such tight quarters. Nevertheless, Intel managed to drop a few more details in regard to its mobile CPU plans, and noted that Santa Rosa’s successor would likely be based on the 45-nanometer Penryn design and offer high-end gaming notebooks a ridiculous amount of power. Additionally, an Intel exec showcased the future chip’s ability to be user-overclocked, suggesting that it would be “your responsibility to take care of cooling.” Of course, if Intel could buddy up with IBM’s miracle-working cooling solutions, the forthcoming chip could manage to breathe a bit easier, but we’ve got until “the first half of 2008″ to see about all that.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

Next-generation cooling technology isn’t the only thing IBM’s R&D crew is spending time with, as the chip giant has recently made plans to hit up “vertical stacking technology” in order to make the next wave of supercomputers really crank. Supposedly, “laying chips vertically — as opposed to side by side — reduces the distance data has to travel by 1,000 times, making the chips faster and more efficient.” The new format will place chips directly atop one another and connect them with “tungsten filled pipes etched through the silicon,” which will subsequently eliminate the need for wires and increase the speed at which data can flow. The questionably-dubbed “3D chips” will reportedly operate around 40-percent more efficiently than existing renditions, and considering that Intel is purportedly cooking up a similar agenda in their own labs, that “end of 2007″ release date is quite likely to be accurate.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops, Tablet PCs

Admittedly, it feels a bit strange to praise a machine for getting a Core 2 Duo in April of 2007, but Lenovo’s highly-regarded convertible has finally remedied the one gripe that nearly everyone seemed to have about it. While we’ve seen the C2D hit high-end lappies rather late in the game, we’re fairly sure this one takes the cake for belatedness, but if you’ve been patiently anxiously awaiting for the overdue processor upgrade, your wait is finally over. Right now, you can order up an X60 Tablet PC with a 1.5GHz L7400V Core 2 Duo CPU, 12.1-inch SXGA+ display, 1GB to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, up to 120GB of hard drive space, Bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g/n, and an eight-cell Li-ion battery to boot. Of course, such “fresh” luxuries apparently don’t come cheap, as a fairly well-spec’d machine will run you upwards of $2,000, and should arrive “within one to two weeks” from now.

[Via Slashgear]

UPDATE: Well you can officially color us confused, as it appears that the Core 2 Duo mention on Lenovo’s official webstore is, um, bogus. According to “sources at Lenovo” cited by TabletPCTalk, “there are no Core 2 Duo ThinkPad X60s available as of this moment,” but alas, we’ve no idea when this moment will end and the next will begin. Stay tuned.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

It was but a few months back that IBM was tooting its own horn in regard to a “breakthrough” technology sure to revolutionize the processor cooling realm as we know it, and while miraculous claims often vanish after their bold declarations, it looks like this invention is moving forward. While we’d already heard the typical techie hub bub that goes along with such systems, IBM is now explaining a bit more about how the process will eventually work. Essentially, researchers have created a system in which “tree-like branched trenches” are placed in the copper cap, where a newly-thinned thermal paste can be applied with half the pressure of current renditions, netting a “twofold increase in cooling performance.” The micrometer-sized channels basically act as an “irrigation system” to allow the toasty particles to homogeneously escape rather than building up in the self-proclaimed “magic cross” section. We know, this still isn’t spelling things out in layman’s terms, but if you’re truly interested in knowing precisely how IBM plans on slashing the heat emitted by your future CPUs, grab your reading glasses and hit the read link.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!