The new look store has arrived at warp speed and it looks sensational.
To celebrate we have got some amazing opening day offers for the first lucky customers through the door on Saturday Morning (November 12th @ 9am)… but we are open if you want a sneak peak in advance….
In last week’s PC Prattle we looked at the motherboard, which in turn led to mentioning chipsets. But what exactly is a chipset? In a nutshell, a chipset is a collection of integrated circuits – or chips – that are designed to work together, and as such are often sold as a single product (for example as part of a motherboard). Modern motherboards generally require far less chips that their predecessors (which used to use dozens), and it is quite common for the chipset and motherboard manufacturer to differ.
In the case of Intel Pentium microprocessors (one of the most common brands), the chipset encompasses the north bridge and south bridge, which are two specific chips on the motherboard that regulate the high speed devices (such as the main memory and graphics card) and lower speed peripheral buses (this including Ethernet and USB connections) respectively. However, on some motherboards the north and south bridges can be integrated into one big circuit.
The CPU, GPU, north bridge (NB) and south bridge (SB) on a laptop motherboard
Two things which bother laptop computer users more than anything else are speed and battery life. If you want your laptop to last a whole hour on one charge you’ll have to adjust your settings to the lowest power usage modes meaning video and music are virtually unwatch/listenable and any programmes you have which are clunky when connected to the mains will grind more painfully than sand in your ice cream. If you bought a laptop you probably got it so that you could compute on the move then found that was fine for a few minutes then had to carry around a useless block of technology until you could find another power outlet. Funny, they never told you that in the adverts.
But perhaps all that’s coming to an end. Cloud computing’s supposed to be a great power saver as you’re not running any more than one programme but I’m not going to talk about that today. I wanted to talk about the new processors that Intel is developing with their partners over at Acer, Samsung, Lenovo and Asutek.
Intel Logo
Intel forecast that by December this year they should be producing laptops with fast, battery saving processors which will mean that their laptops can run all day on a single charge without compromising speed or efficiency.
Navin Shenoy, VP and GM for Intel Asia Pacific said that: “We’ve briefed just about everybody in that category of original equipment manufacturing and original design manufacturing. We want to reinvent the PC.”
Shenoy asserts that the partners that they‘ve hooked up with will produce an “incredibly sleek, powerful notebook” that can be always on.
As far as design goes, they are promising ‘sliders’ where sections of the machine itself slide to reveal the keyboard or ‘convertibles’ where the screen flips open and rotates so that it can be used as a normal laptop or tablet, depending on the user’s needs.
Intel say the laptops featuring their latest processors will be available between Christmas this year or 2013 and that as well as being thinner and faster, their production methods should be quicker too, meaning that they should be cheaper than 1st gen new tech usually is upon initial release.