Toshiba's new Regza ZF HDTVs don't upscale your DVDs to HD resolution with any old chipset or engine: they do it with a Cell-processor based system. Bonkers! It's the first TV to upscale with a Cell, and according to its European executive vice president, Toshiba's future "does not involve Blu-ray disc" but will use this sort of tech to deliver high-res imagery. The upscaling system uses the Cell for some advanced image-processing techniques, creating interpolated pixels to give the final image "near-HD" quality. The sets will also have Active Vision M100 100Hz HD picture processing, 178-degree viewing angle, 30,000:1 contrast ratio and 10-bit processing. The ZF TVs will be in 40- and 46-inch sizes, the 40-inch out now with pricing of around US$2,390, the 46-pricing and availability is not announced yet. [Toshiba.co.uk and Toshiba.de-via Google translate.]

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Muffled by the cacophony of like a million netbooks and the wireless power that'll power our cyborg brains at the Intel Developer Forum was the low-key introduction of Intel's next-gen 45nm dual core chips for ultra-thin notebooks--i.e., the dwarven chips that made the MacBook Air possible. Now that everybody can snag them, expect a surge of similarly limber notebooks that can suck in their gut to fit into narrow pockets of ugly paper.

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At the Intel Developers Forum Intel itself is turning the spotlight on the upcoming Nehalem chip microarchitecture. The chips will have integrated memory controllers built directly into the processor, as we mentioned before, which will allow three-times faster memory read-write speeds than previous generations.

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Last we'd heard about dual-core version of Intel's tiny Atom processor it was delayed through supply problems... but now info on Intel's Atom 330 dual-core has arrived. It's a desktop chip, with a 533MHz frontside bus and based on the 45nm process, though there's no info on its clock speeds yet. It'll be compatible with Intel's upcoming D945GCLF2 mini-ITX motherboard, a 945GX chipset/GMA 950 graphics chip board due in September, which is presumably when the 330 hits the streets too. As yet there's no news on a mobile version, bearing the letter N in its numeric title. [Reghardware]

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A few years ago, AMD was the king of performance per watt with its K8 architecture, while Intel kept pushing the Pentium 4 faster and hotter, until it basically had to chunk its NetBurst architecture. So this is something of a nostalgia trip for AMD fanboys: In Tom's Hardware's tests, a 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+ using the years-old K8 architecture "beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power" and "outperforms [it] in several benchmark tests" even though the Atom chip is running at 1.6GHz chip. How?

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A few new details about AMD's mysterious Fusion CPU/GPU combo chip have leaked to the Web and they seem to confirm what some rumours have been saying, namely that AMD would be making the chip with help from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest chip plants. ATI, whom AMD bought two years ago, had been a long time customer of TSMC so the deal makes sense. The technical details point to the first processor under the Fusion name will launch Q1 of next year, and will be a dual-core Phenom CPU running along side an ATI RV800 as GPU at 40nm, a "half-node" size that will probably transition to 32nm within a year. It's an exciting idea, we just hope AMD can pull it off. [TG Daily]

About a year ago, we first brought you news on Intel's Larrabee multi-cored GPU chips, but some new info is hitting the intertubes and hints that the chips could have uses beyond graphics. An alternative to developing faster—but hotter—processors, Larrabee will have between 16 and 48 processor cores aboard, all compatible with the classic x86 instruction set.

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Via's Nano and Intel's Atom low-power processors are intended for slightly different purposes, but that didn't stop HardOCP pitting them against each other in performance tests, and coming up with some interesting results. In every single benchmark, the beefier Nano beat the Atom. In particular it was 59% better in MP3 encoding tests, 37% in Divx encoding and achieved double the frame rate in Quake 4. No surprises there: the Nano is designed to draw a little more current (53W against 45W) than the Atom, so it won't make it into quite the same hand-held gizmos as Intel's chip. But the tests revealed that under normal "desktop" usage, the Nano actually drew less power when idling. Looks like Via's got a hot one in its grip: we might expect to see more of this chip. [HardOCP via BBG]

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Intel's first Nehalem-based processor, Bloomfield, was originally set to launch in December, but Digitimes says these little demons will actually come out in September, hitting shelves in early October. Why the excitement? Nehalem is a brand new microarchitecture, replacing the Core one we're all familiar with. (Penryn was a shrink of Core, to make it more energy efficient.) Anandtech has a nice preview of Nehalem. To give you a taste, even on a "partly crippled, very early" platform, Nehalem smoked Penryn by 20-50 percent, while using only 10 percent more power. Yeah. [Digitimes]

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This week marks the 40th anniversary of Intel, the people who likely made the CPU in your computer. To mark the occasion, the people at PC Magazine have put together a pretty comprehensive timeline showing every major generation of Intel processor from the first one to the current Core 2 Quad and Atom series processors. We've all used them at some point in our lives, and I remember my first Intel processor was a Pentium II running at a blazing 233MHz. I loved that laptop. What was your first Intel processor? Or which was your favourite? [PC Mag]

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