News Bits: More Dells With Penryn, New Firefox Beta, AMD Graphics

Nvidia is currently shrinking its G92 GPU core from a 65nm process to a 55nm to compete better with AMD's upcoming RV770. AMD is currently preparing its RV770 series graphics card for the mobile market and it will be released by the end of Q2 this year, which is around the same time Nvidia will release the 55nm G92.

Read More (VR-Zone.com)
Read More (DigiTimes.com)
Special thanks to forum member 2.0 for submitting this bit

AMD 780M integrated graphics outperforms Intel's best

In a behind-the-scenes look at CeBIT 2008, HEXUS.net was able to grab footage of AMD's latest 780M mobile chipset with integrated graphics outperforming a desktop with an Intel G35 motherboard and Penryn CPU by up to 3x in a Half-Life 2 timedemo. The video can be viewed here. AMD launched the desktop 780G last week, which is based almost entirely on a DirectX 10-compliant Radeon HD 2400 graphics core. Many of the desktop 780G's features and performance have been carried over into the mobile variant.

Expect to see Puma platform-based notebooks appear in the latter half of this year. Intel will offer significant competition with its Centrino 2 platform, which also promises DirectX 10 graphics.

Read More (HEXUS.net)

Dell XPS M1530 finally available with Penryn

The new 45nm Penryn Core 2 Duo CPU has finally been made available on the Dell XPS M1530. From the base T5450 65nm Merom processor, the Penryn T8300 (2.4GHz/3MB L2) is a $175 upgrade, the T9300 (2.5GHz/6MB L2) is a $300 upgrade, and the T9500 (2.6GHz/6MB L2) is available for a hefty $575.

Source (Laptoping.com)
Product Link (Dell.com)
NotebookReview.com review for the Dell XPS M1530

Faster ExpressCard standard on the way

The PCMCIA International Association has announced that a new revision of the ExpressCard format is on the way, ExpressCard Standard 2.0. Transfer rates with the new standard will be between 2x and 10x faster than the current ExpressCard Standard 1.2. SATA and video adapters are two devices that will benefit from the higher transfer rates. The new 2.0 standard will be backwards compatible with all previous versions.

Read More (Laptoping.com)

Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 released

Mozilla has released the Beta 4 of its upcoming Firefox 3.0 browser. The new beta is doing well in the real world so far. The appearance of the browser has changed slightly, with a much larger back button and the placement of the Home button has been moved to the left side of the bookmarks bar.

Read More (BetaNews.com)