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Hands-on with GestureWorks' Gameplay virtual controller (video)
With the exception of the Razer Edge, Windows 8 tablets are at a disadvantage when it comes to gaming -- most PC games are built with keyboard, mouse or a gamepad in mind. Although Civilization V and other select titles have special multitouch controls for the Surface Pro enthusiast, the majority of games are simply unplayable without peripherals. The solution? Find a middleman. GestureWorks Gameplay promises to solve the tablet owner's mobile gaming woes by creating a virtual touch interface that emulates keyboard and mouse inputs. The suite allows users to create custom multitouch controllers with virtual joysticks, d-pads, buttons and even mappable swipe gestures. It's a curious proposition, particularly when one considers the efforts Android and iOS gamers go through to dodge touchscreen controls. We met up with the company to get a quick look at the program's beta.
Gigabyte shows off tiny BRIX gaming PC with Haswell and Iris Pro graphics (hands-on)
While we had an inkling that Gigabyte would be fitting its latest miniature BRIX PCs with Haswell processors, we were pleasantly surprised to learn it had also built a tiny gaming computer with Iris Pro graphics on board. Indeed, the BRIX pocket gaming PC has similar internals to the recently announced Gigabyte BRIX II -- it has an HDMI port, Ethernet, four USB 3.0 slots, Bluetooth 4.0, a Mini display port, built-in WiFi and a headset jack -- but with the added benefit of Intel's latest integrated graphics and the choice of red, yellow or black aluminum housing. We had a chance to play around with a prototype model at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and we have to say we're impressed. We played a short round of Grid 2 and the race car looked amazing as it roared across a large 1080p TV. While the performance appeared robust enough in our brief hands-on, an Intel rep did warn us it probably won't replace a system with a dedicated high-end GPU (Ed. Note: We've heard from Intel that while Iris Pro won't replace a high-end GPU, it'll match up well with low to mid-range graphics cards). The box itself is an adorable little thing that we felt was compact and light enough to bring to our next gaming party without taking up too much space in the trunk.
HP Chromebook 14 with Haswell hands-on (video)
Aside from the new Acer Chromebook, we also got a hands-on look at the new HP Chromebook 14. The latest Haswell-powered Chromebook from HP comes in an array of eye-popping colors -- Snow White, Ocean Turquoise and Coral Peach -- which certainly makes them the most colorful Chromebooks we've ever seen. In person, the colors seem bright and playful, though we can't help but feel they look like they belong in Toys R Us rather than an electronics store. The Chromebook's chassis is made out of plastic, which makes the whole thing seem even more toy-like. The top cover has a smooth rubberized finish, but the plastic-molded keyboard feels a bit gritty; the texture reminds us of the material used in 3D printing. As the name suggests, the Chromebook 14 has a 14-inch display with 1,366 x 768 resolution. It looked bright enough underneath the convention center's lighting, though it's difficult to tell after just a few minutes of use. It's certainly not the lightest Chromebook we've ever held -- it measures about 0.81-inch thin and weighs in at a whopping 4.08 pounds. HP opted to adhere to the standard Chromebook keyboard layout instead of its own, and the trackpad has just a single button instead of the two found on the HP Pavilion 14. Other features include a HDMI port, 16GB of storage, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, an HD webcam, an SD card slot and a battery that promises up to 9.5 hours of continuous use. If you decide to buy one, it comes with 100GB of Google Drive for free for two years. The HP Chromebook 14 is priced at around $299.99 to start, and should be available for purchase before the holiday season. To get a closer look at the candy-colored laptops, have a peek at the gallery or hit the video after the break.
New Acer Chromebook with Haswell hands-on (video)
One of the first Chromebooks to come blessed with Intel's Haswell processor is the new Acer Chromebook, and we had a chance to get a closer look at it today. If not for the "new" moniker that Acer has so kindly bestowed on it, at first glance you'd be hard-pressed to find much different in comparison to its C7 predecessor. Get closer however, and you'll notice it's lighter and slimmer, measuring around 0.75 inch thin and weighing in at about 2.76 pounds. The new Acer Chromebook also has much better battery life, boasting up to 8.5 hours of continuous use from a non-removable cell this time around. It also sports an HDMI port, two USB ports (one 3.0), a standard headphone jack and an SD card slot on the sides. The 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 resolution display is a little on the small side, but still looks crisp and colorful enough to our eyes. The raised chiclet keyboard feels tactile and comfortable to use, and Acer wisely chose to adhere to the standard Chromebook keyboard layout instead of recycling a PC layout like on the C7. While we don't know its price just yet, we do know that you'll get 100GB of Google Drive storage free for two years with every purchase. Sadly, we don't have much more information about the new Acer Chromebook to share with you, but we'll be sure to update this post once we do. In the meantime, have a peek at the hands-on gallery and video after the break.
