They’re Dells. No thanks
I have a company Dell laptop. It’s incredibly shitty, even for a Dell. It is due to be replaced by either a Surface or a MacBook. I didn’t like Dells before I was forced to use this abortion, and now I like them even less.
Dell has refreshed its business laptops, predictably enough adding 12th-gen Intel silicon while also trying to make its offerings in a very well established product category stand out. The new Precision 5470 might be the best illustration of Dell's efforts. The 14-incher is designated as a workstation, but still meets the Evo …
There's more than that. Dell Latitudes, their business laptops, can be quite good. I had an E6420 for about 7 years of steady use with no problems and, after refreshing the unit with cheap and easily available parts off eBay such as a new keyboard, I sent it off to a new home with a friend in need (but he's an Apple-head and although I gifted him a computer it seems he didn't bother to use it :rolleyes: No computer, still Apple picky!)
Dell Precisions workstations are fantastic: I outfitted a clumsy, not very technical friend with a Dell Precision M4600 what, at least a good 8 years ago? Since then I've replaced his keyboard at least 3 times; recently the entire palmrest & display bezel to refresh the unit to give him a nicer look, whilst at the same time replaced the metal lid latches because he broke them; repasted the CPU; upgraded the RAM; switched to an SSD about 5 years ago; replaced the power adapter at least twice...
and yet, with dented & bent chassis corners from how many times he's dropped the thing, a loose power plug from how many times he's yanked out the cord whilst working on his lap, no rubber feet from them being ripped off due to his handling, it continues to go on and on and on and on. He's using it to this very moment.
(Talking him into an upgrade, coming soon!)
Dell Inspirons, on the other hand...can be utter shiate.
Depends what you buy, you get what you paid (or, didn't pay) for.
Agreed. i still have some D620s as the real serial port is useful.
As much as I like larger screens I've grown quite fond of my E7240s that I have few and I've replaced parts as needed, maxed out RAM (or added the WWAN card if missing). Had to replace the screen on one (only annoyance is that the 1920x1080 is only available as the glossy touchscreen). I have couple spare keyboards and palmrests in the cupboard for when needed. Whilst I've always thought UltraBooks were silly, when I had to recently do fair bit of travelling i found the E7240 perfect, small and light and not too cumbersome to use on a plane either WWAN card for mobile internet is very useful when on the move and I prefer that to tethering.
I did take a look at the new lineup and looks like you can get those new ones with 4GLTE card etc so fairly similar. Sadly they have dropped ethernet port so its either the awful puck or some other USB GigE adapter. Battery is also internal as seems to be the case with all laptops now.
So £2k for new shiny that is less functonal (unless you crave USB C) than my current one.
I think I'll stick to recycling old ones until they die completely or spare parts become unavailable.
i used to think that. I still do mostly.
However as I needed to carry more than one laptop when doing some travelling I bought some 2nd hand 7240Es and they are actually lot better than I thought they'd be. Perfect size. Much nicer to carry around being lighter (especially if you need more than one laptop) Ok battery life on old ones is not that great. Great size to use on a plane, wouldn't want to try to balance 17" on airplane tray.
Intel has been ruining PC laptops for years.
The Ultrabook was, and is, overpriced crap. Almost all of their other specs mandate making a nearly useless machine that is also practically indistinguishable from every other laptop on the market. It's insane that a hardware company pushes that hard to limit platforms that could otherwise include more of the technology they as a company make, and haven't been selling enough of.
And calling it an EVO or a vPro is just adding gobbledygook from a consumer standpoint. More marking BS isn't the answer here.
Maybe they need to drag out whatever morons they hired in from the auto industry and publicly flay them with wafer cleaner on the next company zoom.
Arm has at least one of Intel's more capable mainstream laptop processors in mind with its Cortex-X3 CPU design.
The British outfit said the X3, revealed Tuesday alongside other CPU and GPU blueprints, is expected to provide an estimated 34 percent higher peak performance than a performance core in Intel's upper mid-range Core i7-1260P processor from this year.
Arm came to that conclusion, mind you, after running the SPECRate2017_int_base single-threaded benchmark in a simulation of its CPU core design clocked at an equivalent to 3.6GHz with 1MB of L2 and 16MB of L3 cache.
It seems promoters of RISC-V weren't bluffing when they hinted a laptop using the open-source instruction set architecture would arrive this year.
Pre-orders opened Friday for Roma, the "industry's first native RISC-V development laptop," which is being built in Shenzen, China, by two companies called DeepComputing and Xcalibyte. And by pre-order, they really mean: register your interest.
