Lenovo announced today the ThinkPad X130e laptop, specially ruggedized for education and with the features needed to help students in grades K-12 and their schools get the most out of their PC technology. Equipped with the advanced technology expected for an educational laptop, the ThinkPad X130e comes with choices of the latest Intel or AMD processors and fast, integrated graphics as well as wireless connectivity and multimedia tools for today's digital learning. Designed to be handled by kids, the ThinkPad X130e has a reinforced and extra durable top cover, keyboard and hinges. Schools will also like its performance, reliability and customizable options including asset tags, BIOS modifications, custom imaging and a broad selection of custom colors.

Nordic Hardware has scored an exclusive interview with Pat Bliemer, Managing Director of Intel Northern Europe to discuss the technology following on from the 22 nm one used in the upcoming Ivy Bridge processors. Unfortunately, Bliemer was light on the technical details of this technology and didn't say when it would see the light of day, except to say that it will make fuller use of the Tri-Gate tech being used in the Ivy Bridge processors and that test circuits are running.

We need to keep going and you can trust me that in our labs we actually have the next generation after 22nm running, so we need to keep going.[...]I cannot really disclose more about that other than that in a laboratory-environment, absolutely we do have the path, our engineers do have the path to actually go and produce 14nm products. There are many variables that you can play with of course it is not the right name for it and the engineers would not like it when I say play, that you can influence to actually go and stay to that model. And I think the breakthrough we had now with the 3D metal gates, just the design of the gate will actually allow for much more efficient thermals and power.

Back in July, we looked even further ahead and reported that Intel aims to have 10 nm-based processors by 2018 and that the 14 nm tech is due for release around 2014. Watch this space.

Although Intel has its SSD 510 series to target the high-end client market segment, it's available in very few capacities, and is facing tough competition from "SandForce-Driven" SSDs (SSDs that use SandForce-made controllers). In 2012, Intel will give its SSD lineup a large-scale revamp, which includes the gradual replacement of SSD 510 series with new SSD 520 "Cherryville" series. Targeting the same high-end client segment, SSD 520 will be available in a wider variety of capacities that includes 60 GB, 120 GB, 180 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB.

We are now getting to learn through a fresh report by TheSSDReview, the idea behind SSD 520: that Intel wants to use SandForce SSD processors. The new drives feature transfer rates of up to 550 MB/s reads, 520 MB/s writes, 70,000 IOPS 4K random write throughput, and overprovisioned capacities consistent with most SandForce-driven SATA 6 Gb/s SSDs in the market. SSD 520 should hence provide the best of both worlds: the trust Intel brand brings to the table with a possible secret-sauce firmware; and the high-performance of SandForce controllers. Intel's SSD 510 uses a Marvell-made controller, many of its previous generation SSDs have used its in-house SSD controllers. TheSSDReview reports that the launch of these drives is imminent.

AMD's new flagship Bulldozer "FX" series of processors have turned out to be mediocre performers in almost every review and benchmark going, sometimes even getting bested by the existing Phenom II and certainly no match for their Intel competition. To add to this tale of fail, it now turns out that AMD didn't even know how many transistors they have! Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech received an email from AMD's PR department and this is the revelation he had to share with us:

This is a bit unusual. I got an email from AMD PR this week asking me to correct the Bulldozer transistor count in our Sandy Bridge E review. The incorrect number, provided to me (and other reviewers) by AMD PR around 3 months ago was 2 billion transistors. The actual transistor count for Bulldozer is apparently 1.2 billion transistors. I don't have an explanation as to why the original number was wrong, just that the new number has been triple checked by my contact and is indeed right. The total die area for a 4-module/8-core Bulldozer remains correct at 315 mm².

AMD's new Bulldozer "FX" series of processors may be very lacklustre performers in reviewer's benchmarks and have garnered considerable scorn in enthusiast circles, but they're a very good performer for AMD's bottom line. Incredibly, they are selling out as soon as shops get them in stock - and they are not even priced very competitively against Intel's offerings, so perhaps the "It's an 8 core CPU!!" marketing is working well on the uninformed "enthusiast" after all? Mind you, what enthusiast, however uninformed, wouldn't know exactly how these products perform? Every tech website and computer magazine has covered these chips by now. The mind boggles.

