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No sooner had Intel announced its newest Atom chip for tablets than the company rolled out its next-gen "Cedar Trail" Atom processor due in Netbooks this holiday season. The chipmaker brandished new Netbooks based on the next-generation Atom processor and touted its tablet strategy at a developer conference in China today.

Cedar Trail Netbooks will be "quieter, thinner, lighter than current Netbooks," according to Doug Davis, general manager of the Netbook and tablet group at Intel. Davis was speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, where he showed off a future Cedar Trail Netbook and an Intel Classmate PC that will use the future Atom chip. The event was streamed over the Web.

Davis also mentioned that Intel has shipped 90 million processors into the Netbook segment to date, which means Apple still has to ship tens of million more iPads to even begin to catch up to Netbook numbers. … Read more

The Intel executive who led Intel's so-far-unsuccessful push into smartphones and tablets quit as that business comes under unrelenting competitive pressure from companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia.

Anand Chandrasekher, who had been senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, announced today that he will be leaving Intel to "pursue other interests." Effective immediately, Mike Bell and Dave Whalen, both vice presidents of Intel Architecture Group (IAG), will co-manage the group, which is responsible for building Atom chips that go into smartphones and tablets.

This follows the departure last year of Eric … Read more

Intel is preparing to ship two low-powered Xeon processors for the high-density microserver market, and will deliver similar chips based on its Sandy Bridge and Atom architectures within the next two years.

The additions to the Xeon E3-1200 family, the E3-1260L and E3-1220L, along with the Sandy Bridge and Atom additions, have been designed for microservers, Intel announced at a press event yesterday. A microserver comprises multiple small, one-socket servers sharing the same chassis to provide high-processing density in a relatively small amount of space.

The new Xeons have a thermal design power (TDP) rating of between 20W and 45W … Read more

For the most part, computers do a pretty good job of keeping accurate time, but every now and then they need some help. AnalogX Atomic TimeSync is a simple utility that lets users sync their system time with time information retrieved from the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, a government agency that's part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Although it's a fairly basic program, some of its features are more intuitive than others.

The program's interface is plain, with boxes displaying the local time on your computer, the network time retrieved from the server, and the … Read more

Intel's MeeGo software seems destined for obscurity, in the wake of the Nokia-Microsoft agreement announced yesterday.

Why do I say that? Intel made a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show last year by flourishing an LG phone with an operating system that would later be called, under joint ownership of Intel and Nokia, MeeGo. LG's phone was due in the second half of last year--according to this video taken at the 2010 CES. But it has yet to appear.

That's not in the least bit surprising. Why would LG build a phone with software that was being … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Every year at CES, there are the concept devices and out-on-a-limb concepts that inevitably grab headlines and rapt attention. The Razer Switchblade, announced today, is certainly one of these.

Described as a way to bring desktop PC gaming to a portable form factor, the concept device comes from Razer, a company known for making mice and computer peripherals. And yet, the Switchblade is a full Netbook of sorts, an actual PC product, albeit not one that's set for production yet.

The Switchblade is Intel Atom-based, with a touch screen and a dynamic tactile keyboard that adjusts its layout … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Now here's a new idea...how about a tablet that runs on Windows instead of Android? Samsung's newly announced Sliding PC 7 is a funky hybrid touch-screen device with its own slide-out keyboard. It's a revamp on the idea of a Netbook, and an attempt to finally make a Windows tablet work a little bit better.

The 10.1-inch mini-laptop has a striking design, and has a multitouch screen so it can operate in both tablet and Netbook-esque format.

Specs are Netbook-esque: an Intel Atom Z670 CPU, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 32 or 64GB SSD drive, and … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Toshiba makes good Netbooks, but they were never on the affordable side. The Mini NB305 is one of our favorite Atom Netbooks around, but its price hovers higher than perfectly suitable entry-level alternatives from Acer and Asus.

While some manufacturers, such as Asus, seem to be shifting focus away from Netbooks completely, Toshiba appears to be giving it another go with the NB505, a more affordable Netbook that matches its stiffest competition at $299.

Its specs are baseline: Windows 7 Starter OS, 10.1-inch display, 250GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and an unspecified Atom processor that we assume … Read more

Sony will move beyond traditional Netbooks, a market it has never fully embraced, while Lenovo is making a case for these more powerful, but small laptops already.

Sony will move its Netbook-class laptops up-market with Advanced Micro Devices newest Brazos processors, according to sources. Those AMD chips integrate two processing cores and graphics silicon with robust performance--the latter feature a major departure from Intel's Atom, the standard for Netbooks.

"Sony wants to get out of Netbooks," one source said. Intel has "created a great opening for AMD. They can now drive a big truck through that [… Read more