No pricing is available right now, quantities are said to be limited, and information is sparse.
Analysis Supermicro launched a wave of edge appliances using Intel's newly refreshed Xeon-D processors last week. The launch itself was nothing to write home about, but a thought occurred: with all the hype surrounding the outer reaches of computing that we call the edge, you'd think there would be more competition from chipmakers in this arena.
So where are all the AMD and Arm-based edge appliances?
A glance through the catalogs of the major OEMs – Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Inspur, Supermicro – returned plenty of results for AMD servers, but few, if any, validated for edge deployments. In fact, Supermicro was the only one of the five vendors that even offered an AMD-based edge appliance – which used an ageing Epyc processor. Hardly a great showing from AMD. Meanwhile, just one appliance from Inspur used an Arm-based chip from Nvidia.
In yet another sign of how fortunes have changed in the semiconductor industry, Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC is expected to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue for the first time.
Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance.
The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC.
Intel has found a new way to voice its displeasure over Congress' inability to pass $52 billion in subsidies to expand US semiconductor manufacturing: withholding a planned groundbreaking ceremony for its $20 billion fab mega-site in Ohio that stands to benefit from the federal funding.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was tentatively scheduled to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Ohio manufacturing site with state and federal bigwigs on July 22. But, in an email seen by the newspaper, the x86 giant told officials Wednesday it was indefinitely delaying the festivities "due in part to uncertainty around" the stalled Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.
That proposed law authorizes the aforementioned subsidies for Intel and others, and so its delay is holding back funding for the chipmakers.
Comment Intel has begun shipping its cryptocurrency-mining "Blockscale" ASIC slightly ahead of schedule, and the timing could not be more unfortunate as digital currency values continue to plummet.
Raja Koduri, the head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics group, tweeted Wednesday the company has started initial shipments of the Blockscale ASIC to crypto-mining firms Argo Blockchain, Hive Blockchain and Griid:
Intel is claiming a significant advancement in its photonics research with an eight-wavelength laser array that is integrated on a silicon wafer, marking another step on the road to on-chip optical interconnects.
This development from Intel Labs will enable the production of an optical source with the required performance for future high-volume applications, the chip giant claimed. These include co-packaged optics, where the optical components are combined in the same chip package as other components such as network switch silicon, and optical interconnects between processors.
According to Intel Labs, its demonstration laser array was built using the company's "300-millimetre silicon photonics manufacturing process," which is already used to make optical transceivers, paving the way for high-volume manufacturing in future. The eight-wavelength array uses distributed feedback (DFB) laser diodes, which apparently refers to the use of a periodically structured element or diffraction grating inside the laser to generate a single frequency output.
Having successfully appealed Europe's €1.06bn ($1.2bn) antitrust fine, Intel now wants €593m ($623.5m) in interest charges.
In January, after years of contesting the fine, the x86 chip giant finally overturned the penalty, and was told it didn't have to pay up after all. The US tech titan isn't stopping there, however, and now says it is effectively seeking damages for being screwed around by Brussels.
According to official documents [PDF] published on Monday, Intel has gone to the EU General Court for “payment of compensation and consequential interest for the damage sustained because of the European Commissions refusal to pay Intel default interest."
Desktop Tourism My 20-year-old son is an aspiring athlete who spends a lot of time in the gym and thinks nothing of lifting 100 kilograms in various directions. So I was a little surprised when I handed him Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio and he declared it uncomfortably heavy.
At 1.8kg it's certainly not among today's lighter laptops. That matters, because the device's big design selling point is a split along the rear of its screen that lets it sit at an angle that covers the keyboard and places its touch-sensitive surface in a comfortable position for prodding with a pen. The screen can also fold completely flat to allow the laptop to serve as a tablet.
Below is a .GIF to show that all in action.
As Intel gets ready to build fabs in Arizona and Ohio, the x86 giant is planning to offload a 149-acre historic research and development site in Massachusetts that was once home to the company's only chip manufacturing plant in New England.
An Intel spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday to The Register it plans to sell the property. The company expects to transfer the site to a new owner, a real-estate developer, next summer, whereupon it'll be torn down completely.
The site is located at 75 Reed Rd in Hudson, Massachusetts, between Boston and Worcester. It has been home to more than 800 R&D employees, according to Intel. The spokesperson told us the US giant will move its Hudson employees to a facility it's leasing in Harvard, Massachusetts, about 13 miles away.
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022