With Apple likely forgoing optical drives across all or most of its MacBooks, and ultrabooks doing the same, it's no surprise that the venerable whirring drive will spin away, albeit gradually, into obscurity.

Next to go driveless at Apple is the 15-inch MacBook Air. 9to5Mac says Apple almost brought out a 15-inch Air in late 2010 (but didn't because of a problem with the hinges). Apple now has plans to make this happen next year when Intel's graphics-centric Ivy Bridge processor ships.

Ultrabooks will do their part to hurry the otherwise slow demise of the optical drive. … Read more

Intel is trying to overhaul the supercomputer. The idea is to pack more processing power into less space. The 50-plus core Knights Corner processor is how Intel hopes to make it happen.

Let's be clear. It's not that Intel is necessarily losing the supercomputer race--its Xeon processors still power the vast majority of the world's supercomputers--but supercomputing is changing. And the chip giant's arch rival Nvidia is leading the way, with newfangled supercomputers that increasingly rely on its graphics processing units (GPUs) to do supercomputer calculations more efficiently.

Intel's Knights Corner processor is … Read more

At an Intel Capital conference this week an Intel executive spelled out how and why the market will transition to ultrabooks over the next few years. In a word, ultrabooks need to be "cool."

Intel is driving the PC industry to ultrabooks with a $300 million ultrabook fund--principally for hardware development--and a second fund announced this week, the $100 million AppUpSM Fund, targeted at applications for future ultrabooks.

Erik Reid, the general manager of the Mobile Platforms Division at Intel's PC Client Group, detailed Intel's thinking in a session at the Intel conference this week in Huntington Beach, Calif.

The coolness factor: "Users want something that's cool," said Reid. Intel research shows that when people see an ultrabook they think that "it must be better engineered because it's thin. It's harder to make a thin device than a thick device. It's more forward-looking." … Read more

Aside from a couple hulking memory chips, Texas Instruments owns the interiors of Amazon's Kindle Fire.

iFixit's teardown shows an abundance of TI silicon, with flash memory storage and system memory from Samsung and Hynix, respectively.

Keep in mind that a system-on-a-chip (SoC) like TI's OMAP 4430 already packs many of the core device features onto one piece of silicon. But the Kindle Fire also attaches a number of less glamorous TI chips to the SoC for things like power management and audio. … Read more

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif.--Intel CEO Paul Otellini said today at an Intel conference that touch-based ultrathin notebooks running Windows 8 will be a big focus for the company in the coming 12 months.

Otellini said that to lure mainstream laptop buyers, Intel and its partners need to get the cost of touch technology under control. "To hit the volume price points, we need to span $699 and up, and that's the goal for next year," he said, speaking at the Intel Capital Global Summit in Huntington Beach, Calif.

"To do that, we have to get touch … Read more

With Best Buy getting ready to sell a $799.99 Toshiba ultrabook and the Acer Aspire S3 now going for $839.99, the prospect of affordable ultrabooks is real.

Surprisingly, this didn't take long to happen.

"I think Intel is cheering right now--that the price came down that low that fast," said Deron Kershaw, an analyst at Gap Intelligence.

"What's the magical price point that sales really begin to take off? That's probably $599 to $699 next year. But we didn't think we were going to see anything around $800 this year," … Read more

The University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has contracted with Cray to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. That computer will tap AMD's new 16-core processor.

Blue Waters will be composed of more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets based on the AMD's Opteron 6200 Series processor (formerly code-named "Interlagos") and more than 30 cabinets of a future version of the recently announced Cray XK6 supercomputer with Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs), Cray said. All of this will be combined into a single, powerful hybrid supercomputer.

The … Read more

Toshiba is poised to launch a model in its Z830 Portege Ultrabook series for $799.99 at Best Buy, which will be a new low price point for this emerging laptop category.

The Portege Z835 at Best Buy (model: Z835-P330) packs a "Sandy Bridge" 1.4GHz Core i3-2367M processor, 4GB DDR3 memory, 13.3" LED-backlit display (1366x768), and 128GB solid-state drive.

The 0.6-inch thick, 2.5-pound laptop also includes Intel HD 3000 graphics, built-in webcam and microphone, one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet LAN, Wi-Fi, and Windows 7 Home Premium.

Interestingly, … Read more

Next year is shaping up to be the year that the Ultrabook takes on the MacBook Air in earnest, with a new report hinting at an $800 ThinkPad from Lenovo and even talk of a fall release of Windows 8.

Intel has been espousing Ultrabooks as the next wave in Windows-based laptop computing. An important part of the argument is price: Ultrabooks have to be considerably cheaper than the popular MacBook Air in order to get consumers interested. (Note to picky Ultrabook reviewers: PC makers are going have to cut some corners to get the price down.)

Well, Lenovo appears … Read more