Ultrabooks are thin and light laptops that, by definition, feature Intel processors. That’s because Intel trademarked the word “ultrabook,” and the chipmaker provides PC makers with guidelines for building ultrabooks. But just because all ultrabooks have Intel CPUs doesn’t mean they’ll all have to rely on Intel integrated graphics. Fudzilla reports that several upcoming ultrabooks, possibly including models from Acer…

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Intel’s next generation Atom processors for netbooks, tablets, and desktops are due out by year’s end, and while the Cedar Trail chips won’t offer much more processing power than today’s Pine Trail chips, it looks like they will offer much better graphics performance. We already knew that the Cedar Trail platform would support 1080p HD video playback and Blu-ray decoding….

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The Raspberry Pi is designed to be a tiny, low cost computer for use in education. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to play video games. The team working to bring the $25 computer to market posted a video this weekend showing a prototype running Quake III. This is still a work in progress — the frame rate…

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Mobile processors such as the latest NVIDIA Tegra or Qualcomm Snapdragon chips already offer pretty impressive graphics performance. They can handle 1080p HD video playback and 3D graphics acceleration and companies are working on adding features like shadow-and-lighting effects. While there are some pretty impressive games available for mobile devices, they still don’t really hold a candle to the titles…

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HTC has agreed to pay $300 million to acquire S3 Graphics from chip-maker VIA (although more than half of that money will go to WTI, a private investment firm). S3 makes graphics solutions for desktop and notebook computers as well as embedded products. Since VIA bought the graphics company 10 years ago, most VIA processors have also included integrated S3…

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Imagination Technologies has announced that six partners have licensed its next-generation PowerVR Series6 graphics architecture. ST-Ericsson has announced plans to use the Series6 technology in its upcoming smartphone chips. Texas Instruments will incorporate it in new OMAP chips. And MediaTek is a third partner. The company is remaining silent on the other three partners, but since Apple is currently using…

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NVIDIA plans to launch its first quad-core mobile chip for smartphones and tablets later this year. Code-named Kal-El, the chip doesn’t just feature four processor cores. It also has 12 graphics cores, and NVIDIA says it’s the first mobiel chip that can handle high quality lighting and shadow effects. The company has put together a demo called Glowball which sounds…

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NVIDIA’s Optimus technology allows laptops with the latest Intel chips and NVIDIA graphics cards to automatically switch between Intel’s integrated graphics and NVIDIA’s higher performance graphics depending on what programs you’re running. This allows you to get better battery life when you don’t need bleeding edge graphics, while giving you the ability to play high performance video games without rebooting…

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Intel’s upcoming Cedar Trail platform may use PowerVR graphics instead of Intel graphics. The folks at VR-Zone got their hands on a leaked slide which shows that the next-generation Intel Atom chips could use PowerVR SGX545 graphics with support for DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.0. The graphics core could run at clock speeds of 400 MHz or 640 MHz and…

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Adobe has launched a public beta of Flash Player 10.2. The biggest change is support for Adobe’s new Stage Video API, which improves support for hardware video acceleration. Translation: If you’ve got a supported video card, you’ll be able to watch HD Flash video without straining your CPU, which means you’ll be able to watch HD video and do other…

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The Asus Eee PC 1015PN is one of the most powerful netbooks on the market today, if that’s not an oxymoron. Sure, it doesn’t come close to matching a notebook with a Core i-series CPU, but this 10 inch netbook has a dual core 1.5GHz Intel Atom N550 chip and the latest generation of NVIDIA ION graphics, which make it…

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AMD sort of sat on the sidelines of the netbook space for the first few years, but this year the company introduced a line of chips that offered decent battery life, about 2-3 times the CPU performance of an Intel Atom chip, and support for 1080p HD video playback as well as 3D graphics acceleration. Now it looks like AMD…

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