Dell

Dell is offering Windows-Linux hybrid laptops that use both Intel and ARM processors. Though the user would never know it.

As pointed out in this EE Times report, entitled "Dell has dragged the Linux-ARM Trojan horse inside the Wintel PC," Dell is offering a processor-plus-OS subsystem separate from the main Windows-Intel system.

The goal is to give users instant access to e-mail without booting up the operating system and extend battery life by running Linux on a very low-power ARM processor. Basic ARM processor designs are licensed by U.K.-based ARM Holdings to companies like Samsung and … Read more

Updated on January 26 at 9:50 a.m. PST with additional information about ACP and TDP thermal-envelope ratings.

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday released low-power and high-performance processors that will find their way into servers from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and Rackable Systems.

The new server processors are updated versions of AMD's 45-nanometer Shanghai processor.

"When we first came to market, we brought out the standard-power (Shanghai processors) because that's where the bulk of our market is," John Fruehe, the director of business development for server and workstation products at AMD, said in an interview. &… Read more

Updated at 11 p.m. PST with information about Apple.

Dell is doing its part to usher in the age of the super-sized solid-state drive. For the first time, Dell laptops can be configured with the newest large-capacity SSDs from Samsung.

Back in the day (last January), laptop buyers were stuck with a Henry Fordesque choice: order any solid-state drive you want with your laptop as long as it's 64GB.

What a difference a year makes. On Friday, Dell quadrupled this to 256GB. The Samsung SSD is now available as an option on Dell's XPS M1330 and M1730 … Read more

A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.

Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.

Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.

The trend of … Read more

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more

Looking for signs that netbooks are catching on? And even morphing into notebooks? Here's a few.

Netbooks were the big end-user gadget on display at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that ended Friday.

And all the Netbooks at a Microsoft booth were running Windows 7, Microsoft's next-generation operating system due next year.

A Microsoft person on the floor said that a lite version of Windows 7 will run on 1GB of memory and 16GB of (solid-state drive) storage. Higher-end Netbooks will have a 160GB hard disk drive, according to Microsoft "guidance."

This person also said something … Read more

Updatd on November 3 at 9:00 a.m. with additional information about Dell Core i7 systems.

Intel's Core i7 processor will first appear in fast gaming desktop PCs, as reviews arrive confirming its speed advantage over the Core 2 architecture.

The first comprehensive reviews hit Monday leaving little doubt that Intel's Nehalem chip architecture will greatly surpass anything Intel offers now.

Reviews cover the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition used with Intel's "SmackOver" motherboard, aka the DX58SO Extreme.

Core i7 processors expected to launch later this month include 2.66GHz (Core i7-920) and 3.20GHz (… Read more

Is the MacBook Air overpriced? Competitive offerings from Dell and Toshiba reveal that the MacBook Air may not be so extortionately expensive.

Of course, it all depends on your perspective: $2,499 for a laptop is a lot of money. But put the Air into the context of its product category--ultraportable laptop--and you see that, by comparison, it's not necessarily overpriced.

(Note: Here we're talking about the just-announced update to the MacBook Air.)

Let's start with Dell's recently announced ultraportable laptop (or 'subnotebook," choose your nomenclature). The 12.1-inch Latitude E4200 is priced at $2,… Read more

Will 2009 be the year that solid-state drives take off? Maybe not. The speedy drives are catching on, but wider acceptance will take time--and the bad economy isn't helping.

Costs are still high for these drives, which typically outdo--and in some cases blow away--hard disks in performance. "2010-2011...that's when we think the price points for the SSD market get attractive enough to really drive stronger growth," Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief operating officer of SanDisk, said this week during SanDisk's third-quarter earnings conference call.

Indeed, there is still a wide price gap between hard-disk … Read more