June 19 - 4:30pm EDT   Dell may soon begin offering a new-generation graphics card for its multimedia-oriented Studio XPS 16 notebook lineup. If true, it would begin offering the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 instead of the current, aging ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670 with its 512MB of dedicated memory. The HD 4670 will most notably double dedicated graphics memory and is based on smaller 55nm manufacturing process. [full story]

June 17 - 4:40pm EDT   Shuttle PC has recently announced a new barebones mini-PC, the SA76G2, which is its first barebones product to support AMD socket AM3 processors using the 760G chipset, including the Phenom II as well as original Phenom, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 and Sempron CPUs. There are also two DDR2 DIMM slots for up to 8GB of RAM. The PC is backwards-compatible with AM2 and AM2+ CPUs. [full story]

June 16 - 4:00pm EDT   BenQ recently announced the upcoming release of its ultra-portable netbook, the 13.3-inch Joybook Lite T131. Weighing in at just under 4lbs, the 13.3-inch T131 sports a 1.6GHz AMD Sempron 200U processor based on the same platform as the Athlon Neo and which should give performance better than netbooks without a major increase in bulk. A minimum of 1GB of RAM is onboard, as is an ATI Mobility Radeon X1270 graphics chipset that can drive HD video playback. The standard 250GB hard drive -- a 320GB drive is an option -- comes preloaded with Windows Vista Home Basic. [full story]

June 9 - 7:45am EDT   HP this morning rolled out a trio of notebook refreshes it's gearing towards students, particularly in price but also in design. The Pavilion dv6 is being given a headlining dv6z Artist Edition 2; the 16-inch notebook has special lid artwork that won a recent MTV design contest and also comes with relatively high specifications for an AMD-based system, including a 2.3GHz Turion X2 Ultra, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a Mobility Radeon HD 4650 for its video. It also gets a bundle of three Corel audiovisual editing apps and will launch on June 10th for $950. [full story]

June 3 - 4:40pm EDT   At a press conference at Computex in Taiwan on Wednesday, PC maker Acer announced it will soon offer the Moblin Linux operating system in its products. This will include Aspire One nettop PCs and regular notebook and desktop PCs. Several Moblin-powered Aspire One netbooks are currently being shown at Computex, along with netbooks from other manufacturers, albeit there was more than one version of Moblin. The Linux-based operating system was developed by Intel to get the most out of the Atom CPU used in ultra-portable netbook PCs. [full story]

June 1 - 9:45am EDT   AMD took its graphics in a new direction on Monday by rolling out the ATI Radeon E4690. The embedded chipset has the same feature set as modern Radeon HD 4000 chipsets but fits the visual core and 512MB of GDDR3 memory all into a single 35mm package small enough for very tight spaces. It's estimated to be about three times faster than the previous E2400 and can not only produce advanced 3D but, in a rarity for the class, handle two displays at once. [full story]

June 1 - 9:30am EDT   ASUS may soon release its Eee PC netbooks and Eee Box nettop PCs running on the NVIDIA Ion mainboard that would tie in Intel's Atom CPU with NVIDIA's hybrid graphics and system controller combo. The computer maker is apparently already testing such configurations, Digitimes reported on Monday, citing industry sources. The same source has an Ion-based Eee Box B1006 coming to stores in the summer of this year, though no estimated dates are being guessed at. [full story]

May 29 - 4:00pm EDT   Computer hardware maker ASUS will soon add two new EeeBox small form factor desktop PCs, the EB1002 and EB1006, according to a Friday NotebookItalia report. The former is said to have an integrated graphics processor while the latter will ship with dedicated graphics. [full story]

May 29 - 1:40pm EDT   A new version of the MSI WindBOX nettop PC, the DE200, was spotted in Europe recently. The main and most significant change of the DE200 from lesser WindBOX nettops is its use of an ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics card with a dedicated 512MB of RAM instead of the integrated Intel GMA 950 chipset. Otherwise, the new WindBOX shares the same 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 CPU, 1GB of RAM and Wi-Fi. [full story]

May 22 - 9:05am EDT   ASUS has confirmed a new, special netbook designed for extra visual performance. The Eee PC 1000HV is a direct sibling of the 1000HE which replaces the Intel integrated graphics with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450. The move not only gives it much faster 3D and video playback but also supplies 256MB of dedicated video memory that reclaims more of the 1GB of system RAM for other tasks. It shortens battery life but still results in a relatively long 5 hours of use. [full story]

May 21 - 10:10am EDT   Apple has posted a job listing that hints at the company's future hardware direction for the iPhone, iPod touch and possible other devices. The position for a High Perform/Low Level Programmer asks for someone familiar not only for programming assembly-level code for ARM processors, which Apple already uses in its handhelds, but for the NEON vector math units used in the newer Cortex architecture for the mobile chips. Apple is especially concerned about experience with vector math and particularly values anyone with additional knowledge of vector units through general CPUs, such as Intel's SSE or the AltiVec units found on PowerPC G4 and G5 cores. [full story]

May 13 - 4:40pm EDT   In a rare move of its own, AMD today launched a factory-overclocked version of its ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics chipset. The move takes the 850MHz core clock speed of the standard edition and boosts it to 1GHz, rendering the new version the first graphics processor of any kind to reach the milestone. AMD claims that the simple shift boosts the peak computing power from 1.36 teraflops to 1.6 and is theoretically faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285. [full story]

May 12 - 3:05pm EDT   Dell today lived up to promises and put its new-look Inspiron desktops on sale today in the US. Now called the Inspiron 537 and 537s, the finished systems are distinguished by their option of several colors and range in speed from Celeron through Core 2 Quad processors for Intel systems and Semprons through Phenom X4 processors for AMD. They can all have up to 8GB of RAM as well as dedicated ATI Radeon HD video, though storage varies slightly with a slimline tower limited to a 750GB drive while the larger mini-tower holds up to 1TB. [full story]

May 7 - 10:50am EDT   AMD late Wednesday announced intentions to move to a new operating model, in an effort to refocus resources on its struggling businesses. The announcement follows several other shifts in AMD's focus, specifically trying to improve integration between microprocessor and graphic processor development. The announced operating model organizes AMD into four operating teams: products, technology, marketing, and customers. [full story]

May 5 - 9:00am EDT   ASUS has fleshed out the details of its designer U series notebooks. Ostensibly based on the shape of a butterfly, the systems share the same tapered shape of the MacBook Air and are also faster, larger versions of the Eee PC 1008HA. The 12-inch U20A, 13.3-inch UX30 and 15.6-inch UX50V are all based on the basic processors expected to be part of Intel's Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) effort and attempt to bring ultra-thin designs to larger systems, ranging from the entry 1.2GHz Celeron M in the U20A to the 1.3GHz Pentium, 1.4GHz Core 2 Solo and 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo in the UX30 and UX50V. [full story]