I finally made the transition to a notebook as my desktop last year, a move many had made years prior. Quad-core mobile Sandy Bridge and good SSDs made the move simple for me, but Thunderbolt eventually made it near perfect. With only two drive bays in my notebook (I ditched my optical drive so I could have another SSD, something Brian Klug did back in 2010), there wasn't any room for good, high-performance, mass storage. Thunderbolt solved this problem for me.
Co-developed by Apple and Intel, Thunderbolt is a tunnel that carries both PCIe and DisplayPort traffic to the tune of 20Gbps per channel (10Gbps up and down). In the past, whenever you wanted to add a PCIe device (LAN, audio, high-speed storage, etc…) you needed to physically install that device in your system either via an ExpressCard slot on a notebook or via a PCIe slot on your desktop. Thunderbolt acts as a decoupler for PCIe devices, allowing you to put controllers that would traditionally lie inside your system outside of it, or even inside another device like a display. That's where the DisplayPort support comes in.
Apple's Thunderbolt Display is the perfect example of what Thunderbolt can be used to do. Take a DisplayPort panel, integrate Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, audio and USB controllers and you've got Apple's Thunderbolt Display. In theory, you could connect a system that had none of these things, and the functionality would be provided exclusively by the display. Decoupling hardware like this allows OEMs to build thinner and/or smaller form factor machines (think Ultrabooks/MacBook Air), while allowing for full functionality when connected to a display. By carrying DisplayPort over the same cable, you can have a single cable that both extends functionality and connects your small form factor machine to a larger monitor. Thunderbolt enables the modern day dock for notebooks.
For all of last year, Thunderbolt was an Apple exclusive. This year, starting with the launch of Ivy Bridge, Thunderbolt is coming to PCs. We'll see it on notebooks as well as some desktop motherboards. Today we have the very first desktop motherboard with Thunderbolt support: MSI's Z77A-GD80.
Read on for our full preview of the first Thunderbolt PC motherboard.
Sony has officially unveiled its first Vaio branded Ultrabook – with the Sony Vaio T series bringing an ultralight and ultrathin option to Sony’s laptop range in June.
Sony remains a highly desirable brand, and the Vaio T series aims to capture some of burgeoning ultrabook market.
The Vaio T boasts a 13-inch screen, Intel Core i3 processor and the SSD version brings the promise of a nine-hour battery life.
Looksee
Of course, it’s the look of the device that is going to decide its success, and as well as the always impressive Vaio screen the Vaio T boasts a ‘smartly styled’ magnesium and aluminium chassis.
As you might expect, there are HDMI, VGA and RJ45 network ports, plus an SD/MMC media slot and Sony’s xLOUD and Clear Phase audio.
"Thin, light and portable, the responsive new Vaio T Series is always ready for action," adds Sony.
"Smartly styled in tough magnesium and aluminium, the go-anywhere VAIO T Series is tailor-made to handle daily trips to the office or lecture theatre.
"Blending durability and performance, and loaded with the latest technologies from Sony and Intel, it’s the first Ultrabook to proudly carry the Vaio name."
The Sony Vaio T release date has been set as June.
For Intel, the road to their first real competitive smartphone SoC has been a long one. Shortly after joining AnandTech and beginning this journey writing about both smartphones and the SoC space, I remember hopping on a call with Anand and some Intel folks to talk about Moorestown. While we never did see Moorestown in a smartphone, we did see it in a few tablets, and even looked at performance in an OpenPeak Tablet at IDF 2011. Back then performance was more than competitive against the single core Cortex A8s in a number of other devices, but power profile, lack of ISP, video encode, decode, or PoP LPDDR2 support, and the number of discrete packages required to implement Moorestown, made it impossible to build a smartphone around. While Moorestown was never the success that Intel was hoping for, it paved the way for something that finally brings x86 both down to a place on the power-performance curve that until now has been dominated by ARM-powered SoCs, and includes all the things hanging off the edges that you need (ISP, encode, decode, integrated memory controller, etc), and it’s called Medfield. With Medfield, Intel finally has a real, bona fide SoC that is already in a number of devices shipping before the end of 2012.
In both an attempt to prove that its Medfield platform is competitive enough to ship in actual smartphones, and speed up the process of getting the platform to market, Intel created its own smartphone Form Factor Reference Design (FFRD). While the act of making a reference device is wholly unsurprising since it’s analogous to Qualcomm’s MSM MDPs or even TI’s OMAP Blaze MDP, what is surprising is its polish and aim. We’ve seen and talked about the FFRD a number of times before, including our first glimpse at IDF 2011 and numerous times since then. Led by Mike Bell (of Apple and Palm, formerly), a team at Intel with the mandate of making smartphone around Medfield created a highly polished device as both a demonstration platform for OEM customers and for sale directly to the customer through participating carriers. This FFRD has served as the basis for the first Medfield smartphones that will (and already are) shipping this year, including the Orange Santa Clara, Lenovo K800, and the device we’re looking at today, the Lava Xolo X900. Future Medfield-based devices will deviate from the FFRD design (like the upcoming Motorola device), but will still be based loosely on the whole Medfield platform. For now, in the form of the X900 we’re basically looking at the FFRD with almost no adulteration from carriers or other OEMs.
