Although Intel doesn't build laptops, the chip maker showed off a bit of design flare at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with Nikiski, a concept notebook that folds up into a touchscreen virtual assistant.
For all the ballyhoo about supercomputers and their feats of CPU derring-do, the actual hardware space necessary to pull things off tends to be ginormous—row upon row of racked out silicon toiling in tandem. Some of these things make even WarGames’ WOPR (remember that?) look like a toy box.
Sandy Bridge, make way for Sandy Bridge-E, Intel’s ramp-up of its LGA 2011 socket CPU platform designed to woo enthusiasts with deep pockets. SBE is Intel’s platform for a trio of just-announced powerhouse CPUs, each packing over two billion transistors and weighing in at just 32 nanometers.
When Apple switched to Intel chips back in 2006, reality almost imploded, and when Steve Jobs launched the iPad without an Intel microprocessor, you could almost feel the ripples through the time-space continuum. What you probably didn’t know, is that the iPad almost had an Intel chip under the hood.
Intel is betting big on small, announcing a deal with Google to get future Android-based devices running on Intel chips, along with a plan (not involving Google) for much more efficient power management features for thin-and-light ultrabooks that’ll be hitting the market soon.
Today’s Intel Developer Forum fastest processor in the world gold star goes to Int—I mean, AMD?
The promise of Windows-based “ultrabooks” is an intriguing one. They’re coming later this year and they’ll sport super-thin, super-light designs similar to those found in Apple’s MacBook Air line of notebooks.
Not that it should be a huge surprise by any stretch of the imagination, but notebook computers will continue to get thinner, lighter and less expensive.
A couple years ago, Intel was keen on steering people away from netbooks. The chip maker asked retailers to warn consumers about what netbooks can’t do, and created the “ultra-thin” category to provide a more powerful — and more expensive — alternative.
The Apple rumor du jour is a juicy one: the company might switch computer processor architectures again, ditching Intel in favour of ARM.
From Avatar‘s tawny-eyed, blue-skinned aliens to high-def Blu-ray movies to Nintendo’s totable 3DS, everyone’s hip to 3D, and the latest company to hop onboard looks to be–wait a second, Intel?
