Intel® Centrino® Duo Processor Technology

Accelerate your mobile world with up to 2x performance from an Intel® Centrino® Duo processor technology-based notebook.¹ That headroom lets you multi-task with ease and run processes like anti-virus scans in the background without interrupting what you're doing.

Innovative power-saving features designed to extend battery life are also built right in.² That gives you more freedom to use your notebook when and where you want, such as taking advantage of new media technologies that take mobile entertainment to the next level. Plus you can spend less time waiting with optional Intel® Turbo Memory, which lets you boot up faster and accelerates load time of frequently used applications.

The integrated wireless capabilities of Intel Centrino Duo processor technology provide flexible connectivity options to match your needs. Tri-mode 802.11a/b/g is standard, for robust connectivity. Adding the optional Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N technology and a wireless N network extends your connectivity to the emerging standard that delivers up to 5x better wireless performance and up to 2x better range.³

Why Technology

Why technology? Simply because technology is no longer the wave of the future. The future is now, and technology is a tremendous part of our world. And as the world changes so education and educators must change so that we fulfill our responsibility of preparing our students.
As with all living things, our world continues to grow and change. Education and educators must also continue to grow and change if they are to keep pace with the world around them. As educators, our job is to lead those who have been entrusted in our care to become successful participants in their world. As education changes in the late 1990's, it is turning its focus away from the teacher centered classroom to the student centered classroom, and away from the notion held in the past that we had to learn and do things in a certain way. In years past, it seems that high school teacher spent most of their time telling students that they had to be prepared for college. While that is still somewhat true, educators are now seeing that college is changing and that we must prepare our students to be life long learners.
Technology is the tool that we can use to help use achieve our educational goals. Through the use of technology, we can help students embrace the learning process and make the most of it. We can also train them to be successful participants in a technological world no matter what their career choices may be.
Through the technological resources that are now becoming available students can take a much more active role in their learning, both in the classroom and outside of it. The new technologically updated classroom can support many learning styles, and can encourage students to question, to research, and critically evaluate a myriad of resources and topics. . The entire world is now open to them from where they sit in the classroom. The classroom is no longer away from the world, but now it can be an integral life giving part of the world. Students now have access to resources around the world, not just the school library. By using virtual learning, students can communicate with astronauts and scientists, artists, and writers, and more. Students can participate in studies around the globe and be an integral part of an expedition.
Why technology? Besides the fact that it is pedagogically sound, it is also exciting for the teacher and the students. And motivation is a must if learning is to take place. So, through technology, we have a win for both sides. We have sound educational principles being used to foster the educational process and excite the participants. Can it get any better than that?

Next-generation Intel® Microarchitecture

Intel's next-generation 45nm Hi-k microarchitecture (code named "Nehalem") is a dynamically scalable microarchitecture delivering breakthrough energy-efficient performance for server, workstation, PC, and mobile computers.

Now performance really does come "on-demand"
With Intel Nehalem microarchitecture, we've expanded and redefined what's possible for technologies to come:

Future-ready.

Designed for next-generation Intel® processors and platforms
Beyond quad-core. Scalable, unprecedented performance with 1-8+ cores
Simultaneous multithreading. Bringing high-performance applications into mainstream computing with 1-16+ threads

Energy-efficient performance.

45nm microarchitecture delivers revolutionary energy-efficiency without compromise to performance
Greater system flexibility. Improved addressing for interrupts with xAPIC capability
Scalable shared memory. Outstanding memory performance and energy-efficiency with Intel® QuickPath architecture

The catalyst for industry innovation
Following Intel's introduction of 100 percent lead-free 45nm Hi-k processor technology (code named "Penryn") in the second half of 2007, Nehalem is the next step in Intel's "tick-tock" product strategy and cadence to deliver a new process technology with an enhanced or entirely new microarchitecture every year.

Extreme Processor From INTEL

Extreme exhilaration. Extreme enjoyment.

