ARM has introduced a new graphics core design which will offer ten times the performance available from the ARM Mali-T400 chips available today. In other words, you get a 1000% graphics performance boost over the chip in the Samsung Glaaxy S II, which is one of the fastest phones available today. The new ARM Mali-T658 design is aimed at pones,…

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AMD has unveiled its new line of CPU and GPU products, with a heavy emphasis on low power chips for netbooks, ultraportable laptops, and low power desktops. Probably the most interesting new chips in AMD’s lineup are the new Fusion chips which combine graphics and CPU functions onto a single chip. We’ve been hearing about these products for ages, but…

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Chip maker AMD acquired graphics company ATI a few years back but continued to produce graphics cards and processors under the ATI name. So while competitor Intel would pump out both CPU and GPU products with its own name on them, you could easily wind up buying a computer with an AMD CPU and ATI graphics card without necessarily realizing…

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A few weeks ago AMD announced that it’s new low power Ontario chips for netbooks should begin shipping to PC makers by the end of 2010. There’s always a little gap between the date when a chip maker starts shipping a processor and the time when you can walk into a store and buy a notebook with that chip inside….

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Open source media player VLC is known as a Swiss Army knife of video players. It can handle pretty much any DRM-free video format you can throw at it, from WMV to MKV, with a little H.264, Xvid and DiVX thrown in for good measure. The folks behind VLC just rolled out version 1.1 with support for Google’s new WebM…

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Microsoft launched a platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 recently. It’s not a full browser yet, so much as a framework for a browser. But it already has one of the features I’m most loking forward to: support for hardware acceleration. The folks at NVIDIA grabbed a pre-release Asus Eee PC 1201PN and fired up the Internet Explorer 9 demo…

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China’s Academy of Sciences (ICT)  is working with US based Vivante to develop low power chips for netbooks. ICT is behind the MIPS-based Loongson CPU used in the Emtec Gdium netbook. And Vivante, which is an embedded graphics technology company, has agreed to work with ICT to develop GPUs for use in Chinese netbooks. The partnership could help bring higher…

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I think if you ask most of the people who read this blog regularly, they’ll tell you that a netbook is a small, light, and low cost computer. But companies that make a lot of money by selling state of the art computer components have a tendency to say that netbooks don’t work very well as computers. The latest person…

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Now that we know Intel isn’t going to block NVIDIA from pairings its grpahics chips with the Intel Atom processor, it’s time to take another look at what kind of performance NVIDIA’s new ION platform really offers. NVIDIA has said the platform will offer 10 times the graphics performance you get from the Intel Atom + Intel 945GSE chipset you…

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You know how NVIDIA recently announced plans for a platform that would combine the Intel Atom low power CPU with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU to provide enhanced video performance on netbooks and low power notebooks? Yeah, apparently they forgot to run that whole thing by Intel before unveiling the plan publicly. DigiTimes reports that Intel currently bundles the Intel…

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NVIDIA has unveiled a new netbook platform that combines an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU with an Intel Atom CPU to dramatically boost graphics performance on low power machines like netbooks and nettops. We first heard that NVIDIA was working on something like this a week and a half ago, and now the company says machines built around the platform could…

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S3 Graphics, maker of the Chrome graphics chip used in the current generation HP Mini-Note, is launching a new line of GPUs designed for netbooks and low power laptops. The S3 Graphics Chrome 400 ULP series includes support for DirectX 10.1 and high definition media playback. Three different models will be available. The Chrome 430 ULP which is the most…

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