Read on for our review of the very first Intel x86 based Android smartphone!
HP has quietly launched its first laptops to feature Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors.
The mid-range Pavilion DV4-5000, DV6-7000 and DV7-6000 are now listed on HP’s website, but the price-points are not yet available and the device’s aren’t available to pre-order.
All three include the new, third-generation Intel i7 processor, known as Ivy Bridge, with varying screen sizes and storage options.
The DV4-5000 will have a 14-inch screen with a 1366 x 768 resolution, along with up to 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard-drive and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M graphics card.
The 15.6-inch crew
The DV6-7000 has a 15.6-inch screen which improves resolution to 1600 x 900. It boasts the same speed processor, again with 8GB of RAM and the same graphics card. Hard drive space doubles to 2TB
The final model, the DV6-7000 also rocks a 15.6-inch screen, the same storage and RAM, but with a slightly faster version of the i7 processor (2.6GHz compared to 2.3GHz on the other pair).
The laptops feature HP’s new Mosaic design and, according to a leaked press release, will be available for order on April 8th with a shipping date of April 29th.
We’ve been hearing lots about Ivy Bridge delays in recent weeks, but it would appear that the release date may indeed be on track for April.
You can get a look at the higher-end DV6 model in the video below.
TechRadar: All latest Laptops news feeds
First look: Intel’s Nikiski see-through notebook
The concept notebook with a huge transparent glass palm rest that doubles as a touchscreen that Intel showed off at Computex last year is now a prototype. And it’s going to be a shipping product before Windows 8 comes out.
Use the Nikiski like a laptop, with a see-through glass touch pad that stretches almost the whole width of the base.
Touch it with a finger and it’s a trackpad, put your palms down on it to type and the larger base of your hand doesn’t register as a touch so you still get a wrist rest.
Close it, turn it over and the touch pad turns into a touchscreen layer to enable you to browse a slimline view of key information such as new emails.
AT A GLANCE: See if you have new messages, look up your next meeting or check Facebook without opening the notebook
Despite the Metro look of the notification tiles in the interface that appears through the bottom of this glass touchpad, the prototype isn’t running Windows 8, and the first version will launch this year running Windows 7.
"We’re hoping to get the product out sooner and then we’ll move to Windows 8," Intel’s Peter Adamson told TechRadar. Although he didn’t give a release date, to make it worthwhile shipping before Windows 8 comes along, we’re expecting to see the first model by spring or early summer.
Some rumours put Intel’s next generation Ivy Bridge chips on the market as soon as April or May, although we don’t know what processor Nikiski will have.
Not an Ultrabook yet
The white prototype Nikiski device will not be an Ultrabook, according to Adamson. An Ultrabook version, more like the slim black prototype shown at Computex, will follow later in the year.
This first Nikiski will be priced "close to 9."
We spotted USB 3 ports, a memory card slot and an HDMI connector on the sides of the wedge-shaped chassis.
NOT ULTRABOOK: The first Nikiski model won’t be an Ultrabook, although it will have the instant-on and long battery life associated with Intel’s powerful laptop-tablet hybrids
Adamson is responsible for the Nikiski app, and was guarded about the final features – currently it shows details from your calendar, email, Facebook news feed and more, with Metro-style notification numbers for new messages since you last looked at the app.
USB 3: Power, USB 3 ports, a headphone jack and volume controls run down one side of the Nikiski
There’s a Home button to get back to the top level and a Settings button that enables you to change options such as the font size, plus icons showing details like the time and network connectivity.
You can turn on the slimline view by swiping your finger over the touch pad to wake it up, or tapping the power button without opening the lid.
It appears to use the same lid closing and opening sensors that most laptops use to hibernate (and a few use to turn on automatically) to switch between the overview and the same information in a standard desktop view.
So if you select an email or a web page through the bottom of the notebook and you can’t see enough detail (although as Adamson notes "you’ve got a lot more real estate than on a phone"), you can open the lid to see the message or web page full screen without having to find it again.
Touchscreens add to the cost of a notebook and they also take more power, "but we’ve done a lot of work to keep the power usage low" Adamson told us. To save even more power, the backlight for the two-thirds of the screen you can’t see when the lid is shut will turn off automatically in the final version. Intel hasn’t done that for the prototypes, as you can see by the backlight shining through the closed case.
TWO THIRDS: Intel plans to turn off the backlight for the area of the screen that’s hidden when the lid is closed – you can see the glow of the full screen in the Nikiski at the right
Intel only
Intel’s Mooley Eden jokingly warned competitors not to copy the palm rejection "because we’ve already patented it".
That doesn’t compete with the ‘unintentional touch rejection’ patent Microsoft already has, because that’s about Windows interpreting your touch to see if it’s deliberate or an accident.
Nor does it compete with any of the other touch rejection patents held by various technology companies, Adamson told us.
Here it’s all done by the PC firmware and Windows never sees the touch of your palms. "We intercept the touch before Windows ever sees it."
That takes a lot of work, he explained, because "when you first touch it, your palm does look like a finger [to the PC]" but he says the system can reliably tell the difference, so you won’t be randomly moving the mouse while you’re typing.
THE WEDGE: The angle of the chassis leaves room for an HDMI port and an SD card socket as well as giving the keyboard a reasonable typing angle
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