Whether it's gaming, digital photography, or video editing, today's high-impact entertainment demands breakthrough technology. Get the unrivaled multi-core performance of the new Intel® Core™2 Extreme processors.

Your options, multiplied

Intel® Core™2 Extreme quad-core processor
When more is better—with four processing cores the Intel® Core™2 Extreme quad-core processor QX6850 is a multitasking monster delivering significantly more performance for highly-threaded apps.
8 MB of L2 cache
1333 MHz front-side bus
Intel® Core™2 Extreme mobile processor
Experience the world's highest performing mobile processor¹. Bar none. Now you have the performance to play the latest multi-threaded games anywhere, with the Intel® Core™2 Extreme dual-core mobile processor X7900.
4 MB of shared L2 cache
800 MHz front-side bus
Intel Core 2 Extreme processor
With Intel Core 2 Extreme dual-core processor, you get energy-efficient gaming performance for a frighteningly vivid high-def multimedia experience.
4 MB of shared L2 cache
1066 MHz front-side bus

Features and benefits

When "Extreme" is an understatement.It's not about playing the game. It's about dominating and winning the game. Designed for extreme performance, the Dual-Core and Quad-Core Intel Core 2 Extreme processors feature the latest arsenal of performance-rich technologies:

Intel® Wide Dynamic Execution, enabling delivery of more instructions per clock cycle to improve gaming execution time and energy efficiency

Intel® Intelligent Power Capability, designed to deliver extreme energy-efficient performance

Intel® Smart Memory Access, improving system performance by optimizing the use of all available data bandwidth

Intel® Advanced Smart Cache, providing a higher-performance, more efficient cache subsystem. Optimized for industry leading multi-threaded games

Intel® Advanced Digital Media Boost, accelerating a broad range of applications, including ultra-realistic game physics and human-like artificial intelligence for an intense gaming experience unlike any other

Warning: Graphics may appear to be too real.The Intel Core 2 Extreme processor has the power for incredible visual experiences. Get inside amazingly complex HD games and applications with the incredible performance from Intel's most advanced gaming desktop processor ever.

Energy-efficient performance? Rage on.The Intel Core 2 Extreme processor was designed to enable energy-efficiency so you can maximize your performance. Plus, the added energy efficiency allows systems to run quieter so you only hear what you want to hear - the sounds of sweet victory perhaps

How To Select The Notebook That Meets Your Requirements?

By: Ian Hewitt

For the past ten years there has been a tremendous growth in the usage of notebook or laptop computers. The impact is that the notebooks are slowly replacing the traditional desktop computers from home as well as from office. There are so many varieties, technologies and brands of notebooks available in the market that it has become very difficult for a regular user to identify the best fit for his or her needs. This article will help you in getting a few tips on how to select the right notebook and make the most out of your investment.

A notebook offers several advantages. The most important being the trouble-free mobility. This is enhanced by the easily available wireless internet connections all over the world. It is very convenient to carry all your work with you anywhere you go. Advancement in technology has brought down the weight and size of the notebooks significantly, making it even more comfortable for a regular user.

What are the things that you should consider before purchasing your notebook? Start with doing an analysis of your needs. Ask questions like: For what purpose will I use this notebook? The answers could include -- for internet browsing, chatting, high-end graphic designing, gaming, business or official work, programming, application development, etc. The type of notebook you choose will depend on what you need it for.

When you do your research, make notes on the prices, technical features, configuration, guarantees, and performance that each notebook has to offer. You would need to decide whether you want a notebook from an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) or from a brand. It is believed that brand notebooks offer better post-sales service, and guarantee, while OEM notebooks are cheaper and offer the same hardware quality as the brand ones.

If you need a notebook that is small and light and should be carried around easily while you are traveling, go for the ultra-portable range models. These notebooks have screens smaller than 12 inches and weigh up to 5 pounds. Some models of such notebooks include Sony Vaio PCG-U3,
Fujitsu Lifebook P1510, Toshiba Libretto U100, Panasonic R4, Dell Latitude X1 and many more.

