nvidia

One of the many laptops being announced at CES this week is the Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q725. It will offer the same bells and whistles of recent X305s, except that its primary drive will consist of a 64GB solid state drive, while the secondary drive will be the standard spindle-based 320GB SATA hard disk drive. This hybrid solution will not only boost performance on an already beast of a machine but will also help with its typically lackluster battery life--as with most gaming laptops--not by much, but it's something.

Here's a quick look at the specifications:

Updated at 11:05 p.m. PST with additional information throughout.

Another Netbook? No, not exactly. Hewlett-Packard's new Pavilion dv2 is an ultraportable, thank you. And the new Athlon Neo silicon inside from Advanced Micro Devices will try to prove that point.

AMD is introducing new chips at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that target the no-man's land between Netbooks and notebooks. Typically, these designs are referred to as ultraportables--the most salient examples being Apple's MacBook Air, the Toshiba Portege, and the Sony Vaio TT series.

So what makes AMD's platform different? In one … Read more

When Apple converted to Intel in 2005 that was big. But 2008 Intel Atom converts make this look like a small-town baptism.

Overall, it was a good year for the Intel faithful despite the Wall Street financial crisis. Intel handily beat Advanced Micro Devices in the PC processor performance war. (Not coincidentally, AMD was forced to spin off its manufacturing operations to save itself.) But that really was last year's news since AMD had not been delivering competitive processors for almost two years.

The tectonic shift in 2008 came as one PC maker after another adopted Intel's new … Read more

Intel and Nvidia are entering into a new, nasty phase of competition. What's at stake? Only the future of the personal computer.

Although the Santa Clara, Calif., neighbors (located only a couple of miles from each other) have never really been on speaking terms, the rivalry is intensifying with the emergence of the Netbook--small, lightweight laptops priced below $500.

The competitive backdrop is still the same--Intel's longstanding (and very successful) vision of a CPU-centric universe versus Nvidia's creed that graphics processing matters more and more in a multimedia-intensive world.

The challenge for Nvidia is that as laptops … Read more

On a very special Buzz Out Loud, we discover that we, much to our surprise and chagrin, are the cause for the ongoing economic crisis in this country. Who knew? Also, of course, we dissect at length the news that Apple is pulling out of future Macworld Expo conferences after this year, and the even bigger news that Steve Jobs won't be giving this last keynote. Heartbreak ensues.

Without Macworld, how will Apple create the buzz? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10124956-37.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/12/16macworld.html… Read more

With Apple under its belt, Nvidia is taking aim at Netbooks.

On Wednesday, Nvidia is launching its GeForce 9400M "Ion" graphics chipset for Netbooks and small desktop designs. And the Santa Clara, Calif., company is hoping for another coup like the one it staged at Apple, where Nvidia bumped Intel silicon out of the Apple MacBook because of underperforming graphics.

The goal this time is to replace the Intel silicon that supports the Atom processor. Currently, Netbooks from companies such as Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell use the Atom and accompanying Intel silicon called a chipset.

Nvidia has … Read more

Bad bumps? A U.K. tech site is alleging that the latest Apple MacBook Pros contain Nvidia graphics chips with the same "bad bumps" problem that Nvidia addressed this summer and said was rectified.

Nvidia said in a phone interview on Tuesday that this is dead wrong.

First a little background. Nvidia issued a statement July 2 saying it would take a charge of up to $200 million to cover repairs due to a "weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems."

Both Hewlett-Packard … Read more

Problems with Apple's newly redesigned MacBooks are being reported on Apple discussion boards and across the Internet.

The new notebooks, which have already run into problems with the trackpad, are said to have problems with video performance, third-party memory chips, and staying in sleep mode. It's always difficult to get a sense of how widespread such problems are from tracking message board posts--and every computer ever made has had problems--but the volume of such complaints regarding the new systems seems to be increasing.

Gizmodo collected some of the more pressing problems in a post Monday. The memory issue involves crashes that appear to be linked to adding third-party memory chips into the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Apple charges way more for memory upgrades than other companies such as Crucial or Other World Computing, so savvy Mac users interested in adding memory on their own often choose one of those products.

That post also highlights an issue that involves the MacBook Pro being unable to stay in sleep mode, turning itself on when closed every minute or so, or freezing when woken up by the user. That issue doesn't seem as serious as the memory one, but if you've noticed this problem resetting your MacBook's PRAM seems to have worked for some people.

… Read more

On Tuesday, an industry consortium ratified the OpenCL 1.0 specification, a standard that started as an Apple proposal but has gained many supporters, including graphics chip companies Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

OpenCL, or Open Computing Language, is essentially an open industry standard for 3D graphics and computer audio and is meant to extend the capabilities of the graphics processing unit (GPU).

Not surprisingly, graphics chip companies have been quick to pick it up, including Nvidia and AMD's ATI graphics unit, which both made separate announcements Tuesday, along with the broader announcement from The Khronos Group consortium.

OpenCL … Read more