Todays & Tomorrows Technology

Maingear have announced a new PC that can’t decide quite whether it’s for gamers or HTPC enthusiasts. The Maingear Axess HD Gamer has its sights on your living room, and uses a low-profile aluminum case; however inside there’s an Intel Core i7 processor, up to 12GB of DDR3 memory and dual NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT graphics cards in SLI configuration. The Axess HD Gamer is also the first system to come with the Phantom Lapboard.
Other specifications include a Blu-ray drive, 8-channel audio with pre-amp, S/PDIF digital audio output and Vista Home Premium with its media center UI. Storage is courtesy of two 3.5-inch SATA drives, offering up to 2TB of space, or alternatively twin SSDs.

Up front there’s an OLED display for status information – including song or artist for music, or alternatively movie title – plus a multi-format memory card reader. Connectivity includes DVI-D, VGA, HDMI and component out, plus dual gigabit ethernet, eight USB 2.0 ports, two 6-pin FireWire ports and eSATA.

Unsurprisingly, none of this comes cheap. The Maingear Axess HD Gamer range starts from $1,799, but expect to pay far more than that for the kind of maxed-out system the company are talking about here.

Intel have announced that it will be rebranding its CPU range to supposedly simplify the lineup, focusing on the “Intel Core” prefix and transitioning the Centrino brand to cover the company’s WiFi and WiMAX products. Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 will eventually replace Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, distinguishing different feature sets; somewhat confusingly, some processors will slot into multiple i-prefix categories, depending on their capabilities.

For instance, the upcoming Lynnfield desktop processor will be an Intel Core chip, but have various models that slot into the i5 or i7 segments. Broadly speaking, i3 is an entry-level chip, i5 is a mid-level chip and i7 is the flagship high-level processor. It’s not all change, though, as the Celeron and Pentium brands limp on to cover “affordable entry-level” and “basic computing” respectively.

Finally, one of the most popular chips over the last twelve months, the Atom range, will also survive, and vPro technology will be offered on certain i5 or i7 chips. There’ll also be a new star-system, shown under the Intel Core logo, which indicates whether its feature-packed or not.

Intel’s upcoming CPU plans continue to leak out, with motherboard manufacturers apparently tipping a new entry-level Celeron range in Q3 2009 together with a new Core i7 processor in Q4. The Intel Celeron E3000 series will replace the existing E1000 series, and initially consist of 45nm 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz chips. As for the performance chip, that will be the 3.2GHz Core i7 960.

The E3000 Celeron processors will each have 1MB of L2 cache, an 800MHz FSB and 65W TDP. The E3200 will run at 2.4GHz while the E3300 will run at 2.5GHz, and both will support VT-x virtualization. That means Windows 7’s XP Mode will run.

According to the unspecified sources, Intel expect the new E3000 range to account for 10-percent of their entry-level CPU shipments in Q4 2009, rising to 21-percent in Q1 2010. Meanwhile the D410 nettop chip is predicted to capture 6-percent in the first-quarter next year, lagging behind the faster D510 with 25-percent.