Intel has announced plans to release an anti-theft initiative for laptops by the end of the year. The rate of data hacked from stolen or misplaced laptops has been increasing and Intel has planned to release this technology to prevent your vital data from being widely misused. Read the rest of this entry »

With the Asus Eee PC’s success, other competitors are planning to launch the low end computers to get a piece of the pie! Instead of making tiny notebook, Intel promised that their Atom chips will bring us cheaper computers (desktops) with “good enough” performance for basic tasks like surfing the web or viewing CDs and DVDs. But just how much cheaper the desktops might be? Well, according to this report, Intel expects the systems to be priced in the $199 to $250 range.

Taiwan’s Asustek, better known as ASUS. It is one of the most interesting, innovative and fastest-growing companies in technology.

Why Microsoft, Amazon, HP and Dell hate ASUS?

ASUS is the creator of Eee PC Mini Laptop. It’s compact, flexible and the best part is the price - costs as little as $299. This attractive price tag is less than Apple’s 16GB iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle e-book reader and certainly less than any full-functional laptops in the market. (Read the high rating reviews)

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AMD is saying that their new chipset quad-core Phenom 9700 and 9900 are going to be delayed again, this time to the end of Q3. Apparently there’s a buffer-related glitch in the original design, so AMD decided to cancel the two chips and “reintroducing” the revised versions in Q3 as the 9750 and 9950 to improve consumer confidence.

Dell Inc. will limit online sales of computers using Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chips as part of a routine adjustment of product offerings. Dell declared it will continue selling its Inspiron AMD-based systems through its retail partners and over the phone - not online though.

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AMD publicly stated late last year that it would be able to offer quad-core AMD Phenom 9700 and 9900 CPUs with fixed erratum as well as at higher clock-speeds in Q1 2008. However, the chipmaker recently notified its partners that the launch of its higher-end chips will be postponed until next quarter.

According to the company, the decision to postpone the launch was based on OEM input on how AMD should prioritize its next two waves of AMD Phenom processor models:

Based on these customer inputs, AMD will continue to prioritize volume-based Phenom products, including the AMD Phenom triple-core processor introduction for consumer and commercial markets this quarter, and now a new energy–efficient 65W AMD Phenom 9000e series processor in this quarter (instead of Q2).

Solid State Drives are well known for their petite size and low power consumption, you might have heard about it many times already. But this Intel Z-P140 PATA is worth noting. Intel managed to cram 4GB on a surface that is equivalent to a penny, this is pretty impressive, although not surprising given current advances in semi-conductor manufacturing. Today, many music players use 1.8” drives that have a much larger capacity (60GB), but the Z-P140 has very interesting qualities:

• 400x smaller for 15x less capacity
• 75 times lighter
• More shock resistant

Quick specs:

• Parallel ATA interface (PATA)
• 2GB and 4GB capacity
• 40Mbytes/sec (read), 30Mbytes/sec (write)
• 300mW (1.1mW in sleep mode)

Intel will release its desktop dual-core E1000 Celeron on January 20th next year for the low-cost market sector, making this the first of its kind. The first dual-core Celeron processor, known as the E1200. It will share the outgoing Core 2 Duo family’s support for 64-bit code but run on a slower 800MHz system bus and carry a small 512KB of Level 2 cache for instructions to reduce its price at only $35-50. Guess we can expect to see even cheaper desktops being offered by computer manufacturers and vendors when these new processors roll out.

Source: Xbit