ivy bridge

Though Advanced Micro Devices will not be inside branded ultrabooks, it is making a play for that market. Will consumers care which chipmaker is inside?

The quick answer: yes, if you're price sensitive. "They'll come into a market behind Intel and then do what they do at a lower price," said Deron Kershaw, an analyst at Gap Intelligence.

Ultrabooks are skinny, light laptops that attempt to combine the portability of a tablet with the productivity of a laptop.

How low can AMD-based systems go? "Our...solution will enable a full featured, high-performance user experience well … Read more

Apple may have sold as many as 1.2 million MacBook Airs last quarter as its competition tries to pounce on the burgeoning ultrabook market.

The estimated 1.2 million in unit sales was a small leap from the 1 million sold in the third quarter. But Apple was the only vendor that didn't see a drop in overall notebook sales between the two quarters, according to a report from DigiTimes.

Hit by the sluggish economy and a shortage of hard drives, fourth-quarter notebook shipments around the world dropped by 8.7 percent to 48.59 million in the … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The message of CES 2012 for laptops thus far: wait.

I'd love to tell you that one of the laptops of this year's Consumer Electronics Show is absolutely wonderful, a must-buy. However, I can't. I have a strong feeling that whatever we see at this show is only a half-step forward. Worse, there's a very good chance that it'll all be out of date by midyear.

The reasons are utterly simple, and made even clearer by this morning's Intel keynote presentation.… Read more

Ultrabooks will come in two basic varieties at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas: present and future. The latter will incorporate Intel's Ivy Bridge processor, destined to populate all of the ultrabooks and hybrids coming out in the second half of the year.

Ivy Bridge follows the Sandy Bridge chip shipping in current and ultrabooks. While SB should be the chip of choice in ultrabooks until this summer, expect PC makers (and Apple) to make the switcheroo to Ivy Bridge after that.

PC manufacturing titans like Foxconn and Inventec were already hawking their Ivy Bridge wares in September. … Read more

2012 promises to be a watershed year for laptops. Really thin will be in and internal optical drives out, while some designs venture into hybrid territory.

Apple: Apple is expected to incorporate the MacBook Air design theme into more models, including a 15-incher sans optical drive. And since Apple popularized the really-thin aesthetic with the January 2008 introduction of the MacBook Air, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the company will continue to be a trendsetter.

Trendsetting may include a rumored 2,880-by-1,800-pixel display. That would be a remarkable feat as workstation-class 15-inch Windows laptops, such as … Read more

Laptop and desktop computers aren't always the most high-profile of products shown at CES, but with an influx of new, thin, ultrabook laptops expected, as well as an updated CPU platform from Intel, you're sure to get a detailed view of what PCs will be on shopping lists for the rest of 2012.

Laptops get thinner We've seen a good handful of ultrabooks already, but the rumor mill says that nearly every computer manufacturer will get in on the act with at least one 13- or 14-inch entry. Remember that an ultrabook (according to Intel's official definition) can include laptops in the 15-inch range, so we may see some of those as well.… Read more

USB 3.0 has gotten the green light for becoming a standard offering on Intel-based Windows PCs next year.

The USB Implementers Forum announced this week that the upcoming "Ivy Bridge" 7 Series Chipset and other Intel chipsets have achieved USB 3.0 certification. Chipsets are support silicon that work in tandem with the main processor.

USB 3.0, aka SuperSpeed USB, delivers up to 10 times the data transfer rate of USB 2.0, as well as improved power efficiency.

Intel's Ivy Bridge silicon, due to ship in Windows PCs in the April-June time frame, will … Read more

A chip analyst has written a sobering assessment of Intel's chip prowess vis-a-vis Apple in the mobile device race, an odd underdog position for the largest chipmaker.

In the brave new world of tablets and smartphones, chip competition isn't so much about Moore's Law but rather how the "blocks" of circuits are put together and the nexus with the software that runs on those circuits, Gus Richard, a senior research analyst at securities firm Piper Jaffray, wrote in a research note this week.

More specifically, tablets and smartphones use silicon called system-on-a-chip, or SoC, that … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about missing Recovery HD partitions after cloning a Lion installation, upgrading the processor on Mac systems, and the requirements for running permissions repair routines when updating the system. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

NOTE: The "contact us" box on the MacFixIt page is now available for you to use when e-mailing questions. … Read more