bridges

Microsoft's first PC, the Surface Pro, has survived Round One.

A report this week said 400,000 Surface Pros were sold in about a month since its release. That's a decent start (contrary to the media's take).

Remember, this is an $899-$999 tablet (though I prefer to describe it as a full-blown Windows PC compacted and stuffed into a tablet's chassis), not a $199 Nexus 7 or $329 iPad Mini.

Also remember this is just the start. The Pro should evolve to the point where you can have a 1.5 or 2 pound tablet … Read more

Intel desktop circuit boards may begin to get scarce.

The chipmaker cut back on motherboard orders by 80 percent to only 100,000 units, claims an Asia-based Digitimes report, citing sources in the "supply chain."

A person familiar with Intel's motherboard business contacted by CNET could not confirm whether the 80 percent figure was accurate but said the general thrust of the report was correct, as Intel announced in January that it was winding down the desktop motherboard business.

"We disclosed internally...that Intel's desktop motherboard business will begin slowly ramping down over the course … Read more

With the flip of a switch Tuesday night, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, already known as one of the world's most amazing bridges, will undergo an epic transformation.

Starting tomorrow evening, anyone looking at the San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge at night will be wowed by the ever-changing swirls, bursts, star fields, and other patterns of the Bay Lights Project, the world's largest LED art installation.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the project features 25,000 1-inch LEDs strung for 1.8 miles along the bridge's cables that together make up the pixels on what … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--I'm standing behind Leo Villareal, watching the well-known artist calibrate settings in the software running on his screen. Each time he moves a slider, one of the world's largest art installations -- mounted on one of the world's most-famous landmarks -- changes in an instant.

It's a gorgeous evening on the Embarcadero, San Francisco's eastern waterfront, with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge dominating the landscape in front of us, and a near-full moon doing its best to overcome the typical evening fog cover. Lights from the city, and from Oakland on the other side of the bay reflect brilliantly in the water. And with just the most subtle adjustments in his custom-designed software, Villareal makes thousands of LEDs strung out over the 1.8 mile-long western span of the bridge almost instantaneously change what they're doing, and how they're interacting with each other. … Read more

A 26-year-old graduate student named Matthew Riese has an ambition to create a business building custom hovercrafts. And he's making waves -- literally -- on the way to realizing that dream.

On Saturday, Riese's vehicle took a brief dip in the water and then spun out on a beach in San Francisco, giving tourists taking in views of the Golden Gate Bridge something entirely unexpected to photograph and show the folks back home. This wasn't the first time Riese's invention has made its way into San Francisco Bay. Here's a recording made last year of … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Intel is trying to move its chips from below the keyboard to behind the glass.

In other words, more emphasis on the tablet half of the equation.

Behind the glass: "We believe...detachables are fundamentally different," Adam King, Intel's director of notebook marketing, said in an interview with CNET, referring to laptop designs with displays that can be removed from the base to become standalone tablets.

"The point of differentiation is that the processor is...behind the glass," he said.

"Detachables we think of as a tablet first. Because when you take it … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Intel came clean today about the power efficiency for the new Ivy Bridge chips announced at CES on Monday.

At its CES event, Intel claimed that new power-frugal Y series Ivy Bridge processors were rated at 7 watts -- a remarkable feat on its face, as that's 10 watts less than standard low-power Ivy Bridge chips rated at 17 watts.

It turns out, Intel did some fancy marketing footwork in order to claim the 7-watt rating, as Ars Technica pointed out.

Below is Intel's statement provided to CNET. The operative phrase is: "The TDP of the … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Feeling the heat from tablet and smartphone rivals, Intel demonstrated today at CES today that it is more concerned about low power than high performance.

Kirk Skaugen, GM of the Intel PC Client Group, made a surprising disclosure when he said the current third-generation "Ivy Bridge" processor will now run at a rated 7 watts and will appear soon in super-skinny tablet-laptop hybrids from Acer and Lenovo.

Power efficiency like that wasn't supposed to happen until the upcoming fourth-generation "Haswell" processor based on a new micro-architecture.

To put that into perspective, mainstream Intel mobile … Read more

Join CNET tomorrow afternoon for live coverage of Intel's keynote presentation at CES 2013, where the company is expected to talk about -- you guessed it -- chips galore.

The keynote kicks off at 1 p.m. Pacific from the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino. Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel's PC Client Group, will be presenting, along with Mike Bell, general manager of the Mobile and Communications Group. They'll include an "update" on the company's third-generation processors and its mobile device strategy.

You can tune in to the blog and video stream here: … Read more