Earlier this week, a report tabled the model numbers of Intel's 2012 Core processor family based on the "Ivy Bridge" silicon. Its processor model number scheme consisted of Core i5/i7 3000 series, targeting various market price points. Many of these model numbers are confirmed on the latest roadmap slide detailing the Core processor family for 2012. We are also getting to see what the nomenclature of next-generation Core i3 processors could look like.

The slide shows that Ivy Bridge processors will start selling in Q2 2012, which is consistent with reports of an April 2012 launch. Intel will begin with Core i3-32xx (xx = TBD), i5-3450, i5-3550, i5-3570K, i7-3770, and i7-3770K. Around this time, there will be a market transition among cheaper Core i3 parts. In Q3 2012, i5-3470 and i5-3570 will displace i5-3450 and i5-3550; while a faster Core i7-37x0K processor will displace the i7-3770K. The market transition among some Core i3 parts will continue in Q3. Q4 2012 will largely resemble Q3, except that the lower-end Core i3 lineup will have fully transitioned to Ivy Bridge. There will be no changes in the LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E HEDT lineup, except that an affordable quad-core part will be added in Q1 2012. For quick reference, we re-posted the table from the older report.

Previous preliminary reports have suggested that the forthcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs will have single threaded performance on par with the existing Sandy Bridge CPUs and will mainly deliver improvements to power consumption and integrated graphics - nothing for PC enthusiasts to get excited about. However, in leaked documents sent to partners, Intel have now revealed official performance figures for IB and they look rather good. They've produced a raft of benchmarks, which reveal improvements such as 56% in ArcSoft Media Expresso, 25% in Excel 2010 and a 199% gain in the 3D Mark Vantage GPU benchmark. Unfortunately, they haven't released any benchmarks based on high performance 3D games, but it's probably safe to say that they will be similarly improved. Now, on to the benchmarks, which compare their new 3.4 GHz i7-3770 (4 cores + HT) with the current 3.4 GHz i7-2600, also with 4 cores + HT:

It looks like the Bulldozer disaster might have been too much of a setback for AMD to recover from. After 30 years of competing with Intel in the x86 processor market, AMD is about to give up, even with the 2009 1.25bn antitrust settlement they extracted from them. Mike Silverman, AMD company spokesman said, "We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore." He was vague on the exact strategy that AMD intends to pursue from now on, though. However, the company is widely expected to make a concerted effort to break into the smartphones and tablets market. The big problem with this strategy unfortunately, is that this arena is currently dominated by many other competitors. On top of that, their arch enemy Intel is also trying to muscle in on this space, hence AMD could find themselves back at square one, or likely even further back. AMD's graphics cards are doing well at the moment though and are quite competitive, so it looks like their expensive purchase of ATI back in 2006, might yet save the company from extinction. If they become primarily a graphics card company, they will inevitably end up a lot smaller than they are now though and that's a lot of lost jobs and personal hardship, along with a monopoly x86 market remaining and all of its negative effects on the market.

The latest beta drivers and the first in the 290 series have been released by NVIDIA today, supporting all graphics cards since the venerable 6-series. Their main new feature are official support for enabling ambient occlusion settings in the control panel separately for specific games and enabling NVIDIA Surround on the new X79 SLI-certified motherboards. Ambient occlusion (AO) is settable for uber-popular games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. So, what does AO do? We'll let Andrew Burns of NVIDIA explain:

If you're unfamiliar with Ambient Occlusion, it is most easily described as a way to make in-game shadowing more realistic, and therefore better.

What he doesn't say of course, is how it kills your frame rate, especially on lower end hardware. Anyway, there's all the usual goodies in this release: 3D Vision game profiles for games such as MW3, Diablo 3 & LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (yes really). There's a HD audio update and nine fixes too, including one for random flickering of the Windows boot logo as it's loading or fading away and a fix for the mouse cursor flickering and shaking in games such as Crysis 2 & Deus Ex when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play. The NVIDIA product release page is here and they have a snazzy-looking driver selector here. The release notes follow.

Russian website Overclockers.ru claims to have a complete picture of what Intel's upcoming 22 nm Core "Ivy Bridge" desktop (2012 Core Processor Family) looks like. The site compiled model names, extensions, clock speeds, Turbo Boost speeds, L3 cache sizes, and TDP ratings of as many as 18 models, most of which are quad-core.

The table reflects that most clock speeds are similar to today's Sandy Bridge LGA1155 processor models, some have Turbo Boost speeds as high as 3.90 GHz. Since Ivy Bridge silicon is an optical shrink of Sandy Bridge LGA1155, from 32 nm to 22 nm, and since Intel is using a more energy-efficient transistor design, there are significant improvements in TDP ratings.

Intel's Ivy Bridge line of processors are not due for release until spring 2012, but it looks like Chinese website Coolaler has scored a sneak peak at the performance level of Intel's 22 nm Ivy Bridge platform by testing an engineering sample of a quad core CPU. The screenshot shows CPU-Z & Task Manager (no HyperThreading) readouts, while the AIDA64 Cache & Memory benchmark has been run. The CPU used is a 2 GHz sample as shown by the photo, which CPU-Z reports as running at its 2.4 GHz turbo boost speed (20% overclock) on a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 motherboard. Rough and ready verdict: about the same speed as the current Sandy Bridge, but with a significantly enhanced northbridge and graphics core. The AIDA64 scores are actually slightly lower than the current SB scores, but this is likely because the CPU is running unsupported and unoptimized due to a mobo BIOS that's not made for it and a benchmark that cannot measure its true performance. Note the memory speeds, which were run fast at 2134 MHz 6-9-6-24 CR2, further indicating lack of optimization, since these timings suggest somewhat better performance than what was measured.

In-Win Development Inc, a leading innovator in high-quality, contemporary PC hardware and multiple winner of the internationally renowned Red-Dot Design Award, has today launched its new performance PC chassis, the BUC 101.

Its strength of design is echoed across both its boldly shaped exterior, high quality SECC steel construction and a hard-wearing black interior. With a striking expression and fantastic feature-set that includes support for multiple 300mm (11.8") graphics cards, it will perfectly suit any gamer.

Intel started shipping the new Pentium 350, a model designed specifically for low-cost servers, micro-servers, and home servers; a segment Intel originally planned to address with some of its Atom dual-core chips. The Pentium 350 is an offshoot from entry-level desktop and notebook platforms the Pentium brand is currently in charge of, it is designed with durability and energy-efficiency required by servers in mind.

Available in the LGA1155 package, Pentium 350 is a dual-core processor based on the 32 nm Sandy Bridge dual-core silicon. It is clocked at 1.20 GHz, and features 3 MB of shared L3 cache apart from 256 KB L2 cache per core. Thanks to its low clock speed, the chip's TDP is rated at just 15W, making it ideal for home and small business servers. It will naturally benefit from the high IPC of Sandy Bridge architecture. The chip features Intel64 instruction set, its integrated memory controller supports up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1066/DDR3-1333 MHz memory.

Lenovo, today announced the IdeaCentre Q180 - a consumer desktop PC no larger than a paperback book, yet powerful enough to turn a digital TV into a multimedia hub for enjoying music, videos, games, web browsing and more.

"With the IdeaCentre Q180, we upped our game in the compact PC category," said Nick Reynolds, executive director, Product Group Marketing, Lenovo. "Featuring the latest HD Graphics and Blu-ray 3D playback, the Q180 enables consumers to change the way they enjoy multimedia and the Web in their living room at an affordable price point."

NVIDIA today announced that, for the second year in a row, the world's most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer is powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.

The Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) ranks as the greenest petaflop-class supercomputer on the recently released Green500 list. Published twice annually, the Green500 list, rates the 500 most energy efficient supercomputers based on performance achieved relative to power consumed.