Alienware brings Ivy Bridge-E to its Aurora gaming desktops
Here's a nice update for those of you who like your high-performance gaming rigs coupled with tiny glowing extraterrestrial heads. Alienware today let it be known that it'll be upgrading its Aurora line with new processors. The flagship desktop is getting those new Ivy Bridge-E chips, letting users configure their machines with up to six cores and a 15MB of cache, bringing overclocking speeds of up to 4.3GHz. Also new for this week's Intel Developer Forum are NVIDIA GeForce 700 AMD 8900 series graphics options. The new configurations are available today through Dell's site, starting at $1,399.
Dell revives Venue brand with new line of Windows 8 tablets
Dell dropped a surprise here at the Intel Developer Forum when Neil Hand, VP of tablets and performance PCs, announced that it's reviving its Venue brand with a new line of Windows 8 tablets. The company last used the branding almost a year ago with the less-than-successful Venue and Venue Pro handsets -- the Venue ran Android while the Venue Pro used Windows Phone 7. Hand was on stage during today's IDF keynote showing off what appears to be an 8-inch slate running the latest Windows 8.1 firmware on Intel's recently announced Atom Z3000 processor. Not much else was unveiled about the hardware, but Hand did drop a hint that it plans to host a Venue-specific event on October 2nd in New York City that will hopefully reveal more information.
HP, Acer, ASUS and Toshiba all announce new Haswell Chromebooks; HP model arriving in the holiday season for $300
Intel has just announced a new line of Chromebooks that run on Haswell. Chromebooks have previously run lower-powered processors like ARM and Atom, though the Pixel did break the mold by running on a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Core i5. Upcoming Haswell Chromebooks include new iterations from Acer and HP, along with Chrome OS newbies ASUS and Toshiba. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome and Android, came on stage to say that Haswell will offer superb battery life without compromising performance. At first glance, the Acer Chromebook on stage is a slim and light affair, while the HP model sports a larger display. Intel even showed off a special ASUS Chromebox that serves to be an extremely lightweight PC. As you might expect, there's no announcement of pricing or availability just yet, though we did hear we'll see them "over the coming months." Update: The New Acer Chromebook and the HP Chromebook 14 pages are now live. So far, we have the most details about the Chromebook 14, which will arrive sometime this holiday shopping season for $300. It will have a 14-inch, 1,366 x 768 display and 16GB of built-in storage with HDMI, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports. Unusually, too, it will be available in an array of punch colors, including "Snow White," "Ocean Turquoise" and "Coral Peach." Find the full press release embedded below.
GestureWorks Gameplay adds onscreen controls to almost any Windows 8 game
GestureWorks is smearing the lines between PC and tablet gaming with its Windows 8 app, Gameplay. The application lets you custom-design gestures and virtual buttons for most games, and place them wherever you see fit. It probably works fine with Castle Crashers' simplistic mayhem (pictured above), but we aren't so sure we'd want to explore Skyrim without a mouse and keyboard. Regardless, maybe now you can give those Steam sale impulse buys a whirl while you're on the go.
Intel announces Quark system on a chip, the company's smallest to date
The hits keep coming from IDF. After showing off svelte new 14nm silicon built for laptops, CEO Brian Krzanich announced a brand new SoC series named Quark. It's the smallest SoC the company has ever built, with processor cores one-fifth the size of Atom's, and is built upon an open architecture meant so spur its use. Early on in his keynote, Krzanich said that Intel plans to "lead in every segment of computing," and Quark is positioned to put Intel in wearables -- and, in fact, he even showed off a prototype smartwatch platform Intel constructed to help drive wearable development. And, Intel President Renee James pointed out that Quark's designed for use in integrated systems, so we'll be seeing Quark in healthcare and municipal use cases, too. Unfortunately, no details about the new SoC's capabilities or specs are yet available, but we can give you some shots of Intel's wearable wristband prototype in our gallery below.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shows working 14nm SoC laptop, announces sub $100 tablets at IDF 2013
Many eyes may be shifted south of San Francisco to a shindig in Cupertino, but Intel's making some waves in the city. Just now onstage at IDF 2013, CEO Brian Krzanich showed off a functioning laptop running on a 14nm Broadwell Intel SoC. Naturally, Krzanich didn't deal any other details about the laptop, but did say that we'd see those tiny chips ship by the end of this year. And, following that little nugget, Chipzilla announced that there will be tablets packing Intel silicon being sold for less than $100 this holiday season. Who will build these bargain slates? Krzanich isn't telling, but we'll do our best to find out, and we'll let you know as soon as we do.
Intel teases MXC: a 1.6Tbps optical interconnect for servers
While we think of optical connections as cutting edge, they're positively decrepit in server rooms; current fiber interconnect technology got its start in the 1980s. Intel may soon drag servers into the modern era with its just-teased MXC format, however. The standard (not pictured here) will combine both silicon photonics and a new form of Corning fiber to link servers at 1.6Tbps -- more than quick enough to eliminate many data bottlenecks. The connectors themselves are smaller, too. Intel won't say more about MXC until the Intel Developer Forum next month in San Francisco, but we already suspect that supercomputer operators will be happy with all that extra bandwidth.
