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Retailer Planning Laptops With Intel Core i7 Chips
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian PC retailer Eurocom is planning to ship a 12-pound laptop with Intel's Core i7 chip, which might go down well with deep-pocketed geeks. The Core i7 was designed with desktop computers and servers in mind; later members of the Nehalem chip family are planned to address portables. The 17" notebook's price, not yet announced, will certainly be in excess of $5,000."
Whatever happened to the 'desktop replacement' designation for mobile but not lightweight platforms?
This reminds me of the first laptop I ever owned:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64.
... that's not supposed to be put on your lap, unless you are sure you don't want to have offspring. Given that this is designed for the /. kind of geek, the question of offspring is probably not too much of a problem anyway :)
The problem with this design is that the i7 chips put out 130 watts TDP. Even if this laptop has a battery, it's going to last less than an hour.
I should I know. I have a toshiba laptop that has a desktop P4 in it. 1 hour.
What I'd like to know is how on earth they can justify charging 5 grand for a laptop that has nothing special about it except being absurdly heavy and featuring an i7.
For that size and weight, you could just throw a desktop motherboard in some plastic, tape a screen and battery on, then ship it out! This machine might justify the price if it clocked in at under 5 pounds.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
vista is more secure. remeber how you all bitched and moaned non stop about the lack of security in the windows platform?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
...on the expected hardware specifications, see Notebook Review: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=348239
Insert self-referential sig here.
I had an Toshiba P-10 a few years ago. It had an Intel P4 3.2ghz socket 478 desktop chip in it. It was a beast.
I miss having a laptop though, as I don't have much time at home.
This 12pound monster is a little bit overkill unless it has 6gb ddr3 a pair of 500gb or 1tb drives in RAID and a SLI or crossfire-x solution in it.
Then it would almost be worth it if you just had to spend 5k on a laptop.
..::ALWAYS : watching::..
DOS ran fine on a 286 also...maybe we didn't need any fancy toys like a Pentium II 266MHz. (Disclaimer: I was only about 6 years old in the 286 era, so may have missed some minor detail in the prior sentence. Point still stands though.)
Secondly, there ARE applications that can use more than one core. Games, Photoshop, video encoding, damn you are a troll and I fell for it. :(
... it is a compact electric (gonad) cooker. :-)
All that power will prove being useless because of constraints on the PC architecture.
Because of I/O bottlenecks, on a gaming laptop with 64-bit dual core system and 2+ GB RAM, burning a DVD while copying a file from disk to disk (SATA) will kill the system to low responsiveness.
In theory the CPU is powerful enough to juggle the I/O requests (SATA, nvidia, keyboard and mouse) with the actual computing things in a manner that the user won't experience low responsiveness a-la pre-1990.
In the practice all that power is weasted, unless you run tasks with low I/O needs.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I remember my first computer (sometime around 2000ish). Macintosh Classic. Then I upgraded to a compaq laptop with a 386 and DOS with DOS shell. Got more looks when I brought it into class one day than any of the computer that could play more demanding games than Zork did (note: I did remember to remove the DOS shell from autoexec.bat before bringing it in).
http://www.aaronrogier.net
Who would need Intel Core i7 for XP?
You want to be able to run Minesweeper at the same time, or maybe, perhaps, optionally, some applications. Some people do actual work with their machine instead of just refreshing /. all day.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
...enough so to afford a Sherpa to carry the thing?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
a temporary decrease in fertility is a feature
Only if the girl's birth control pill fails to work, and in that case the after-oops pill will work just as fine.
I don't buy it as an argument for frying my balls. But feel free to do what you want to your own testicles :)
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's the point of a 12-lb laptop that's real benefit is for being a server? Why pay 5K for that thing when you can just build a box and throw the i7 in there for stability's sake?
Just wondering.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/30/
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Looking at the model and at the type number (D900F) I'm gonna guess this is another Clevo, branded as something Canadian. It's probably gonna be okay, as long as you don't want it on your lap and don't want to use it without a wall socket. Then again, who'd want that for a laptop anyway?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Perhaps a bit off topic, but why is a Canadian retailer named Eurocom? Some identity crisis going on here? Of course, planning on sticking an i7 in a laptop does seem to indicate some mental instability...
and no space station either. Reminds me of that thing Porsche built in WWII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_VIII_Maus
I think part of the problem is that people have a given size of computer in their mind when they hear "laptop" when really it covers a fairly wide range. What this might be called is a "desktop replacement." These are used when you want the power of a desktop, but you need some portability. You aren't looking to cart it everywhere with you, you just need to move it around from desk to desk. For example maybe for security reasons all you work needs to remain on one computer. So your desktop at work is actually a really powerful laptop that travels home with you. Or maybe you need to be able to pack up your shit in a hurry. I had a former roommate who bought a big ass laptop for that reason when he was deployed to Iraq. He wanted a desktop, but you can't have all that extra shit in a battle zone.
