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Today Intel announced that they are ready to start offering the i7 mobile CPU for laptops. Using Intel’s “Turbo Boost” technology the new chip is supposed to be 75% faster than current generation laptop mobile CPUs.

“These processors in addition to the new Intel® PM55 Express Chipset, provide the best laptop experience for intense gaming, digital media, photos, music, business applications and other multi-threaded software that hungers for faster processing speed. The chips also boost overall performance when using several of these applications simultaneously.”

Pricing for the Intel® Core™ i7-920XM, Intel® Core™ i7-820QM and Intel® Core™ i7-720QM mobile processors is $1,054, $546 and $364, respectively.

Read the full story here:  Intel Unveils Fastest Laptop Chips Ever With the New Intel® Core™ i7 Mobile Processor

Waking up this morning to lots of buzz about Intel supposedly releasing a prototype of a Moorestown device, but most news services are already updating their releases as they take a closer look at the information. Intel unveiled the first working Moorestown “platform” today. Basically a validation board to test and demonstrate the Moorestown on. Not a prototype by any means, and definitely not something like the concept art and pics of mock up (shells) flying about the net. Slow down and read a bit more guys… Then again… We all are guilty of jumping the gun occasionally, and seeing as how it was a really slow weekend for news I guess we can forgive people for being a bit anxious.

That said I suspect we will see prototype devices very soon as they are expecting a roll out of the platform in consumer products for 2009/2010 according to Intel.

A little bit about the Moorestown… It is a 45 nm processor along with a memory controller, video encoder/decoder, and an I/O hub all built onto a single chip. Basically it’s a complete PC motherboard that is about the size of your average Core 2 Duo processor.

What it means is the ability to create compact mobile internet devices. Current technology has us either using very limited PDA devices or the new line of micro laptops using the Atom processor. The Moorestown will bridge this gap giving us something PDA (or cellphone/MP3 player) sized with the abilities of the “e-notebooks”. Basically it will allow the creation of truly “all in one” devices.

A few weeks ago intel released their new line of Solid State Drives (SSD).  These drives promise to be different than previous SSDs from other manufacturers which have had some reported problems. This is essentially due to the new multi level cell flash memory vs the single level cell architechture used in previous SSDs. These drives are supposed to be much more reliable, and so far most are feeling that Intel has definitely lived up to that promise.

What is an SSD??? Basically it’s a hard drive based on flash memory technology rather than the magnetic platters used in conventional hard disks. As some said when I tried explaining it to them: “So it’s like a flash card for a digital camera only bigger?” Well… Yes… That’s exactly what it’s like. The benefits??? It’s fast, it produces less heat than a standard HDD, it’s fast, there are no moving parts so it’s more reliable, and finally it’s fast… Did I mention that SSDs are fast??? There have been benchmarks showing that SSDs are anywhere from 6X to 12X faster than the average hard drive. A good example would be one fellow that installed one on in his laptop… He said it takes 15 seconds to reboot the computer… Next time you reboot your computer time it. On average I’d say it takes 2 to 3 minutes using a standard HDD. Not to mention all the time folks spend watching that hourglass icon waiting for a program to load.

At the moment the Intel Mainstream drives come in 2 flavors. the XM-18M is an 80 GB drive and the XM-25M is the 160 GB version. Granted they are rather small by todays standards, and rather expensive (the 80GB model is retailing around $700), but the standard rule of thumb on flash memory products is that capacity doubles while price drops by half each year, so it would not be a surprise to see the 160GB drive selling for $350 or so by next fall and a 320 GB version releasing along the same time.

For more info on Intel’s SSD Drives
Click here: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/index.htm