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Check out the comparison on the next page. The Thinkpad got almost 3 times the battery life of the Dell, coming in at close to 4 hours.

A one page link:

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1128

More details here in HotHardware's coverage: http://www.hothardware.com/News/NVIDIA_Gets_Aggressive_Dismisses_CPUGPU_Fusion/ Jen-Sun squarin' off!

Aaaand the good link.

I can't wait to get my hands on one of these, and put Linux on it.

The keywords you're looking for are Dunnington and Nehalem

For the really good stuff you'll have to wait for the next process shrink ~3 years (more if competition lets up).

An open question is if more energy efficient processors just mean greater density in the datacenter. Apparently demand for performance shows no sign of letting up any time soon.

All good points, though I'm not partial to World of Warcraft. However, I am currently playing Warrock, which is a graphically mediocre game with excellent gameplay, especially in the team-based side of it. It's a lot of fun with voice chat going with a clan all in the one map, and it's a lot of fun alone, too, for anyone who likes online Battlefield/Counterstrike-style FPS games. This game also runs pretty well on even IGP chipsets, which is a complete departure from the norm. And I like it. The games that push the envelope are indeed a necessary evil, but as long as they push it faster than the hardware does, low to mid-range graphics solutions won't cut it for pretty much anyone who wants to do some gaming. I'm of the firm belief that IGP-friendly settings, even if they look like absolute crap, should be incorporated into releases. It'd be weird playing CoD4 with pretty flat textures and polygons more at home in the first Rainbow Six, but hell, if I could play it on a $500 Dell, who's complaining? How much extra work would it be to shrink/compress textures and down the polycount? How much extra space would it take up? I can't imagine very much.

But the reason behind the PC market struggling to keep up with the X-Box 360/PS3 in terms of graphical prowess (and the reason for no IGP friendly graphics options in most cases) is simple: Nobody wants the PC gaming market to die off, much less to consoles, whose traditional role in the world of gaming has been a back seat to the mighty PC, even if only armed with an S3 Virge back in the days of software rendering. Graphics don't make the game, but to many people I talk to, it's common to hear "this game's graphics suck" or "I don't want to play that, look at how shitty it looks". However, they're mostly console gamers, and again, there's where the emphasis comes from. Consoles have evolved such that they rival high-end PC's in terms of raw graphical power, and because of their price tag, one might wonder why their $500-700 budget PC can't run games as well or that look as good as their $400 X-Box 360. They don't really care much about the gameplay, or why it happens to be.

But, those that HAVE found games that conform to their budget PC's that happen to actually be really great games are likely to know what to look for in a game. The unfortunate truth about these games, though, is that their follow-ups are very likely to be far more graphically intensive than these systems can handle. That said, in the coming years, more and more IGP's are shaping up to be capable game performers (the integrated Radeon HD 3200, for example, and its ability to scale in "hybrid" mode with other Radeon HD's provides excellent expandability and initial performance for an IGP, especially in comparison to the current standard), and video card tech is moving along at a rapid pace, making mid-range cards today sell at low-end prices tomorrow. The only problem there is, by tomorrow, they really will be low-end. It's an unfortunate treadmill.

...780G-based platform that idles under 80W and runs under full load at 155W. But then AMD adds an element much less common in the integrated world: great performance, regardless of whether you're executing threaded audio encoding software, the latest gaming titles, or even a simple file compression routine. Inclusion of AMD's full UVD gives the chipset real video decoding chops, too. http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_780G_Chipset_and_Athlon_X2_4850e_Preview_/

http://www.hothardware.com/articleimages/item1098/big_1.jpg
That is a tasty sandwich.

FTA at HotHardware.com: http://www.hothardware.com/articles/Intel_Core_2_Extreme_QX9770_Performance_Preview/

"Cinebench is perhaps our most favorite "quick and dirty" test for gauging how fast a new CPU core is. If you're looking for a general quick-take view of system performance and CPU power, Cinebench consistently gives results that we rely on here in our labs. In the multi-threaded version of our this test, the QX9770 is 63% faster than the Phenom 9700. And with only a 33% clock speed advantage over the new Phenom, obviously the new Intel core is significantly more efficient clock-for-clock with a higher IPC (instructions per clock cycle) throughput."

