Coming after the HP TouchSmart’s jugular, the Vaio L will have all the multimedia goods and seems to be packed with new Sony multimedia software that brings Sony TV to your PC. [Sony]

VAIO L Series Puts TV, Internet and Blu-ray Disc Movies One Touch Away

NEW YORK, Oct. 8, 2009 – Sony today unveiled its new touch-enabled, multi-media machine- the VAIO® L Touch HD PC/TV.

With the VAIO L Series’ multi-touch screen easy access to your PC, HDTV, DVR- your entire entertainment hub- is readily at your fingertips.

Equipped with a 24-inch (diagonal) WUXGA (1920×1080) widescreen panel, the unit displays high-definition content in Full HD resolution.

Select models feature a Blu-ray Disc™ optical drive so you can enjoy high-definition movies. A rewritable BD drive for recording, storing and playing back personal content on high-capacity BD media is also available.

“The L Series is the ultimate multi-media hub- it’s your PC, HDTV and DVR in one compact, stylish device,” said Mike Abary, senior vice president of the VAIO business group at Sony. “And with cutting-edge features such as multi-touch, it’s ideal for media lovers who appreciate HD performance and cutting-edge technology.”

Select models feature a built-in tuner so you can connect to your digital cable TV service and Over-The-Air (ATSC) HD TV signals (antenna required) and watch television on your PC

An optional HDMI™ input is available, so in addition to the unit’s built-in HD features you can connect a compatible HD cable box, satellite receiver or PLAYSTATION®3 (all sold separately) via a single cable and enjoy HD entertainment without powering on the PC.

And with built-in DVR capabilities and up to a terabyte of storage, you can create a personal entertainment library with up to 100 hours of HD television.

It comes with Windows® 7 Home Premium or Professional 64-bit operating system. Leveraging these new operating systems, the L Series is able to offer new functionalities such as a touch screen display enabling you to do anything you could do with a mouse with the touch of a finger.

Launch directly into Sony’s own Media Gallery software by pushing the designated VAIO button on the keyboard and create high-quality home movies and slideshows in three simple steps. Import your photos and video, choose a theme and soundtrack, click finish and the software does the rest, generating a professional-looking movie complete with special effects- all by touching the screen.
The unit packs a powerful Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processor (select models), loads of RAM, and a dedicated NVIDIA® GeForce ® series graphics for graphic-intense gaming and movies.

By utilizing built-in wireless 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi technology and your wireless router (required, sold separately), you can position the model virtually anywhere in your home and access the Internet, email or home network.

The model is ideal for anywhere space is at a premium. It has a mounting capability that allows users to attach a VESA-compatible mount (sold separately) to it and hang it on the wall of your bedroom, kitchen, office or attach to your desk.

When not mounted to the wall, the L Series features an adjustable stand to help you adjust the unit to meet your desired viewing or touch angle or simply to decrease the slant for space-saving. A wireless keyboard, mouse and remote control (select models) are included.

The VAIO L Touch HD PC/TV will start at about $1,300. It is available for pre-orders today online at www.sonystyle.com/pr/l. It will also be sold at Sony Style® stores and select retailers around the country starting next month.

Like any other alarm clock with dock—compatible with iPod touch 2nd generation, iPod nano 1st to 4th generation, iPod touch, iPod classic, iPod with video and iPod 4th generation—the iLuv iMM153 has built-in speakers and FM radio. Unlike other alarm clocks, however, the iMM153 comes with a small unit that will vibrate to wake you up. At $US59.99, it doesn’t look bad, but I will need to daisy-chain a few of those if I really want them to wake me up. [iLuv]

There’s really no reason that a pot filled with soil can’t sit next to your computer, but something about a hydroponics system just feels more thematic.

Desktop Hydroponics, available for $US40, is a means to grow herbs at your desk. Essentially a plastic shell with some sponges and nutrient mix, its slot-type top should hold stalks in place…while tempting your coworkers as a means to dispose of old CDs. [ThinkGeek via UberReview]

Hokay, so the way Intel develops chips is on what it calls the “tick-tock cycle”. The “tick” is the improvement of its current microarchitecture, mainly shrinking it down to make it more energy efficient, along with other tweaks. As you now can guess, the “tock” indicates the launch of a totally new microarchitecture.

Penryn, for instance, was the tick to the Core 2’s tock, shrinking it down from a 65-nanometer process to 45nm. Core i7 is a tock, using a completely new microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem. Core i7 Nehalem is actually a dramatic step forward, remedying several lingering Intel architecture deficiencies that AMD actually had them beat on years ago. So, here are four things that specifically make the new chip awesome:

Bye Bye Front-Side Bus
The ancient front-side bus setup has long been a drag on Intel’s chips, and they’re finally ditching it. The FSB essentially carried data between the CPU and memory controller hub (which is also out the window, more on that in a sec), but that didn’t work so well when you started talking buckets of cores. In its place is a new tech called QuickPath Interconnect that’ll make the old bottlenecks history and running tons of cores even better. QPI uses direct point-to-point connections that have a bandwidth of about 25GB/s, way faster than what FSB could offer. The downside is that it requires a new QPI-friendly motherboard. This concept is kind of cribbed from AMD, whose HyperTransport has been doing something similar for a longass time.

Integrated Memory Controller and Triple-Channel Memory
You might notice a pattern that a lot of Nehalem’s performance boosts have to do with better access to memory and fatter bandwidth. Yet another tech that AMD held over Intel’s head for years is an integrated memory controller, which Core i7 finally uses. Basically this just means that the memory controller is on the same die as the CPU, cutting down memory latency. Before, with Intel chips, communication had to take place across the front-side bus, making stuff slooooow. The last memory bonus is that Core i7 supports triple-channel memory. Right now, you’re probably on a computer using dual-channel memory (in English, I mean that it uses RAM sticks in sets of two). Core i7 will make three sticks of RAM the new standard—so keep an eye out for plenty of 6GB and 12GB systems running around.

The Return of Hyper-Threading
Intel abandoned Hyper-Threading after the Pentium 4, but it’s back in Core i7 (and Atom, but really, psh). Basically, it’s a parallel-processing tech that runs multiple threads simultaneously. In English, it divvies up tasks so they can be crunched by a processor simultaneously, instead of one after the other. It short, it makes video encoding and other parallel-friendly processes run faster. We’re interested to see what kind of gains this will produce in tandem with programs coded to take advantage of threading, not to mention the next great operating systems, Snow Leopard and Windows 7, which will supposedly make better use of multiple cores and parallel processing than current OSes.

Built-In Power Management and Overclocking
Core i7 is pretty much a beast already, but whereas Intel used to say that overclocking was bad for your processor, now with the Core i7, it’s built right in. The Core i7 is really aggressive with power management, more so than Core 2, so it’ll sip juice when it’s not busy, and then crank the power when it needs it. In the BIOS now, you can set it to overclock the CPU in certain situations, and customise that by thermal ratings so it won’t overheat.

So yeah, Core i7 gets our engines running, and we’re not even chip nerds. (Honest!) Sadly though, right now there are just a few Core i7 chips available, and they’re all for desktops. There’s not much of a downside for portables—save for the need for new motherboards and the DDR3 RAM already used by premium laptops—but before you see it in a Dell XPS notebook or MacBook Pro, you’re going to see it in a lot of desktop gaming and graphics-intensive systems. Laptops probably won’t appear until way into next year, but we think they’ll be well worth the wait.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about chips, Pringles or the Hillary Swank movie The Core to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.