If you are a business professional looking for a thin and light notebook that offers durability, security and all important features necessary for your office, then you can select from a wide range of business notebooks. These include Apple MacBook, Dell XPS M1210, Sony VAIO FJ, and Dell Latitude and etc.

If you are addicted to gaming you would need a notebook that has the capability to present high-end graphics performance. These would include notebooks with the latest processors, increased RAM and hard disk storage space, faster CPUs, top-of-the line graphic display capability, great wireless connectivity and a host of other compatibility features. Some of the best gaming notebooks include Alienware Aurora, Dell XPS M170, and Rock Xtreme CTX PRO and etc.

If you are looking for just an economic replacement for your desktop and you do not want to spend on a high-end notebook, then you can select from a variety of models offered by Acer, Apple, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba. These notebooks are fashioned to be used at a fixed location and weigh up to 13 pounds, so they are not very convenient if you have to travel a lot. They generally have bigger screen sizes and lower battery life.

Apart from the notebooks mentioned above you can also pick tablet PCs, transportables, high-end personal digital assistants (PDAs), handheld computers, or smart phones. These are mobile devices that you can carry with you wherever you go, if mobility is all you are looking for.

Is Notebook A Better Choice Than Desktop?

By: Ian Hewitt

If internet made the world a global village, then we might as well say that notebooks made it a global colony. With desktops, things were a click away from us; notebook shorted the distance. Now we can carry the global colony on our shoulder. High-end technology at your lap, perhaps, we need nothing to conquer the world of convergence.

The great advantage of notebooks is that it gives us a sense of portability and mobility. Looking critically, portability is the only feature, a notebook has over desktops then why do we choose to go for a notebook? Notebooks can let you carry your work conveniently and you do not have to worry about all the wires, hardware and space required to keep a desktop. Also it's a matter of choice between work and home. You may want to work from home, when your baby or wife is ill. A notebook comes in handy then.

A notebook has a different role to play for different people, but it gives an incredible sense of freedom. Gone are the days when people walked around with pen and paper. All you need to do today to make notes it to buy a notebook. You may want to quickly write a email to a radio station, which is making noise in the name of music. You may want to sit in your neighborhood coffee shop and write a book or letter. But if you want to carry your notebook everywhere you go, you have to consider the weight of the machine too. A notebook weighs between 5 to 10 pounds; an ultralight model is even lighter. Whereas, a desktop computer, with its standalone CPU, monitor, and keyboard, weighs in at about 70 pounds. A notebook takes much lesser space too and is very convenient.

Some of the most famous notebooks are Sony Vaio, Apple MacBook, Dell Latitude, Toshiba, HP. Also there are many affordable versions of notebooks marketed by companies like Fujitsu, Panasonic, IBM, Asus and etc.

Let's look at a scenario where at a school, students are quietly seated at their desks and working on a class assignment with no teachers to guide them. It's real, and is happening in many schools around us. Now, we don't have to mourn looking at our tiny ones carrying pounds of baggage in their backs. Notebook has it all, from their books to assignment copies.

When we look at the productive side of the picture, we would promptly realize that a notebook is always a wise choice for an employer too. It makes his or her employees to achieve more productivity at work. It saves critical office space. At any crucial moment, a notebook can help you to do the work, even when you are not physically present in the office. When the traffic is high, and your boss is waiting for presentation in a conference room, a notebook comes to the rescue. A desktop PC does not give all this freedom for a good worker.

A research says that employees with notebooks work more than those companies with desktop PCs. A notebook enables you to work from anywhere, while traveling, from a beauty parlor, or while waiting for someone at a shopping mall. And the only disadvantage a notebook has is its safety, unless you doubly assure it from theft. It's easy to pick and elope for anyone at a busy commercial place. So, ensure the safety of your costly gadget that makes you feel the world is at your feet and enjoy the power of technology.

ATI XPRESS 3200 review

Introduction
When ATI brought their Xpress 200 Crossfire (RD480) chipset to the motherboard market, they were a bit late to the game. As you may know, the Xpress 200 chipset itself has been around since the end of 2004, but the Crossfire version didn't come until just a few months ago, at the end of November, 2005. When we finally saw the Crossfire parts become available for purchase, it was clear that ATI had some serious catching up to do. With so many people already swearing by NVIDIA's competing solutions, ATI really needed to pull out all the stops. While Crossfire proved to be competitive with SLI, it certainly didn't blow it out of the water.On the NVIDIA side of things, we've seen some manufacturers transitioning to dual x16 PCIe parts. Previously, you would get x16 with a single card, but two x8 when running SLI. The move to dual x16, however, did not result in any clear performance benefits. So, at the end of the day, dual x16 has become nothing more than a marketing tool for NVIDIA to claim dominance over the competition. Until today, that is.One week ago (Feb 22, 2006), I was in San Francisco along with fellow members of the press for ATI's RD580 Technology Day. The day was spent listening to a handful of people from ATI tell us all about RD580, what went into the design, what makes it better than the competition, and so on. Today we will be talking about ATI's Crossfire Xpress 3200 (RD580) chipset. In the most basic terms, it's a dual x16 solution - but it's much more than RD480 with dual x16 PCIe. RD580 was designed from the ground up and promises to bring real performance benefits through the use of "true"? dual x16 PCIe slots. ATI is also boasting superior overclockability, in terms of both headroom and tweakability. As of today, March 1, at 8am CST, you should be able to purchase motherboards using ATI's new chipset. The first board partner to have product available will be ASUS with their A8R32-MVP Deluxe, to be followed by products from Sapphire, DFI, ABIT, and PCPartner in the weeks to come.Unfortunately, due to a mix-up in shipping, we don't have an A8R32-MVP Deluxe on-site for performance testing at this time. That said, we wouldn't have had the time necessary to really put the motherboard to test anyways, so rather than giving hard performance testing results, we will be discussing the technology behind ATI's Crossfire Xpress 3200 and what we expect to find when we do get to test the performance. In the near future you can look forward to some head-to-head performance comparisons between leading dual x16 solutions as we investigate ATI's claims, but for now let's talk about the technology behind the product.

Inside RD580
"True" Dual x16 PCIe
Crossfire Xpress 3200 is known by many enthusiasts as RD580, but the engineers who poured their heart and soul into it endearingly named it Skeletor because, as Joe Macri said, "who's bigger and badder than Skeletor?"? As I mentioned before, RD580 was designed from scratch, and it was about 8 months before it went into production. Just 24 hours after receiving the first silicon, ATI was able to get Crossfire up and running stable. After the now infamous bug with R580, it would look as though ATI's luck is about to change.The chip is manufactured on TSMC's 0.11um process, and it sports the smallest northbridge die on the market at only 39mm2, containing 22 million transistors and with a Total Designed Power (TDP) of 8W. The chip will be passively cooled by a fanless heatsink, which means less noise and more stability, as it is common for heatsink fans to die.As you will see, ATI has made great claims about real performance benefits which can be seen thanks to their "true dual x16 PCIe."? Before I go into detail about ATI's solution, let's examine NVIDIA's method of passing data from card-to-card in an AMD-based nForce4 dual x16 SLI setup. For this example, we'll use ASUS' A8N32-SLI motherboard, which uses a C51 Northbridge chip for the North Bridge and an nForce4 SLI chip for the South Bridge. Each of these two chips drives a single x16 slot. What's interesting, however, is the fact that there is a bandwidth bottleneck between these two chips, where the data is NOT carried on the PCIe bus. Although both cards communicate with a chip via the x16 PCIe bus, the communication between the two chips, which is vital for SLI, negates the benefit of having dual x16 in the first place, or so says ATI at least.
ATI's Crossfire Xpress 3200 chipset communicates with both video cards, each across x16 PCIe, on what ATI has labeled the "Xpress Route."? The main difference is that communication is more efficient and each card will be communicating with the other through one central chip - no bottlenecks. ATI claims up to 50% performance gains with mid-range GPUs and up to 100% performance gains with low-end GPUs, in comparison with NVIDIA's solution. This is what got me to thinking and set off some bells in my head.
Sure, the NVIDIA dual x16 solution suffers from a bottleneck, but that is assuming that the cards are communicating directly between the two chips. With a high-end SLI setup NVIDIA says that you must use the SLI bridge for optimal performance, this is precisely because of the bottleneck pointed out by ATI. With the SLI bridge connection, you eradicate the bottleneck, and therefore you do get dual x16 PCIe. Of course, if you are using some mid-range or low-end parts which don't require a bridge connection, then you will suffer from the bottleneck ATI has pointed out. I don't really doubt ATI's claims of boosted performance in these areas, but I do not think there will be any difference in speed attributable to ATI's "true"? dual x16 implementation in the high-end segment.
Overclocking
One of the things ATI really tried to get across to us is that RD580 is a superb overclocker. All the logic is massively overspecced, so you should be able to achieve incredible overclocking results on stock cooling and without upping voltage. More specifically, the HT link interface has been optimized so that it can run at over 1.5GHz (50%+ overclock) and the PCIe interface can run up to 3.5GHz (40% overclock). Another plus is that there is no internal division when raising the HTT reference clock, translating to a 1:1 internal clock increase.
South Bridge
The information I was given about RD580 shows that motherboard manufacturers can choose to use either the ULi 1575 or ATI SB450 South Bridge. I'm not positive on this, but based on the fact that the ASUS A8R32-MVP specifications say nothing about SATA II, I believe it will use ATI's SB450 South Bridge. The SB450 has received harsh criticism for not only a lack of SATA II (and NCQ) support, but also for poor USB performance. I don't know at this time what the other manufacturers will decide to use for the South Bridge on their boards.
Closing ThoughtsWithout actually having a board on-hand for testing, it's impossible to absolutely distinguish between what is reality and what is just marketing. And even if we had received a motherboard last week, we wouldn't have had enough time to properly test it against competing boards to come to any conclusive statements. However, based on our analysis of the technology, it does seem that ATI's claims regarding performance could hold true, to some degree, in the mid-range and low-end segments (without a connector).For me, the big question remains exactly how much of a difference is there? And is there any difference between the solutions in these segments when there IS a connector between the two cards? What about for the high-end? I can understand ATI wanting to use a weakness of NVIDIA's solution to their advantage, after all, NVIDIA takes every opportunity that presents itself to step on ATI - I just wonder how much this weakness really matters in the grand scheme of things. How many people are actually trying to run mid-range cards in SLI without a connector? And why would they do that, when better performance is just an SLI bridge away? In the low-end sector, I am curious as to how many people actually purchase two low-end cards. I would imagine most people who are interested in SLI and drop over $100 on an nForce4 SLI motherboard, would also want to buy a decent video card.EDIT: When this article was posted, I was unsure what South Bridge the ASUS A8R32-MVP used. Based on the specifications I was given of the board (which did not say anything about SATA II support) I could only guess that it used the SB450. It has come to my attention, however, that the ASUS board actually employs the ULi M1575 South Bridge, which does include support for SATA II and NCQ and doesn't suffer from the poor USB performance of the SB450. I still don't know for sure what South Bridge the other motherboard manufacturers will be implementing (though it seems most are leaning towards the ULi), so we'll see how that goes.Overclocking is always a great thing for the enthusiast market, and we look forward to pushing this board to its limits and comparing our overclocking results with that of the competition. In the weeks to come, we'll be getting our hands on some dual X16 boards and put them through their paces. We will test and compare dual x8 and dual x16 solutions from both NVIDIA and ATI and find out what performance benefits we can realistically expect from either solution.