"The fastest single processor for gaming from the AMD side of the house, generally speaking according to these two tests, is the Athlon 64 X2 6400+. Again, that's according to the game engines at work in Crysis and F.E.A.R. The fastest processor of Intel's offering is obviously the QX9770, which looks to be 6 - 8% faster than its 3GHz counterpart, the QX9650. In general though, the AMD systems are easily outperformed by the Intel-based setups, in some cases by a large margin."

HotHardware has some pretty extensive coverage of the platform and new Phenoms as well. There's a lot fewer pages to sift through and more data on performance.

Remove the trailing slash. http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_DTX_Sneak_Peek/?page=3 should work ok.

Here are some good shots of the chassis layout, from the article: http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_DTX_Sneak_Peek/?page=3/

Not sure why the slashdot editor stripped out the links to the full version of the article but none of the full sized images don't work in it when you click the thumbnails.

Please mod this up for all.
Here is the full version article: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel_X38_Express_Chipset_Debuts/

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/The_State_of_DirectX_10__Image_Quality__Performance/?page=8

Seriously, why do people continue to put up with this abuse? Newer/More Expensive should be better in the computing world, no?

Frankly, I'm glad I use Linux and need not worry about this crap anymore.

That's great, except for the fact that shadows don't have crisp edges in the real world. Unless it's illuminated by a point-source (which immediately excludes the sun, lamps, flashlights, and pretty much every other light source you're likely to encounter), there will be a penumbra. The DX9 image here: http://www.hothardware.com/articleimages/item1031/big_stateofdx10_wic_shad.jpg is more realistic.

Not sure how this got confused by either bioshock or the reviewers...

DirectX 10 allows for both 'crisp' or 'soft' shadowing, as some games demonstrate, the DirectX 10 shadows are 'softer' and more realistic.

The 'difference' with DirectX 10 is that shadows are done on the GPU, in DirectX9 shadows are done on the CPU. This is the 'main' difference between DX9 and DX10.

The 'crisp' choice by bioshock is NOT what DX10 is about, this is a game developer choice. PERIOD.

I know reviews like this can lead people down wrong paths, but it doesn't hurt to look up this type of information before making fun of a fact that is incorrect in the first place.

It is strange that any site 'reviewing' DX10 in comparison to DX9 would not even know the basic 'consumer' terminology for the differences, so they would know what they were looking at... Maybe someday we can get a review posted on SlashDot that is actually done by gaming professionals... (gasp)

Here is a quick list from the MS Consumer Info site on DirectX10, notice the reference to shadows specifically.
-----------------------
Summary

In summary, DirectX10 provides the following benefits to gamers:

More life-like materials and characters with:
Animated fur & vegetation
Softer/sharper shadows
Richer scenes; complex environments
Thicker forests, larger armies!
Dynamic and ever-changing in-game scenarios
Realistic motion blurring
Volumetric effects
Thicker, more realistic smoke/clouds

Other
Realistic reflections/refractions on water/cars/glass
Reduced load on CPU
    -Re-routes bulk of graphics processing to GPU
    -Avoids glitching & system hangs during game play

"shadows in DX10 are crisper and more accurate than in DX9. In the image below, the shadow in DX9 has blurry edges while the same shadow in DX10 has sharp and crisp edges"

That's great, except for the fact that shadows don't have crisp edges in the real world. Unless it's illuminated by a point-source (which immediately excludes the sun, lamps, flashlights, and pretty much every other light source you're likely to encounter), there will be a penumbra. The DX9 image here: http://www.hothardware.com/articleimages/item1031/big_stateofdx10_wic_shad.jpg is more realistic.

Simple flash example: http://www.goalfinder.com/Downloads/Shadows.swf

Some of the direct x10 images look better, and some look worse. Just shows you that better tech doesn't necesarily translate to better art. The Call of Juarez water effects image definately looks better in the direct x 9 version.

