The latest set of industry rumors points at a new set of processors destined for CULV notebooks, which would be part of the Core i3 and i5 families.
CULV is short for consumer ultra low voltage, referring to the chips you find in the mid-range notebooks that slot in between netbooks and “full-power” notebooks. Currently these are the Core 2 Duo SU-models, boasting extensive battery life and decent performance.
The only details we know about the new processors is that they are due for release in the next couple months and will be manufactured on the 32nm process, like the other chips announced earlier this year. They will of course be less powerful than the current standard voltage chips, but will also be priced less.
Last week, we postulated that another rumored chip, a ULV Core i7, might serve as the replacement for the aging Core 2 Duo ULV processor in the ThinkPad X301. It is unlikely that we will see these new CULV chips in a ‘classic’ ThinkPad, although they could be placed into the Edge or even SL models.
We will also most likely see them in Lenovo’s IdeaPad CULV notebooks, like the smaller U Series models.
A few weeks ago I wrote about a proposed feature of Windows 7, which would allow you to create a virtual instance of your WiFi card. It looks like Intel is doing a similar play with the virtualized card, but implementing it with a lot of added functionality that should make this a really cool technology for home users.
Have you wanted to share files, printers, or other devices over your home network? If you tried to, do you remember how much of a pain it was to make that happen? Intel’s new technology proposes to make activities like that much simpler, and open the doors to many other connectivity opportunities.
As defined by Intel:
Intel MWT is an integrated silicon, firmware, and software (driver) solution that enables a single Wi-Fi adapter to function like two adapters for concurrent WLAN and Wi-Fi PAN connectivity.
That’s great, but what does it do for you? Every day, more and more devices are becoming WiFi enabled. GPS, cell phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, printers, and the like. My WiFi lets you add nearly device to a Personal Area Network (PAN) that is created using the virtualized adapter. The likelihood is that if your device can connect to a standard wireless network, you’re good to go. Forget about the the dreaded network tweaking that goes on to get everything to talk to eachother on a traditional home network – this one comes with a GUI.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the entire process is nearly point and click. Look closely and you see devices like a printer, AppleTV box, projector, iPod, PSP…the list goes on.
As someone who is moving away from traditional entertainment sources (read: cable/satellite), takes a lot of photos, occasionally needs to print, and has computers littered around the house, this is huge. Multimedia devices can join the network in a pinch, I can print to my bottom-barrel laser printer without expensive & complicated add-ons, and file sharing will be a piece of cake. THIS gives me incentive to upgrade to 802.11n and invest in some WiFi enabled multimedia boxes.
So how do you get Intel’s MyFi? Well you need one of Intel’s two newest wireless cards: the Intel Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 or the WiFi Link 5100, which are pretty much standard options in any current notebook configuration. From there you’ll of course need a software update, but it looks like from there you’re set. While Dell is being proactive and advertising the feature on their blogs, and it is noted in the WiFi card options during purchase, it doesn’t appear that anything is preventing anyone with the proper wireless card from using this feature.
Are you guys as excited about this as I am? I might need to hunt down one of these cards for my ThinkPad X61.
Check out the links below for more info and useful resources around My WiFi.
Some of you may remember the IdeaPad U350 that Lenovo announced the other week, which featured Intel’s Pentium SU2700 ULV processor. Until yesterday, that processor didn’t officially exist. This week at the Computex 2009 conference, Intel announced several new processors including the ULV SU2700 chip destined for CULV machines.
While the SU2700 makes up the lower end of the performance spectrum, there is also the new T9900 which runs at a blistering 3.06GHz, but chugs quite a lot more power than the SU2700. In the middle of these two extremes you’ll find the P9700 and P8800, which run at 2.8GHz and 2.66GHz respectively. I am assuming the petite SU2700 is a single core chip, but truthfully, I can’t seem to find explicit mention of that. Check out the nifty chart below for an overview of the new bits or hit the link for a more detailed, technical analysis of the new offerings from Intel.
This one is for the really techy readers out there. Intel recently started talking about the next generation Atom (i.e. netbook) platform, codenamed PineTrail. For those of you without a computer engineering degree or too much time on your hands, the net of it is that performance and power consumption will be improved and of course the price needs to stay in the same range.
The biggest technical change is moving both the memory controller and graphics core onto the CPU itself. AMD has had integrated memory controllers for a long time and Intel is going that way on mainstream CPU’s as well, but this will be a big first on the uber-budget Atom chip. By having both of these components on one chip, you simplify the actual manufacturing of the chipset. Since it will be on chip, the memory controller and graphics core will be manufactured using a 45nm process, compared to the 130nm process used for the chipset on the current Atom platform. Smaller transistors = less power usage
For those who want some more gorey, technical details, check out Anand’s excellently written article below.
Intel has been a busy bee at a few conferences of late. First up is the announcement of a couple new Atom processors at the Beijing Intel Developer Forum. The headlining Z550 sports a breakthrough 2GHz clock speed, supports Hyperthreading, and consumes 3W of power. While less sexy, the Z515 should be the first Atom to feature “Burst Performance Technology,” which would allow the clock speed to be increased up to 1.2GHz as needed. How is this different than SpeedStep on every Intel mobile CPU since the original Pentium M? You’ve got me.
Over at the Linux Collaboration Summit, Intel was talking about a possible 2 second boot time with their Moblin Linux platform on an Atom-based device. Tests of an alpha version of Moblin show that certain parts of the platform already load in a couple seconds and Intel feels confident that a complete boot is possible in 2 seconds. Hit the links below for more details!
James over at jkOnTheRun got a brand new Intel Classmate Convertible PC in the mail the other day and just couldn’t wait to share his excitement, so he practically live vlogged its opening. Hit the link to check out his video and first impressions.
It seems like a really neat venture. I’ll say that as cool as having ink functionality in a notebook is, the most I found myself using it was in classes and that is right where this machine is targeted (primary education anyway). The hardware itself seems solid and well thought out, albeit simple. Sounds like a win so far in my book!
AMD’s chief marketing office, Nigel Dessau, wrote on his blog recently about laptop battery life standards. He notes that in other industries, a product’s “time of usability” is generally noted by more than one figure: with cars you have city and highway Miles per Gallon, with cell phones you have Standby and Talk Time run-times, and so on.
Nigel is calling for a similar “Idle” and “Heavy Usage” metric for laptops, to better educate consumers as to what they are buying into. He even goes as far as to run tests on various Intel and AMD based systems using his proposed benchmarking suite, to highlight the differences.
While Nigel’s post doesn’t specifically call-out Intel, he does include test results for Intel systems and shows the drastic difference in battery life between the different test methodologies. A Wall Street Journal blogger covering Dessau’s post contacted Intel for their feedback:
Intel doesn’t seem too inclined to converse about the topic in this fashion. “There are many ways to measure battery life,” a spokeswoman for the company says in an email. “We believe the best way to determine how to measure battery life is by making proposals and debating it in industry consortiums and not via blog post.”
Ouch. Apparently Intel doesn’t really care about the post, perhaps because they haven’t seen competition from AMD in quite some time. Hit the links below for more details & the actual test results between AMD’s proposed benchmarks.
How do you consumers view battery runtime figures? Are they a big factor in your purchasing decisions? Are they detailed enough for you?
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AMD’s chief marketing office, Nigel Dessau, wrote on his blog recently about laptop battery life standards. He notes that in other industries, a product’s “time of usability” is generally noted by more than one figure: with cars you have city and highway Miles per Gallon, with cell phones you have Standby and Talk Time run-times, and so on.
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