Intel's New Superefficient-But-Fast Laptop Core i5 Chips on Jan. 7 [Intel]

Intel's dropping a big bowl o' chips January 7th—17 of 'em—like the first lower-end Core i3 chips, but we're most excited about the Arrandale Core i5 for laptops: still fast but more efficient 'cause they're shrunk to 32nm.
Remember all the excitement about Penryn a couple years ago, which took the Core 2 and made it more efficient with a new manufacturing process? It's the same deal here, as the tick of Intel's tick-tock cycle. "Tock" is a whole new microarchitecture, while "tick" is a die shrink of that, which makes it more power efficient. Nehalem is the tock—it was 45 nanometers—and Westmere is the tick, shrunk to 32nm.
Arrandale is what this set of mobile Core i5 chips, based on Westmere, is called. (Here's our primer on Intel codenames.) One thing in particular about Arrandale is that it has a graphics core built right onto the main chip package, which Intel says is good to go for Blu-ray.
Anyways, what all this means is that there's about to be a whole bunch of new laptops with faster, better Intel chips inside that won't munch your battery as hard.
[Gizmodo via Cnet]

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The Dell Adamo XPS gets pictured

First, a rant: Dell is really taking advantage of the media with the new Adamo XPS notebook. It’s classic. First they put up a teaser website a month ago that shows nothing but the incredibly thin dimensions and a side picture. Then they call a press conference where all they do is wave around the notebook for 3.5 seconds and then put it away. Now, there is a press release that contains nothing but two new pictures. This practice is tiresome and I hate that we must play the game, Dell. Anyway… on to the press release.



The new pictures shows off the unique hinge design of the Adamo XPS. It’s exactly how I thought it would work after seeing some pictures from the 9/9/09 event. The notebook is so small that designers had to pack all the computing hardware under the screen instead of around/under the keyboard. The result is what we see above as the hinge had to be moved up so the screen to keyboard ratio isn’t thrown off. I’m just curious how the notebook will stay open when sitting on your lap. Oh, and I of course wanna know the price and specs too.
[CrunchGear]

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Panasonic rolls out new Toughbooks with Windows 7 and 16 hours of battery life

Panasonic’s Let’s Note (aka Toughbook) series is the favorite choice among many Japanese hackers. And today the company announced [JP] two new notebooks from the series with Windows 7 on board. Panasonic says their 16 hours of battery life is unmatched in the industry.
The so-called N8 and S8 are the models Panasonic will market in Japan as “winter season computers”. The S8 has an internal super-multi drive, but otherwise the main specs are identical for both Toughbooks: Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 processor (2.53GHz), 250GB HDD, 12.1-inch WXGA LCD, 2GB RAM (max: 4GB RAM), Wi-Fi, WiMax, one SD slot, one HDMI interface and three USB 2.0 ports.

The S8 and N8 will go on sale in Japan on October 22 (prices: $2,400 for the S8 and $2,300 for the N8). No word yet on international sales plans from Panasonic.


[CrunchGear]

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Phoenix trims BIOS startup time down to about a second

Gather ‘round, don’t be shy. Let’s all take a look at Windows 7 booting up in about ten seconds. How is this possible? Well, turn Aero off, strip out all the bloatware, and make sure you’re using an ultra fast solid state drive. That, and trim the BIOS start time down to a little over one second.
As you can see in the video embedded on LAPTOP’s post (skip ahead to about the one minute mark) the whole BIOS song and dance doesn’t even appear. The power button is pressed, and a second or two later we see the Windows 7 startup screen.
Then, we’re greeted with the desktop – all in less time than it takes to pour a non-foamy beer. This is all possible thanks to Phoenix’s new “Instant Boot Bios,” which is currently being offered to OEMs for use in future notebooks (it might be available as an upgrade, too).
According to LAPTOP:

“Enter Phoenix’s new Instant Boot BIOS. It cuts down the post time to roughly one second. Phoenix’s Chief Scientist Steve Jones explained that the new BIOS uses UEFI technology (a new kind of BIOS platform) to power on several system devices simultaneously and to run only those processes which are absolutely necessary to hand control over to the OS.
We had a chance to view Instant Boot in action on a Lenovo T400s, which was equipped with a high-speed SSD. About one second after hitting the power button, we saw the hard drive light flickering and noticed that Windows had already started loading. Because this system had a high-speed SSD and the Windows install didn’t have a lot of extra drivers or crapware, Windows 7 itself took only 10 seconds to get us to a desktop.”

The total time for the BIOS to do its thing was 1.37 seconds – that oughta shave precious moments off of just about any computer whether it’s got a highfalutin solid state drive or not.

Phoenix’s 1-Second Instant Boot Bios Really Works [LAPTOP]
[CrunchGear]

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Toshiba Prepping World's Lightest 13-Inch Laptop [Unconfirmed]

There's no official confirmation yet, but it looks almost certain that Toshiba is gearing up to launch the lightest 13-inch notebook ever. We're talking just over two pounds with an SSD. But how on earth did they do it?

It's not the processor. The info unearthed at vozExpress indicates that the mystery laptop will coming in standard voltage Core i3, i5, and i7 varieties pretty standard these days.


Instead, look to the battery: this new Toshiba's going to employ a second Super Charged ion Battery (SCiB) that we'd previously seen achieving 90% charge in ten minutes. That was back in 2008, so we could see improvements even over that. The laptop's honeycomb rib structure, another first, will presumably also save some weight.


Other presumed specs: up to 4GB memory, 500GB hard disk or a 512GB SSD, 16:9 aspect ratio, and USB 3.0. Not to mention the 'Blaze Mountain' cooling system, which at the very least sounds impressive. But that kind of power with that little weight, and a sleek design to boot? Yes, please.
[Gizmodo via vozExpress via Engadget]

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The Invisible OLED Laptop to End All Laptops [Laptops]

It's only a proof of concept, but this is laptop with a clear OLED screen—but a stone's throw from those floating 3D displays of Avatar. Practical? Not necessarily. The future? OBVIOUSLY.
The resolution, I don't know. It's pixely, but let's not quibble.
You see right through the thing, then something appears on the screen (like a white background), and you can't see through it anymore.
Are you processing this? No, you can't be. It's only 2010. Man wasn't prepared for this kind of technology yet. The brain hasn't evolved enough. We're primates. Squirrels. Slugs.
Maybe in 100 or 200 years, the great artists of the world will reflect on what's happened today and make some sort of sense of it all. Until then, we'll just keep on breathing, in, out. Until then, we'll weep.
[Gizmodo]

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