ATOMS

Intel's Clover Trail silicon will be the first major push by the chipmaker for Windows 8 tablets, CNET has learned.

Clover Trail is an Atom chip slated for the second half of the year, about the same time frame that Windows 8 is due, a source familiar with Intel's plans told CNET.

Clover Trail is a follow-on to Medfield--due in the second quarter--which is aimed primarily at smartphones. While the Medfield chip will undoubtedly be used in some tablets, it is a single-core design, while Clover Trail will also be offered in dual-core versions, making it more attractive … Read more

Netbooks will get a boost from faster Intel silicon. The question is, does anybody still care?

Intel's new Cedar Trail silicon for Netbooks will endow new models with up to 18 percent better overall performance, including a two-fold increase in graphics speed while maintaining long battery life, according to Intel.

Windows 7-based Netbooks typically sport 10-inch screens, are under three pounds, boast up to ten hours of battery life, and priced below $400.

Netbooks are not designed for high-end productivity like photo editing or demanding games, as the Atom processor in the Windows environment is built for power efficiency, not speed. … Read more

Dell is longer interested in selling Netbooks--that category of 10-inch class laptops that saw mild success for a couple of years but is now facing a serious existential crisis.

Rather, Dell is now concentrating on laptops that deliver real performance--a major failing of the Netbook.

"We sold through the Dell Mini some time ago. We're committed to the highly portable space and have focused on delivering thin + powerful solutions, for which we've seen strong success, particularly in our XPS line," Matthew Hutchison, director of Dell Global Consumer PR, said in a statement sent to CNET. … Read more

Google recently revamped Google Reader to a healthy dose of criticism. If you're unhappy with the changes to Google Reader, we've highlighted some alternative feed aggregators to consider.

We've broken down the choices to Web, Android, and iOS, but some apps are available across multiple platforms and devices.

Feedly (Firefox and Chrome) Feedly is an aggregator that actually pulls feeds from Google Reader. It offers different viewing styles, including titles, magazine, mosaic, and full article. Feedly also has one of the most comprehensive sharing options we've seen. Items can be sent to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, … Read more

Steve Jobs had some choice words for Intel that went beyond just censure to hubris in the just-released biography.

In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Steve Jobs," the former Apple CEO, who recently passed away, had significant issues with Intel as a company as well as its world-renowned processors.

Apple switched to Intel's X86 chip design in 2005 when it dropped IBM's and Motorola's PowerPC processors. And Intel chips have been powering Apple's MacBooks and Macs exclusively ever since.

But Jobs implies in the biography that Intel wasn't keeping up with the times. He … Read more

After much delay, Facebook finally rolled out a native app for the iPad, pleasing those who, until now, have relied on third-party apps and the regular Web site for Facebook stalking.

Because of the anticipation (and endless rumors) about the iPad app release, many people missed another exciting piece of news: Facebook also implemented a new mobile Web site for phones, which boasts a very attractive, easy-to-navigate HTML5 interface.

In proper fashion, Facebook didn't make the new HTML5 web app available for the iPad, leaving users to the bulky desktop site while browsing in Safari. However, with this trick, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel hauled out its first Android tablet running on "Medfield," an upcoming Atom chip for smartphones and tablets, while two executives also chatted with CNET about their relationship with Google, all at Intel's developer conference today.

The Medfield Atom chip is one of Intel's most power-efficient chip designs--a strict requirement for tablets and smartphones. It contains a single processing core--as opposed to more power-hungry dual-core Atom chips used in Netbooks--and will be available in devices in the first half of 2012.

The tablet that Intel showed today (see photo below) is a so-called reference design … Read more

British and U.S. scientists have confirmed that an atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) near London is the most accurate long-term timekeeper in the world, the NPL said.

The NPL-CsF2 is a cesium fountain clock that's used as a standard for International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time.

The machine is apparently accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second. Not bad, I guess.

The NPL's Krzysztof Szymaniec joined scientists from Pennsylvania State University in evaluating the clock. The team published its results in the journal Metrologia.

The analysis concludes that the clock will lose only a billionth of a second every two months, and represents an unprecedented accuracy. Cesium clocks are usually expected to lose or gain a second over tens of millions of years.

"Together with other improvements of the cesium fountain, these models and numerical calculations have improved the accuracy of the U.K.'s cesium fountain clock, NPL-CsF2, by reducing the uncertainty to 2.3 × 10-16--the lowest value for any primary national standard so far," Szymaniec was quoted as saying by the NPL.

In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which as of summer 2010 had an uncertainty of 3 x 10-16, meaning it would take more than 100 million years to lose or gain a second.

That will be billions of years before the sun dies, taking the Earth with it, so I expect an update on this from a future blogger. … Read more

The Internet is the Best Thing Ever for news junkies, and RSS feeds help make it that way. Pmcc's News Messenger is a free news reader that reads not only Atom and RSS pages but also HTML, so it can read headlines from sites that don't support syndication. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or higher.

We extracted and saved News Messenger's program file, which immediately scanned for updated headlines when we opened it. The program displays headlines and brief summaries as well as time stamps in a narrow vertical column that can be configured to … Read more