Tsubame 2.0 is a heterogeneous supercomputer (combining both CPUs and GPUs) used to accelerate a range of scientific and industrial research in Japan. With sustained performance of 1.19 petaflops per second while consuming 1.2 megawatts, Tsubame 2.0 delivers 958 megaflops of processing power per watt of energy. It is 3.4-times more energy efficient than the next-closest x86 CPU-only petaflop system, the Cielo Cray supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which delivers 278 megaflops per watt.

The only way mainstream portable wintels are going the survive the onslaught of smaller, increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing devices (such as ARM-driven tablets and smartphones), is by slimming down radically, and making themselves available to the mainstream. No, we're not talking about cheapo netbooks, but ultrabooks (ultra-slim notebooks), that provide mainstream notebook-like performance in a much more compact package. Intel will give this form-factor a big push next year with an Ivy Bridge architecture-based processor platform designed keeping it in mind, and technologies centric to it.

To begin with, slimmer form-factors could eat into wired connectivity, hence, Intel will push its Thunderbolt 10 Gb/s interconnect to the fore. But wired connectivity is the least of ultrabook's limitations. Battery life, data storage, and additional computing power will need to be accessible yet optional to it, and hence docking stations will be hot in the market, yet again. Intel will pitch for Thunderbolt to be a standard component of docking port clusters.

Just in time for holiday giving, Samsung is introducing a Piano Black version of its WiFi-only Series 5 Chromebook. At a price of $349, the updated Series 5 is even more giftable than the original.

Chromebook, based on Google's Chrome operating system, is designed to provide people a faster, simpler and more secure computing experience. Due to automatic software updates, Google has continued to release new features and improvements on an ongoing basis. These new features coupled with the Samsung design aesthetic creates a technology device that gets better over time, offering the best possible web experience in one device for the internet-enthusiasts in all our lives.

The TRIM command feature has become an industry standard for internal garbage collection on SSDs. Unlike with magnetic storage devices such as hard drives, in NAND flash storage devices, new data can't simply be overwritten on existing deleted data (like overwriting on cassette tapes), instead NAND flash cells are first put through erase cycles, and then fresh data is written on them. This leads to degradation of performance in SSDs, as all deleted data will be put through erase cycles. The TRIM command allows the drive to tag freshly deleted data for disposal, and then erase flash memory occupied by that data when idling, and dynamically allocating erased cells for fresh data. This dramatically reduces write performance degradation of SSDs. Unfortunately, issuing TRIM commands to SSDs that are part of a RAID volume is so far not possible, because the RAID volume acts as a sort of an abstraction layer between the OS and physical disks. Some low-level data about member disks can still be read by diagnostic tools, but that's about it.

If the Release Notes document of Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver 11.5.0.1109 Alpha (read here) is to be believed, Intel plans to bring TRIM support to RAID 0 volumes with a future version of RST. Snooping through the document, one can find the following line:

2. This release will not enable the TRIM on RAID0 feature, but it will be added in the next RST 11.5 release. Contact your RST AE representative with questions.

Earlier this week, Intel launched the fastest desktop processors under its Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" platform, with is partners, motherboard, memory and cooler vendors. Less than a week into its shelf life, Sandy Bridge-E already has a successor taking shape at Intel, slated for the fourth quarter of 2012, but that's far from being the most interesting part of this news. According to a new internal slide scored by a source at XFastest, Ivy Bridge-E will be compatible with today's Intel X79 platform, and LGA2011 socket.

Suddenly, Sandy Bridge-E makes for a sweeter deal because its platform longevity (for upgrades) is at least two years. Ivy Bridge-E, like Ivy Bridge LGA1155, will be built on the 22 nanometer silicon fabrication process. We don't expect Ivy Bridge-E to be much more than an optical shrink of today's Sandy Bridge-E silicon, but the shrink could leave scope for enabling some of its components otherwise locked out for the Core processor family. Sandy Bridge-E silicon physically holds 8 cores and 20 MB of L3 cache, but the fastest Core processor based on it has just 6 of those cores, and 15 MB of L3 enabled. The source at XFastest says that while Ivy Bridge-E is slated for Q4 2012, the LGA1155 Ivy Bridge will launch across Q1 and Q2 of 2012 (March~April).

Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced a range of HyperX Genesis memory in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB kits to support the new Intel Sandy Bridge-E X79 quad-channel processors and X79 Express-based motherboards. Kingston HyperX Genesis is the perfect solution for enthusiasts who require 4x raw performance increases afforded by quad channel over single channel solutions.

For extreme users who require both the fastest memory and largest capacity, Kingston's 2400MHz and 2133MHz will soon be available in both 8 GB and 16 GB kits of four modules. Other HyperX Genesis memory for X79 systems include 1866 MHz and 1600 MHz frequencies in kits of four and eight, with capacities ranging from 8GB to 32GB. All of Kingston's HyperX kits have achieved Intel XMP certification and are compatible with the latest X79 motherboards from vendors such as ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI and ASRock.

NVIDIA today announced that system builders worldwide are now shipping the fastest PC gaming platforms ever built, thanks in part to NVIDIA SLI technology and the just-released Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors and X79 chipset-based motherboards.

The combination of NVIDIA SLI technology -- which allows for multiple GPUs to run on a single PC -- and new X79-based motherboards allow gamers to customize their PC experience with up to four NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570, the world's fastest DX11 GPUs. Licensed by the world's leading motherboard manufacturers -- including Intel, ASUS, ASRock, EVGA, Foxconn, Gigabyte and MSI, SLI technology is crucial for playing this year's hottest graphics-intensive games, such as the recently released Battlefield 3 and upcoming Batman: Arkham City with detail, resolution and immersion settings cranked up.

At SC11, Intel Corporation revealed details about the company's next-generation Intel Xeon processor-based and Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC)-based platforms designed for high-performance computing (HPC). The company also outlined new investments in research and development that will lead the industry to Exascale performance by 2018.

During his briefing at the conference, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the Intel Xeon processor E5 family is the world's first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification**. PCIe 3.0 is estimated** to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe* 2.0 specification** while enabling lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in HPC supercomputers.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.2 specification, the latest update to the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. Released eighteen months after OpenCL 1.1, this new version provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification that is the result of cooperation by over thirty industry-leading companies. Khronos has updated and expanded its comprehensive OpenCL conformance test suite to ensure that implementations of the new specification provide a complete and reliable platform for cross-platform application development. The OpenCL 1.2 specifications, online reference pages and reference cards are available here.

"The OpenCL working group is listening carefully to feedback from the developer and middleware community to provide significant and timely functionality for heterogeneous computing in this cross vendor open standard," said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. "The OpenCL working group is also broadening its membership and has growing representation from the mobile and embedded industries and is enabling innovative devices such as FPGAs to be driven through OpenCL."

On this day 40 years ago, Intel Corporation introduced the world's first commercially available microprocessor - the Intel 4004 - triggering the start of the digital revolution. While most people have never seen a microprocessor, devices that contain them have become so integrated into daily life that they have become virtually indispensible.

Microprocessors are the "brains" inside computers, servers, phones, cars, cameras, refrigerators, radios, TVs and many other everyday devices. The proliferation of microprocessors is due in large part to Intel's relentless pursuit of Moore's Law, a forecast for the pace of silicon technology development that states that roughly every 2 years transistor density of semiconductors will double, while increasing functionality and performance and decreasing costs. It has become the basic business model for the semiconductor industry for more than 40 years.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the world's leading motherboard, graphics card, barebone system, notebook and mobile device manufacturer presented white-box All-In-One (AIO) system-G11 not long ago. To surprise the market, ECS provides two more designs for G11-ID2 (North Star) as photo frame style now, and ID4 as L-stand style in Q4, 2011.

Original ID1 as photo-frame style displays an elegant and classical glossy design. ID2 maintains a glossy surface but with a new North Star speaker bezel. North Star represents the leader of stars in Chinese culture and guides the direction in astronomy; G11 new bezel design ID2 leads your new digital life as a North Star. The new ID4 design transfers the photo-frame style to an L-stand style with a brand new stand for users to easily adjust the height and degree of visibility. The new G11 ID4 stand gives you more options for your space arrangement.