There were some impressively thin laptops and convertibles this year at CES. But the trophy of the tiniest PC has to go to Intel's just-announced Compute Stick. Despite being just four inches long, it comes with everything you'd expect from a basic PC: an Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a MicroSD slot for adding more, and a USB port. It will even ship with Windows when it goes on sale in March.
Since the computer age began, microchips have consistently been shrunk to smaller and smaller sizes. Moore’s Law, articulated in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, predicts, fairly accurately to date, that the number of transistors we can fit on a microchip will double every 18 to 24 months, constantly increasing computer speed and efficiency. Many computer scientists and engineers, however, believe we will soon reach a point where the traditional chip circuitry made of silicon will be too microscopic to work reliably.
Who would you want to test your touchscreen device? Maybe an older adult, to ensure it’s intuitive even to someone who isn’t a digital native? Maybe a kid, who’s got high expectations for modern tech? Well, Intel doesn’t use a person at all, MIT Technology Review reports. Instead, it uses robots to evaluate how much people will like new devices.
If you buy a cheapie laptop, you're going to get onboard graphics - historically underpowered, since they exist on the same die as the CPU, and thus historically crappy. To play serious games, or do any real video editing, you'd need to upgrade to a discrete graphics card. But that looks like a thing of the past: today, Intel unleashed its new generation of processors, which go by the name Ivy Bridge, and what had seemed like an incremental upgrade actually has a pretty interesting element: these processors have onboard graphics that basically outclass the entire market of entry-level graphics cards. That means your next computer will be able to run games you'd never be able to run now - with no necessary hardware upgrades.
"Ultrabook" is a word you may have heard used to describe a thin, powerful laptop. You've probably also seen a MacBook Air - the genre's archetype. But if you haven't heard the term this year, get ready for some major exposure: ultrabooks are the way PC laptops will be marketed to us in 2012. But are they something new? Or simply a laptop, refined?