These are for people who need desktop power, but need to have it in a single unit that is man portable.
It's the same kind of thing with regular sized notebooks and little sub notebooks. They are targeted at different markets. To point out the problems of using one where the other would be better is silly.
With laptops it goes kinda like this:
--If you need a computer that can stay with you all the time and it usable pretty much anywhere, but just for simple things like e-mail and web, you want a sub notebook. Something small, light, low features, long battery.
--If you need a computer that is portable and can be used on trains/planes and such without power for a reasonable amount of time, but you need to do some moderate tasks, then you want a regular notebook.
--If you need a desktop that you can pick up and move, then you want one of these high end desktop replacements.
No one size fits all, it depends on what you want to do.
Supposing I had the money to blow on a laptop, one like this is what I'd actually like. Reason is I don't use a laptop as a highly portable computer. When I'm at home, I have my desktop, it's much nicer to work at. When I'm at work, again I've got a desktop. So a laptop for me is just for travel. For example when I go visit my parents, it's nice to have my own computer. Ok well what I do is just cart the laptop to their house and set it up. I don't carry it around with me when I'm out and about. Thus a desktop replacement kind of laptop would be ideal. Huge screen, powerful hardware, who cares how much power it takes, it'll be plugged in.
12 pounds is quite cheap for a laptop of this spec. But I expect once it reaches the UK, it'll be more like 24 pounds. :)
I know the dollar has taken a hammering lately, but its not really that bad yet is it?
Has some of the same specs as the renowned "Lappy 486"; Battery Life: Half of ten minutes.
[Insert pithy quote here]
It didn't seem like there was anything that exceptional in there (in terms of something never-been-done-in-a-laptop-before, aside from the i7 CPU). We've seen two hard drives in a laptop before. We've seen tons of RAM and high-end video. We've seen 12 cell batteries.
Does this system have 2-3 pounds of special cooling hardware?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Ram is also used for caching the file system. So unless you have more RAM than HDD space your performance will improve somewhat with more RAM. However I doubt that this is your problem, as I have a similarly speced machine that runs just fine with 2 IO jobs.
I imagine that responsiveness has more to do with the OS than the hardware. On the one hand, MacOS 9 and earlier had "cooperative multitasking", so you couldn't do more than one thing at once regardless of how powerful your hardware was, while at the other extreme an OS could ensure that the task the user was interacting with always had priority so that responsiveness never degraded no matter how heavily loaded the system was. Ubuntu etc. don't boost interactive processes but two IO operations at a time still seem OK.
Yes I know you were making a quaint pun at anachronistic units but c'mon, it's the 21st century.
Isn't it time the Brits adopted the euro ?
And the Yanks SI ?
In any case, that's approx 3923 euro for 5.4kg worth of laptop.
You upgraded DOS in 2000? No wonder everyone looked at you funny.
Isn't $5000 a bit speculative, or are they using Canadian Dollars (which is about $1000 less than USD right now)?
Looking at component pricing and comparing to what's out there like the Asus M70VM-B1, which is about $1550 for 500GB less disk, the P8400 CPU is just slightly cheaper than the low end i7 (+800 for high end), a slightly slower GPU with 512k less RAM (my guess is this uses the 9800M GTX MXM platform - let's say +$200), 4GB more of DDR3 instead of DDR2 (about $250), no blu ray player (-?). By my estimates, the high end machine should be no more than $3000-$3500 after markup.
Even when I used barebones (whitebook) skeleton laptops I get similar numbers of about $2500 on the high end, but note that neither bare bones system laptop framework could fit 3 laptop drives and the best GPU I found in one was a 9600M GTX (though I didn't look hard - just the usual sources like pricewatch, google, and two manufacturers - ASUS and MSI).
A mobile laptop can be easily stolen. It would take a lot of balls to spend that much on something that can be stolen really easily in an office setting.
I had a Eurocom machine as a hand-me-down from an Executive that left the company. It certainly was a rock star for performance at the time, and yes, it was heavy and the battery life was terrible. The real issue for me was the fan noise. It sounded like a 747 when it cranked up.
I believe someone in our Engineering group has it sitting in a data center as a test machine since you can't hear it.
GP said 10% of body weight... so you weigh 800 pounds?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For 5 grand and at 12#, it needs to come with a hover device to make it follow along behind me.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Dos was still good enough for typing high school papers in 2000. At $20 it was a veritable bargain on a dish washing budget.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
The i7 isn't the half of it. The linked stats suggest that it'll be endowed with the mobile version of a GeForce 280. That'll probably take >150W at load.
This is a 'laptop' designed to be used in the set of all areas with a table to put it on that are within 10' of a power outlet.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin