Asus Smellbook

You’ve got to admire Asus for pushing back the frontiers of laptop design. From the genuinely revolutionary Eee PC, which launched the whole Netbook craze, to the slightly odd bamboo-cased laptop there’s seems to be no end to its creativity, at least that was until we heard about the F6Ve series notebooks. This is a range of ‘fragranced’ laptops, that’s right, they smell, you can choose from a pink coloured ‘Floral Blossom model costing around £649, or a glossy ‘Musky Black machine, which starts at £799. Basic specs are a 13.3-inch screen Intel Centrino Core 2 processor, wi-fi, choice of 120, 160, 250 or 320Gb drives, up to 4Gb RAM, web cam and Vista pre-installed. Incidentally, someone at Asus has obviously been doing some research into smells and national characteristics and in the US you can get models entitled Aqua Ocean and Morning Dew – make of that what you will. Read more

Light Work for Cyclists

Speaking in my capacity as a regular (though not particularly energetic) cyclist, and survivor of more than my fair share of near-misses at the hands of stupid car drivers, I was pleased to see this recently patented device on the Core 77 Website. Basically it’s for all of us patient two-wheelers, who don’t run red lights (well, not very often, anyway…) who have to wait at ‘on-demand’ traffic lights for a car to turn up in order to trigger the buried sensor. This gadget fools the inductive sensor into thinking there’s half a ton of tin waiting for the lights to change, rather than just on your bike. It works by creating a brief but strong magnetic field, triggered by a button on the handlebars. Read more

NVIDIA’s Secret Weapon: 40nm GPUs

According to the most recent details regarding NVIDIA’s upcoming graphics products, the Santa Clara-based chip maker is planning to release its very first 40nm GPUs, even before competitor AMD has a chance of delivering its own 40nm-based solutions. Apparently, NVIDIA will step up to the next-generation TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 40G process technology with the introduction of new mobile chips, codenamed N10x.

At this point in time, there are no details regarding availability and official release date but, according to VR-Zone, NVIDIA will try to be the first to offer a 40nm graphics card, thus increasing its chances of gaining the number one spot in the graphics card market. Read more

Intel Six-Pack

It’s called Dunnington and it’s Intel’s latest Six-Core (count-em…) microprocessor chip. Now why on earth anyone would want a six-core chip remains to be seen, dial-core chips have hardly set the computing world alight. It’s all very well having multiple cores, but without the fancy software to take advantage of the extra power you might as well not bother. Nevertheless, there’s clearly a market for such devices way above the heads of us mere mortals, at the top end of the market, in graphics processing in particular and Dunnington will there to help at the back end of this year, and with around 1.9 billion transistors buzzing away inside, it’s bound to do whatever it does really quickly!