Back in April, Intel launched their latest CPU architecture along with their 22nm process: Ivy Bridge. Similar to the Sandy Bridge launch last year, the first parts to come out were all quad-core, higher performance chips. Today, Intel is fleshing out their Ivy Bridge offerings with some (but not all) of their dual-core offerings. We have details on their new mobile chips while Anand will be covering a new desktop offering with HD 2500 Graphics. Along with the mobile dual-core offerings, Intel is also launching their Ultra Low Voltage parts that are destined for Ultrabooks, and Intel sent along a prototype Ultrabook equipped with one of these new CPUs for testing.

The idea behind the Ultrabook initiative isn’t particularly new; take your standard ultraportable laptop and put a few additional requirements on it and you’ve got an Ultrabook. It’s really a marketing campaign to get users more interested in spending money on higher quality, higher performance, and higher cost laptops. “Sure, you could get that $500 laptop, but look at how this sweet little laptop that’s less than two centimeters thick!” Even though there’s plenty of marketing behind the initiative, marketing can drive a lot of sales, and Intel has been pushing the Ultrabook hard. So here we are, six weeks after the quad-core launch with an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook in hand, and we have details on the other dual-core mobile parts as well. The Ivy Bridge party is ready to move into the second act.

Blizzard’s latest iteration of their hack ‘n slash Diablo series is making plenty of news, and we managed to get a copy for testing purposes. If you haven’t read much about Diablo III, the short skinny is that it’s not particularly demanding when it comes to desktop hardware. Laptops on the other hand, that’s a different matter. We’ve had some requests to show how the various IGPs and mainstream mobile GPUs handle the game, and with hardware and software in hand we’ve run some tests to provide answers. Just how much GPU do you need to take on the forces of hell while untethered? Read on to find out.

There's nothing quite like being fastest. Even to be atop the heap of competitors for a second can be a thrill and a great story. And so it was that we were fascinated by the incredible claims by Archos, that they had the "World's Fastest Tablets." We first caught wind of these tablets last year when they were touted as the fastest Android tablets in the world thanks to the 1.5 GHz clock on the TI OMAP4460 dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC. Delays in producing these top models meant falling behind NVIDIA’s Tegra 3, the current “World’s Fastest” title holder. And while the Android tablet market was still pretty shallow last July when these were announced, it’s a deep wide sea now. So how does the French entrant fare?

The first round of Ultrabooks were mostly underwhelming. It shouldn't be a surprise, but many of the efforts were just half hearted at best. Of the companies who shipped the first Ultrabooks however, it was ASUS who came the closest to perfection with the Zenbook.

ASUS' Zenbook embodied the form factor, portability and overall concept of an Ultrabook. Where it failed to deliver was with its keyboard, display and, at least initially, with its trackpad. The first Zenbook was an amazing effort given the short period of time that it was conceived and developed in, but it was too rough around the edges.

Despite only being introduced 7 months ago, the Zenbook is old news. This is the Zenbook Prime:

The Zenbook Prime is ASUS' second generation Ultrabook, built around Ivy Bridge silicon. Unlike most silicon updates to notebooks however, the Zenbook Prime takes an almost Apple-like approach to renovating the tangibles rather than just relying on a faster chip to do the heavy lifting.

I don't know that I've ever seen a faster turn around on implementing reviewer and user feedback into a product. The Zenbook Prime fixes nearly every issue I had with the original Zenbook. From keyboard to display, it's all significantly better with the Zenbook Prime.

Read on for our full review!

When Alienware announced the Ivy Bridge refresh for its gaming notebook lineup, one model was conspicuously absent. Word filtered out that the smallest member of the range, the 11.6” M11x, would not be refreshed and that Dell was preparing to discontinue the line. For ultramobile gamers, the loss of the M11x is a huge blow, because it was one of the more unique notebooks out there—a near ultraportable with legitimate gaming aspirations, backed up by gaming performance that lit the class standards on fire. It was a truly standout notebook, and it will be sorely missed.

But now, a spiritual successor emerges in the form of Clevo’s W110ER. We have this unit courtesy of Eurocom, who are calling it the Monster 1.0, but other boutiques selling the W110ER include AVADirect, OriginPC, Sager, and XoticPC amongst others. We typically see this with larger notebooks from Clevo and Compal, but it hasn’t been as prominent with smaller notebooks until now, with the exception of some ASUS models from years past.

The W110ER spec sheet actually reads like a pipe dream, something that you would come up with if things like thermal limits didn’t exist. The performance-class GPU is present and accounted for—Clevo ships every W110ER whitebook with a Kepler-based GT 650M (2GB DDR3, 384 CUDA cores, Optimus). But the most impressive thing here is that the W110ER has support for Intel’s new IVB 35W quad-core CPUs. Yeah seriously, a quad-core 11.6” notebook. Just to refresh your memory, the M11x made use of Intel’s low voltage dual-core parts, so this is a significant step up in CPU performance. It’s a ridiculous amount of performance stuffed into a tiny notebook. Interested? Read on.

AMD’s microprocessor history goes way back, predating even the now venerable x86 architecture. Their first foray into x86 territory came as a subcontractor to Intel, and from there AMD cut the ties and began making x86 compatible chips of their own design, starting in 1991 with the Am386. AMD went on to make the Am486 and Am5x86 before ditching the “86” part of the name with the launch of the K5. That’s where most of us started paying closer attention, and the K6/K6-2/K6-III and K7 were quite popular in their day. The real deal however came with the K8/Hammer family of processors—chips that not only competed with Intel offerings (Pentium 4 mostly) but actually outperformed them in the vast majority of benchmarks, and did so while using less power. It was a double whammy of performance and efficiency, and for several years AMD chips were the enthusiast’s CPU of choice.

Unfortunately for AMD, they’ve never quite managed to reclaim the glory of the Athlon 64/Opteron launch. It took Intel a few years—and a scrapped Tejas architecture—but when they finally got things straightened out they struck back with a vengeance. Intel’s Conroe (Core 2) architecture turned the tables on AMD with the same double whammy of increased performance and reduced power, and since the launch in mid-2006, Intel has managed to hold onto the CPU performance crown. In fact, earlier this year AMD almost seemed to throw in the towel as far a high-performance CPUs are concerned, with their future strategy focusing on mainstream and value-oriented APUs. We’ve already seen some of that with their first APUs, Brazos and Llano, and today AMD brings out their third APU architecture: Trinity.

If you’re hoping to see a repeat of the Hammer launch back in 2003 with Trinity today, you’re going to be disappointed. AMD has made no claims or even hints that Trinity is going to go toe-to-toe with Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge-E in processor benchmarks. Instead, the marketing material and reviewer’s guides are more about telling a story of good performance, balance, and flexibility with a price point that won’t have you looking for a loan. Sometimes the best way to take down a massive empire isn’t by lining up your heavy guns and trading blows until one side capitulates—in such battles, the larger/wealthier corporation almost always wins. Instead, it’s the plucky little ships that can outmaneuver the big guns that can sometimes come out ahead. Will Trinity be AMD’s X-wing to Intel’s Ivy Bridge death star? Read on for our full analysis.

Late last year, we covered the first part of AMD’s HD 7000M product lineup, the 7400M, 7500M, and 7600M. Today, the other shoe drops as we get the high-end parts, and unlike the other 7000M chips, these will all be running AMD’s GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. As is customary for mobile GPU launches, we don’t have any hardware in hand to test, and we’ve previously reported some of the details for the chips. Now we have complete specs to discuss, so let’s get to it.