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In 2012, MacBooks, ultrabooks mix it up

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

Tilera's 100-core processors take on Sandy Bridge

Tilera has introduced a range of processors with up to 100 cores, aiming to take on Intel in servers that handle high-throughput Web applications.

The chips in the 40nm 64-bit Tilera Gx family, announced yesterday, have between 36 and 100 cores and are intended by the Silicon Valley-based chip design company to compete with Intel's Sandy Bridge range of processors.

"The reason we can go against Sandy Bridge architecture is [Intel's range] was designed for general-purpose [applications], so it has to account for single-thread performance and power-point performance and Windows," Ihab Bishara, Tilera's head of … Read more

Sleek image organizer

We encounter lots of programs that are either image editors or image organizers, but rarely do we see programs that do both. Kestrel GX is an exception, providing people with both a set of basic editing tools and a sleek way to organize and view images.

The program's interface is reminiscent of Adobe products such as Lightroom and Bridge, with a sleek black layout that's fairly easy to navigate. The image viewer portion of the program allows people to view and edit metadata, assign keywords and other identifying information, and search images using a variety of parameters. A … Read more

Honda Civic GX tops green list again

The Honda Civic GX is the greenest car of 2011, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

The nonprofit organization released its 14th annual environmental ratings list yesterday with the Honda Civic GX, which runs on compressed natural gas, once again winning first place. The ACEEE ranked the all-electric Nissan Leaf second, with the Smart Fortwo in third, and the Toyota Prius in fourth. The Chevy Volt was ranked last at No. 12.

However, topping the ACEEE's list doesn't necessarily mean the Honda Civic GX is the most consumer-friendly green car available. The car, which has … Read more

Most hybrids to lose CA HOV access, electric vehicles can stay

Those yellow Clean Air Vehicle stickers that gave tens of thousands of hybrids access to full-time use of California's carpool lanes are long gone, and the clock is ticking down on the time they're valid. But for a few near zero-emissions vehicles, the HOV lane remains wide open to the single-party driver for another four years.

A recent bill was signed in California extending the amount of time that vehicles meeting California's super ultra-low emission vehicle (SULEV) standard and the federal inherently low-emission vehicle (ILEV) standard can use the HOV lane with less than the minimum number … Read more

Car Tech Live 164: Driving Nissan's bad boy: The 2010 GT-R (podcast)

The U.S. bears down on a Lexus SUV while Toyota mulls over a sort of "guilty" plea...The end of Hummer finally has come, Aptera says it Jetson-like car is going to be real, and we set out in the almost unbelievable 2010 GT-R.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 164 SHOW NOTES

• Driving the Nissan GT-R

• Mini E Race electric car rips up Nurburgring!

• Audi S4 is a CNET Editors' Choice

• MyFord Touch to offer new Eco-Route--drive on less gas

• Aptera EV closer to reality--by 2011?… Read more