Hands-on redux: Creative's Interactive Gesture Camera at IDF 2013 Beijing (video)
At IDF 2013 in Beijing, Intel is again making a big push for perceptual computing by way of voice recognition, gesture control, face recognition and more, and to complement its free SDK for these functions, Intel's been offering developers a Creative Interactive Gesture Camera for $149 on its website since November. For those who missed it last time, this time-of-flight depth camera is very much just a smaller cousin of Microsoft's Kinect sensor, but with the main difference being this one is designed for a closer proximity and can therefore also pick up the movement of each finger. We had a go on Creative's camera with some fun demos -- including a quick level of gesture-based Portal 2 made with Intel's SDK -- and found it to be surprisingly sensitive, but we have a feeling that it would've been more fun if the camera was paired up with a larger display. Intel said Creative will be commercially launching this kit at some point in the second half of this year, and eventually the same technology may even be embedded in monitors or laptops (remember Toshiba's laptops with Cell-based gesture control?). Until then, you can entertain yourselves with our new hands-on video after the break. %Gallery-185293%
China UnionPay and Intel join forces for secure mobile payment
At IDF's second-day keynote in Beijing today, Intel announced its collaboration with bank card giant China UnionPay for secure mobile payment, with the latter utilizing Intel's Identity Protection Technology and also its distribution of the Hadoop software framework for datacenters. With UnionPay being China's top bank card organization boasting a total of 3.5 billion cards to date, this is obviously a big deal for Intel both locally and around the world -- at least in the 141 countries and regions where UnionPay is accepted, according to Executive Vice President Chai Hongfeng. Chai also used his stage time to show off UnionPay Quick Pass, China's very own NFC payment service with over 1.1 million local POS terminals as of December 2012. The exec used none other than Intel's developer device to buy its Corporate Vice President Doug Fisher a can of "Mountain Doug" (we would've preferred "Chai Tea" instead), but of course, HTC beat Intel to it with the joint launch of mobile Quick Pass back in August 2011. Anyhow, there's a press release after the break.
ZTE Geek unveiled with 2GHz Intel Clover Trail+ and a terrible name (video)
Oh ZTE you cheeky monkey. Towards the end of day one at IDF in Beijing, we stumbled upon this awkwardly titled Android Jelly Bean phone that is the Geek at ZTE's booth. Needless to say, this is yet another phone powered by an Intel processor -- a 2GHz Clover Trail+ Atom to be exact, which is what Lenovo's K900 also has. The rest of the device isn't too shabby, either: you get a nice 5-inch 720p display with Gorilla Glass, along with an 8-megapixel main camera, a 1-megapixel front-facing camera, 8GB of storage space, 1GB of RAM, 2,300mAh battery and wireless charging. Radio-wise we see UMTS 900/2100 courtesy of Intel's XMM 6260 chip, and there's also the usual lot of 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and GPS. Design-wise the Geek takes a huge step away from the Grand X IN and shares a similarly clean look with the Grand S, but without the black eye around the main camera. This particular unit had a glossy white finish as well, but we'd prefer a matte finish for a more premium feel. Since ZTE admitted that it had to rush this prototype for exhibition at IDF, we'll come back to the build quality once we see a final retail unit. Until then, check out our hands-on video and the press release after the break. %Gallery-185196%
Intel introduces next-gen Xeon E7, E5 and E3 families for enterprise space
Truth be told, not much has been announced on the consumer end at IDF Beijing earlier today, but Intel did tease us with upcoming refreshes of its Xeon E7, E5 and E3 families for the enterprise space. In chronological order we have the Haswell-based E3 with TDP as low as 13W, and it's coming in mid-2013. This is followed by the "Ivy Bridge-EP" E5 in Q3 and then the "Ivy Bridge-EX" E7 series in Q4, the latter of which boasting three times the memory capacity of its predecessor, along with Intel's Run Sure reliability feature. More details in the press release after the break if you're into these flavors of chips. Also mentioned at the keynote were the now-available Atom S12x9 family for storage systems, as well as a couple of upcoming 22nm 64-bit Atom SoCs codenamed "Avoton" and "Rangeley," both of which are sampling now and are expected to launch in the second half of this year. We've actually already heard of the microserver-friendly Avoton from Facebook's Open Compute Project, whereas Rangeley for network infrastructures was also detailed around the same time; so again, hit up the press release for more details. %Gallery-185168%
Toshiba's Portege Z10t detachable Ultrabook debuts at IDF (hands-on)
Right after Intel's somewhat mundane announcement of the Ultrabook Convertible and Ultrabook Detachable sub-brands at IDF in Beijing, SVP Kirk Skaugen surprised us by whipping out an unnamed laptop coming from Toshiba, so we jumped onto the stage to get a sniff of the only two units at the venue. Judging by the looks of it, we're confident that this is actually the Portege Z10t that hit the FCC last month -- the vents, camera and logo on the back match those in the drawing (embedded after the break) filed in the application.
