CES 2008

Toshiba's Qosmio G45-AV690

With Intel's new Penryn series of laptop CPUs, PC makers, including Toshiba, are revamping their lines to offer the new parts. You'll be able to find the new chips in the Toshiba Qosmio line, the Satellite X205, and select Satellite U305 laptops.

One of the more impressive new Toshibas is the Qosmio G45-AV690, which the company calls the "world's first notebook to feature an HD DVD-R/RW optical drive." Although we admit, that might have been more impressive news before last week's Warner/Blu-ray smackdown.

Toshiba's Qosmio systems are still among our favorite multimedia desktop replacements, featuring 1080p-compatible screen resolution, an HDMI output for sending those HD DVD movies to your big-screen plasma or LCD TV, and most exciting, an external OCCUR TV tuner -- also known as CableCard. Setting up CableCard, for recording hi-def TV signals with your computer, is still a major pain, but it's a vast improvement over old-fashioned TV tuners. You also get Intel's new Penryn T9300 Core 2 Duo processor, and a decent Nvidia GeForce 8300 video card.

The tricked-out Qosmio G45-AV690 is available now for $3,199.

HP announced a CES revamp of its ubersize desktop replacement late last week. Now that Intel has unveiled its new line of laptop chips, we bring you more details and hands-on observations of this high-end laptop.

While some PC makers endeavor to make ever smaller and lighter machines, HP gets credit for going the other way, creating one of the largest laptops ever seen--the massive HDX. With a huge 20-inch display and weighing more than 15 pounds, the HDX is a glorious example of conspicuous consumption. Even better, unlike Dell's similar XPS M2010, HP continues to update the system regularly--the latest version (still just called the HDX) is the third model we've seen since last spring.

The new HDX debuting at CES offers 512 MB Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTS graphics and the latest Intel Penryn processors, and offers a choice of either HD DVD or Blu-ray drives--although the recent Warner/Blu-ray deal makes that less exciting than it was a week or so ago.

Getting a chance to run some benchmarks on a Penryn HDX with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 just before CES, we didn't really see more than a modest performance boost from the new parts--but as with any prerelease hardware, new drivers are often required to unlock the real potential, so it may be a few days or weeks before useful updates are available.

The HDX may be so big that it's a laptop in name only, but the original model from last year was a constant conversation piece around the CNET office. Look for the revamped HDX to be available online sometime in January, starting at $1,999.

Let the 45nm processing begin!

(Credit: Intel)

Intel introduced its Penryn mobile processors today, and Dell sent us a Latitude D630 with one of the new chips last week to test against an identical Latitude with a previous-generation Merom chip. As we found last year when we tested the first Penryn desktop chip, the Core 2 Extreme QX9650, performance gains aren't immediately evident. While the Penryn mobile processor we tested, the Core 2 Duo T9500, boasts a more efficient 45-nanometer manufacturing process, it really is just laying the foundation for architectural advances that Intel will release later in the year with Nehalem. Compared with the previous-generation Core 2 Duo T7800, which our second Latitude D630 test system was running, the two chips feature the same 2.60GHz clockspeed and operate on the same 800MHz frontside bus of Intel's 965 Express chipset. The Penryn chip does serve up 6MB of L2 cache to the Merom chip's 4MB--along with support for the SSE4 instruction set, which aids audio, video, and 3D processing.

On our standard benchmarks--that don't support SSE4--we saw incremental improvement at best. The Penryn system was no faster than the otherwise identical Merom system on our Photoshop CS3, Cinebench, and Quake 4 benchmarks, and we saw only a modest 12 percent bump on both our multimedia and iTunes tests. Intel last week told us we wouldn't see sizable performance gains until we started mucking about with applications with SSE4 support such as Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and DivX Pro 6.8.

The smaller 45nm chip design should result in improved battery life, as should Deep Power Down, a new power management setting Intel released with these Penryn chips that cuts the power of the processor when it's idle. (After one battery drain test, however, we saw only an eight-minute advantage.) According to Intel, Deep Power Down will also help reduce power leakage between transistors, which becomes more of a concern each time the manufacturing process shrinks and more transistors are packed more closely together in a smaller space. Intel's shift to Hafnium-based, high-k metal gates, which Intel trumpets as the biggest change to how transistors are made in 40 years, also will help prevent transistor power leakage.

Penryn is also helping Intel get green. The chips are lead free and will be halogen free later in this year.

