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Updated at 11:50 a.m. PST with additional information on Nvidia and ATI graphics in Mac Pro

Apple's rollout of new Macs Tuesday was a vote of confidence for Nvidia: its graphics chip have now become as ubiquitous as Intel's processors across the Mac line.

Apple's entire Mac lineup now features Nvidia GeForce GPUs. "If you go into a retail store, it's (Nvidia) top to bottom," said an Nvidia spokesperson today. "The message is that Apple is differentiating itself, investing in the GPU," he said.

The GPU, or graphics processing unit, … Read more

Updated at 10:50 a.m. PST with additional information from announcement and Intel-TSMC conference call.

Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will collaborate on Atom chip production, the companies announced Monday.

For its part, Intel is eying big markets--such as smartphones--where it is currently not a player, but TSMC is. "Many of our customers already had an existing IP (Intellectual Property) infrastructure on TSMC that they would like to take advantage of as they ramp Atom-based products. That's essentially what the agreement is about," said Anand Chandrashekar, senior vice president at Intel, speaking Monday morning in … Read more

Archos, a popular maker of Portable Media Players and Mobile Internet Devices, is joining the Netbook fray by releasing one of its own.

Earlier this week, the company announced the availability of its new 10-inch Netbook on its online store. The Netbook was originally slated for release in April, but because it was announced at CES in January, I guess the company felt ready for prime time. Finally, Archos is said to be working on several new versions based on Intel's Moorestown platform, which will replace Intel's current Netbook and MID platform sometime in 2010.

For now, let'… Read more

Nvidia is working with top-10 PC makers to bring its graphics chips for the first time to Netbooks, according to an executive at the company. And an important part of this push is getting its silicon working with Windows 7, a more Netbook-friendly operating system than Vista.

This week, Nvidia released Windows 7 beta drivers for the "Ion" Netbook silicon that it's handing over to customers. In conjunction, Nvidia demonstrated in Taiwan this week applications running on Windows 7. Nvidia also announced that its Ion platform has been certified on Windows Vista.

The Ion chipset is based … Read more

Worldwide PC processor shipments fell sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, though Intel's Atom chip bucked the trend, according to new data from IDC.

In the fourth quarter, processor unit shipments declined 17 percent quarter over quarter and 11.4 percent year over year, while market revenue declined 18 percent over the previous quarter and 22.2 percent compared to the year-earlier period to $6.78 billion, IDC said.

"The decline in PC processor unit shipments in the fourth quarter was the worst sequential decline since IDC started tracking processor shipments in 1996," said Shane Rau, … Read more

Intel's newest Atom processor has slipped out of the starting gate sooner than expected.

Though the Atom N280 had been expected later this year, it is now shipping to Intel customers. "Asus is already taking preorders for the 1000HE with the N280," Intel spokesperson Bill Calder said Thursday.

Intel doesn't expect the rollout to be as big as the Atom N270, introduced back in June, but the N280 is expected to appear in a few systems, Calder said.

The N280 brings a minuscule clock frequency improvement to the N270, bumping up the speed to only 1.… Read more

When 9-inch Netbooks started to replace the original 7-inch models, we got firmly behind that trend. When 10-inch Netbooks started to appear, we declared that we liked them better than the 9-inch versions, but many PC makers didn't immediately follow suit.

Now we're pleased to report that the 10-inch Netbook trend is in full swing, with two big holdouts, Dell and Acer, getting on board.

Dell semi-secretly showed off the 10-inch version of its Netbook at CES, minus pricing and details, but now a U.K. store called Tesco has it for sale at 349 pounds, which is … Read more

I suppose if I were just in search of controversy, I'd write a post to proclaim the death of the MID (mobile Internet device) category. My obituary for the Netbook earlier this week generated a ton of traffic; I suppose I could do that again. Certainly, the concept of a MID--a device midway in size and capability between smartphones and the smallest notebooks--is under tremendous pressure from both sides.

Customers have learned that with a well-engineered browser, the small displays on phones such as Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's G1 "Google phone" are sufficient for most … Read more

Much coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show is full of references to new Netbooks introduced at the show. But in fact, there were hardly any Netbooks at all, and those that did appear went almost unmentioned.

The truth is, the Netbook is dead, and good riddance. The concept of the Netbook was based on a tragic misunderstanding: the belief that tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people worldwide wanted a portable computer that was small, power-efficient, and (here's the misunderstanding) not good for much beyond accessing the Internet.

That's where the "Net" in "… Read more