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/The_State_of_DirectX_10__Image_Quality__Performance/?page=5

Yes, $188 is almost twice the $100 original cost. $100 was the goal, right? Even though OLPC didn't make its goal, $188 is still a ridiculously cheap laptop--no other manufacturer can match that (if they could, they'd be making it)

Hehe, do you realize how deliciously ironic your post is.

And that machine I link to is actually better than the OLPC. And will sell for the same price to everyone (you'll need to pay 2x or 3x the OLPC price to get it yourself). And can run Windows (XP and less) if need be.

In fact, what OLPC proved is, that commercial entities are already doing their best. Negroponte ranted left and right how the greedy vendors could make a cheap PC but couldn't, but now his dream is vaporware and he's arrived at a pretty pedestrian sublaptop, that has its analog for the same price with the good ol' commercial vendors.

Specs of the entire new Barcelons line-up, more details, and pricing are available here as well:

http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/AMD_Barcelona_Architecture_Launch_Native_QuadCore

Are they getting to expensive or are they just tired of nerds? Either way, I dislike the alternative.

You say that but I bought a Acer 1510 back in 2004 and installed AMD64 gentoo. I've reinstalled once after an NVidia driver issue and it's otherwise been rock solid. It's not well made, the hinges required superglue in the first few months but it's currently my main machine.

My next laptop will probably be a Macbook running linux but I'm also interested in the Asus Eee PC for (literally) field use.

anyone else notice how in the picture the guy has three fingers: his left ring, middle and index on the keyboard and his thumb on the touchpad...

sure it doesn't looked cramped if you only type with 8 fingers! i tend to also use my pinkie fingers to type...

HUGE keyboard

Most of the latter screenshots look like KDE (example), but look at THIS screenshot! It looks like a windows-based antivirus running in windows XP in the foreground with KDE in the background.

HUH??

Most of the latter screenshots look like KDE (example), but look at THIS screenshot! It looks like a windows-based antivirus running in windows XP in the foreground with KDE in the background.

HUH??

This is what will really fill that void between PDAs and UMPCs. Two pounds, 200 bucks, built-in wireless, comes with Linux installed, but can run Windows too.

Does this look like an iPhone killer to you?

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=4 32&pid=2
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel_Core_2_E xtreme_QX6850
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/538/1/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_ 2007/

HotHardware also has a full review up right here. They were able to take the new quad-core up to over 3.7GHz and show power consumption numbers for all the high end chips as well.

Uhm.. it does have RAID functionality.

Look at This Picture.

Actually, the summary is correct. I thought it was wrong too, though, until I looked at the photograph of the PCB: http://www.hothardware.com/articles/Gigabyte_GAN68 0SLIDQ6/?page=2

those damn ads kept crasing my ie:

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=987

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=987

Kneejerk flamebait mods: Avert your eyes.

Let me start out by saying HotHardware itself is nothing better than a middle-of-the-pack hardware review site. If I remember correctly, they're a generic offshoot of one of the more major tech sites that tries (too hard) to appeal to enthusiasts but comes across as nothing more than stiff corporate whores desperately spewing cool lingo to draw hapless internet goers into viewing their adbortion (SPELLING INTENTIONAL) of a website. And I'm OK with that.

What I'm not OK with is their oh so blatant blogspam bullshit they send to slashdot. Wow guys, you reviewed a small form factor PC. If that's not front page worthy, I don't know what is! Even worse, the only link in their submission was to their own site.

In the spirit of sharing, I've decided to help out slashdotters who might be genuinely interested in the product beyond a "sweet flames, bro!" 10 pager (it's a fucking barebones system!) fluff review with some informative links. Let's start with a direct link to hothardware's printable version of the page.
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=986

That wasn't so hard, was it guys? Oh sure, it might cut into your ad revenue, but it would be disingenuous of me to accuse you guys of submitting this for the shallow purpose of bumping ad revenue, right? Right?!

In other news, I was looking for alternate reviews of this system. What did I find? HotHardware are apparently a bunch of linkwhoring board spamming bastards. Witness the evidence:
http://www.elitebastards.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t =19838
http://www.dvhardware.net/review/31338
http://forums.hardwarelogic.com/f68/shuttle-sdxi-b arebones-system-7831.html
http://www.mbreview.com/article.php?sid=11683
http://www.motherboards.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p =673332

Maybe the hardware review business is now just as inbred as most news blog sites. I don't know. What I do know is I spent way too much time writing this post. And this story is beyond worthless.