Mobile Penryn: pricing and specs
Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 -- 2.8GHz, 6MB shared L2 cache, $851
Intel Core 2 Duo T9500 -- 2.6GHz, 6MB shared L2 cache, $530
Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 -- 2.5GHz, 6MB shared L2 cache, $316
Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 -- 2.4GHz, 3MB shared L2 cache, $241
Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 -- 2.1GHz, 3MB shared L2 cache, $209

Dell expects to begin shipping the Latitude D630 with the T9300 and the T9500 in February (the T8100 and T8300 won't be listed online but will be available by request). The T9300 and the T9500 will replace the T7700 and T7800 chips currently offered on the Latitude D630 for the same prices. Dell said that Penryn updates to its consumer Inspiron and XPS laptops will soon follow.

CES is not exactly a chip-maker's show, since chips look sort of lame next to flashy cell phones and 100-inch plasma televisions.

Still, Intel and AMD both plan to descend on the desert this week and each company is making some news. Intel has more than a dozen new chips to announce, and AMD has a new logo.

First off, Intel plans to unveil 16 chips on Monday, the same day CEO Paul Otellini delivers an afternoon keynote address at The Venetian Hotel. The five Penryn-class Core 2 Duo notebook processors are probably the highlight, the first of Intel's notebook chips to use the company's 45-nanometer manufacturing technology.

The notebook chips are available immediately, setting the stage for next week's Macworld, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to unveil one or more Macbooks based on Intel's chips. The rest of the new processors are for servers and desktops; the server chips are available immediately, while desktop chips will follow later. Intel is closing in on shipment totals of 1 million 45-nanometer chips after launching its first such processors last November.

Otellini is expected to focus more on Intel's low-power and Mobile Internet Device initiatives, which represent some of the company's most ambitious goals for the rest of the decade. Intel has spent a lot of time talking about its desire to get inside of future mobile computers, and it will probably highlight upcoming MIDs based on its Silverthorne processor during the keynote.

AMD has much less to say, given that right now, its priorities center on fixing its Barcelona and Phenom processors and getting those ready for prime time. Still, the company plans to discuss its upcoming Puma notebook platform during the show.

Turion Ultra is going to be the processor brand delivered with the Puma platform, which will also incorporate ATI Mobility Radeon graphics chipsets from AMD's graphics division, said Bahr Mahony, director of mobile business for AMD.

One interesting feature on certain Turion Ultra notebooks will be the ability to turn the discrete graphics on or off, depending on the need for graphics performance or battery life. Some of the platforms will include the Mobilty Radeon HD 3400 graphics chipset, which can toggle between the two modes.

Sony doesn't sell as many laptops as, say, Dell or HP, instead focusing on high-end systems that are among the slickest-looking out there. While they offer pretty much the same parts as the competition (usually for somewhat inflated prices), we rarely get as many comments or stares from onlookers as when we're carrying around a Vaio laptop.

Sony isn't starting off this year with any radical new designs (in fact these system look identical to the current versions), but is instead offering up some well-timed updates to its current line, adding the latest Intel Penryn processors and even more SSD hard drives.

Sony Vaio TZ298N/X

The 17-inch Vaio VGN-AR790U has a 1,920x1,200 resolution, a high-end 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 CPU, Blu-ray, and an external TV tuner for $3,300. Sony is taking online preorders starting January 7.

The 15-inch Vaio VGN-FZ485U/B has another of the new Intel CPUs, the 2.1GHz T8100, 4GB of RAM, a Blu-ray drive (and an HDMI output for sending that hi-def signal to a bigger screen), and Nvidia's GeForce 8400. It's going to be available for preorder January 7 for $2,200.

The ultraportable 11-inch Vaio VGN-TZ298N/X has a thin LED backlit display and an ultralow power non-Penryn U7700 CPU. It combines a 250GB hard drive with a 64GB solid state drive, plus wireless broadband and a carbon fiber chassis that weighs just 2.65lbs. It's a whopping $3,600, and available for preorder on January 7.

Finally, the 13-inch Vaio VGN-SZ791N/X takes on the popular 13-inch MacBook with an LED backlit display and T9300 Intel Penryn CPU, plus wireless broadband and Nvidia's GeForce 8400 GPU. It's $2,500, and available for preorder January 7.

We're pleased to see Sony jumping on the Penryn bandwagon right away, and nobody makes better boutique laptops, especially in the ultraportable category. Hopefully these "preorders" will turn into actual shipping systems sooner rather than later, and we'll keep you updated on street dates for these.