While Sony has a track record for making beautifully slim laptops, so far it’s ignored Intel’s prescribed ultrabook gimmickry. That stops now with the newly announced Vaio T, but it’s a laptop that’s doomed before it even hits the shelf.
We’ve been hearing for years that integrated graphics — meaning your computer doesn’t have its own, separate graphics card — won’t catch up to the beefier cards, but it’ll be good enough some day soon. Hasn’t happened yet. But these reported benchmarks of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors from CPU World look pretty promising.
Anybody who was looking at the Asus Zenbook and thinking to themselves, “That’s just too highly specced for my needs”, has plenty of cause for celebration today, with Asus announcing it is adding an i3 model to the range.
Intel’s new Sandy Bridge-E chip reigns supreme — and we have the charts to prove it. True performance enthusiasts have had a very difficult choice this past year. Go for maximum core and thread count using an older core microarchitecture, or cheap out and get almost the same (or better) performance in most apps and games using the mainstream Sandy Bridge chip.
Who would have thought the future’d start with an ad in the back of Electronic News? But, on November 15, 1971 Intel announced its new 4004 processor — the first commercially available computer processor manufactured on a chip — and helped to usher in the Digital Age.
AMD’s “Fusion Accelerated Processing Units” (APUs) combine the CPU and discrete Radeon graphics on the same die. There’s three tiers: C-Series (netbooks/tablets), E-Series (12.1- to 14-inchers), and the A-Series for bigger laptops and PCs. We’ve already seen AMD’s C-50 and E-350 chips, and here come the big guns. The dual-core A4 and quad-core A6/A8 APUs roughly target Core i3, i5 and i7 laptops, respectively — so get ready for a Sandy Bridge stoush. In Australia: HP, Sony, Dell, Samsung, Acer, Toshiba and Asus have already signed on.
So much going on in the rumour mill: In the midst of plenty of talk about a Macbook Air refresh, retailers are reporting that their stocks of the entry-level Macbook is running low. Is a new model on the horizon?