This HotHardware review goes into a bit more detail and other benchmarks as well - http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/ATI_Radeon_HD_ 2600_and_2400_Performance/

FTA - "Throughout all of our in-game and synthetic testing the fastest of the three new mainstream Radeon HD 2000 series cards we tested in this article, the Radeon HD 2600 XT, performed about on par with or sometimes well behind a GeForce 8600 GT. The more affordable Radeon 2600 Pro came in a few percentage points behind the 2600 XT, and as expected the 2400 XT fell in behind the 2600 Pro.

We also spent some time testing the AVIVO HD video engine in these new cards with a few SD and HD workloads, but weren't able to compile all of the data in time for launch. We will be updating this article in the next day or so, with the results from our AVIVO HD testing as well. "

This HotHardware review goes into a bit more detail and other benchmarks as well - http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/ATI_Radeon_HD_ 2600_and_2400_Performance/

FTA - "Throughout all of our in-game and synthetic testing the fastest of the three new mainstream Radeon HD 2000 series cards we tested in this article, the Radeon HD 2600 XT, performed about on par with or sometimes well behind a GeForce 8600 GT. The more affordable Radeon 2600 Pro came in a few percentage points behind the 2600 XT, and as expected the 2400 XT fell in behind the 2600 Pro.

We also spent some time testing the AVIVO HD video engine in these new cards with a few SD and HD workloads, but weren't able to compile all of the data in time for launch. We will be updating this article in the next day or so, with the results from our AVIVO HD testing as well. "

The link to the article all on one page is http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=989

FTFA:

Our testing showed the V8 ssytem consumping much more power than anything else while idling at the Windows desktop; almost 50W more than QuadFX and over 100W more than the QX6800. With the processors operating under full load, however, the tables turned somewhat.

Yeah, the tables did turn. Under full load, the QX6800 - which is already power-hungry - uses 319W. The V8 and the QuadFX are at 474W and 498W, respectively. That's an extra 155-179W... For what?!

Is this a continuation of the P4 Prescotts, which used 130W+, IIRC? These beasts use *even more* juice.

Yeah, such CPUs have their place, but if this is an indication of the future of desktop computers, fu*k it. The V8 uses more power over a QX6800 (50W) while idling than what my CPU (E4300) uses at full load. Are we going to be able to buy 50W CPUs in five years, or are we going to have to deal with insane cooling solutions for 200W CPU monsters?

Either the user's fingers are too fat, or the UMPC keyboard appears painfully small. Hard to blame Gigabyte though - personally I think the UMPCs are in a most uncomfortable market segment (between cell phone/PDAs and laptops), making it very hard to choose what features to sacrifice and what to optimize, if not started out with a definitive design goal.

On a different note, is that FIC phone the one with Java Mobile FX (nee savaje) that was introduced at the java one dev. conf a few months ago as the 'java iPhone'?

HotHardware.com has significantly more technical and performance analysis, here. The ExtremeTech article is pretty light with just marketing regurgitation....

HotHardware.com has more details on the AMD Phenom processor, including die map shots and other specifications as well.

Well, the article pointed out that TDP (typical dissipation power, or something like that) ratings are likely to remain the same. They paraphrase Intel as saying they used the reduction in process size to pack in my transistors instead of pursue the power-savings route.

The TDP numbers for Penryn desktop quad-core parts will be 95 and 130 watts, with desktop dual-core parts coming in at a 65W TDP.

Print-friendly link. It drives me crazy that, just to drive up page views for advertisers, webpages break their articles down into 30 parts. And I'm looking at you Tom's Hardware.

All on one page.

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=939

Actually over a week ago both Intel and IBM announced hafnium-alloy based chip technology that reduces electron leakage by ten times (i.e. to 1/10th of the current amount). Or at least that's what I can piece together from the 4-5 different slashdot articles, and this announcement: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articl eid=926&cid=1