Toshiba has announced a new mini camcorder that will retail in the UK for 129.99 pounds (about $181.61 USD).
The camera is touted as being able to produce 1080p-quality video in an incredibly small package. It features a 4x digital zoom and a 2.5in LCD screen. In addition, it can function as a digital camera to take 5 megapixel pictures.
The camera has a built-in SD card slot, which will allow for a good deal of storage which can easily be transferred to a computer (as opposed to the harder transfer process from DVD and HDD Hard Disk Drive video recorders to computers).
While this product isn't as advanced as larger recorders, the device will be great for YouTube-style filming and other activities where lugging around a full-sized camera is difficult.
The XT2 is Dell's newest tablet, and the specs sure show it. With either a 1.2 GHz or 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Processor, a 12.1" LCD display and more, the XT2 is certainly a decent next-gen tablet.
Intel is the world's leading producer of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) with their Intel Graphics Media Accelerator products. Their GMA products are often included in lower-end laptops and desktops because they are cheap and offer reasonable performance. They have garnered much criticism, however, from those who value graphics performance. Nvidia and ATI integrated graphics consistently perform better when compared to GMA GPUs, and their dedicated (discreet) GPUs blow them out of the water.
This would appear to be why Intel is developing a GPU under the codename Larrabee. Larrabee will compete with both Nvidia and ATI's dedicated and GPGPU high-performance computing products. It is thought that Larrabee will be released in either late 2009 or early 2010, although we will probably see more of Larrabee before then.
Larrabee is almost a combination of a CPU and GPU. They use the x86 microarchitecture, like standard Intel processors. It has a coherent cache hierarchy, also like CPUs. But it also has GPU-like features. It will support 3D graphics such as OpenGL and DirectX for games.
The fact that Larabee is a hybrid card could allow it to prove useful for GPGPU and stream processing applications. This could make Larrabee useful in supercomputers for scientific processing such as ray tracing and physics processing. This will help Intel compete with AMD's ATI FireStream and NVIDIA's Tesla in high-performance computing.
Larabee is in some ways similar to IBM's Cell. It is designed to have many small cores that can perform different tasks, perhaps more efficiently than one core made to do it all. There are differences as well. I won't elaborate much on this, but needless to say that while they have similarities, they are meant for different applications.
This will make Intel's offerings reflect those of AMD's ATI and Nvidia more and allow Intel to compete in the dedicated graphics market. With Intel's close relations with many manufacturers, it seems likely that they can get these chips in the market. The question in the end will be how well they perform compared to products from ATI and Nividia. Price will also factor in; it will be interesting to see whether or not Larrabee will be priced competitively. It will also be interesting to see whether or not Intel tries to market these products as ATI and Nvidia do to enthusiasts and sell them individual to system builders and those wishing to upgrade their video card. It will also be interesting to see if Intel will try to offer something similar to Crossfire from ATI or SLI from Nividia. Without support for multiple GPUs, if Intel doesn't have a single product that can outperform the other companies' cards enthusiasts will likely shun Larrabee, at least until Intel gets things together. At any rate, it will be very interesting to see how things play out.
A while back Toshiba demonstrated a Cell processor-based SpursEngine chip in a laptop (yes, the same Cell processor tech that is found in Sony's Playstation 3). Although the Cell processor was shown to be powerful at allowing for several new innovative applications in their demo, the usefulness of these chips is really for encoding and transcoding MPEG4 and MPEG2 AVCHD/H.264 codecs.
The Firecoder Blu is a card meant for these purposes, and accelerates encoding and transcoding, possibly up to five times faster than real-time. The device could possibly prove useful to those who are into Blu-Ray. With the power of modern GPUs, however, and with new programs coming out that can take advantage of their capabilites in encoding and transcoding videos, the question is whether the projected $599 pricetag will really be worth it. This is yet to be seen.
If you are into tech or browse news sites such as Slashdot, you have probably heard of Intel's new Atom Processor. And you probably know that the processor is meant for use in ultra-mobile PCs and other mobile devices, even smartphones.
You might be thinking, "these have existed in the past without the Atom processor, how are things going to be any different?" If so, you are right that both AMD and Intel have had mobile offerings available for a while. However, in these cases the lowest-power chips available from both were used for an application they really weren't originally made for. Also, because they consumed little power and were so small, they were generally underpowered, which made these UMPCs slow. And then there are "Netbooks" and other small laptops that relied on processors like low-powered Intel Pentium-M and, more recently, Core 2 chips to keep their small form factor. And finally there are even smaller devices, such as Smartphones, that use processors not compatible with the x86 instruction set that is standard in Intel and AMD processors which run Windows and standard Linux distributions. One example of this is Nvidia's Tegra, which will supposedly have superior performance to Atom, but will not support the x86 instruction set, and instead be based on the ARM RISC architecture.
This is where Atom comes in. Intel's Atom has a maximum CPU clock of a decent 1.87 GHz (with the lowest clock being 800 MHz), and supports the x86 instruction set. While AMD's Geode processors have supported Windows operating systems and standard software, they are underpowered compared to Intel's Atom.
Now, with Atom, even a smartphone could run the standard applications end-users have gotten used to, not just special versions adapted for a mobile platform, often with less functionality. And there is software that is not available at all for current mobile platforms. Two good examples would be Flash and Java, which can be important parts of the web browsing experience. With Intel Atom, both Flash and Java could run on Windows or Linux on a UMPC or MID (Mobile Internet Device).
Hopefully manufacturers will realize the potential here, and that the companies selling these devices properly market these devices, making sure that consumers know that these devices can do what other mobile devices cannot.
At the same time, I hope that innovation marches on, and that AMD comes up with their own mobile solution to compete with Intel.
In the meanwhile, Intel has unveiled their Centrino 2 Platform. Highlights include an 802.11n-compatible Wireless card.