The Toshiba Libretto W100 was launched as part of the company’s 25th anniversary celebrations – its first laptop, the Toshiba T1100 was launched back in 1985 – with the company’s Phil Osaki quoted by VentureBeat as stating that the company is aiming for the back-to-school season in the US.

Described as still “in development” over on Sony’s official blog, the un-named device will feature interchangeable lenses just like its still variant cousins – with promised support for both the Sony E-mount lenses used by the NEX 3 and NEX 5 and the A-mount lenses used by Sony’s range of Alpha digital SLR cameras, albeit via an adaptor.

Full details of the device are still held closely under wraps by Sony, but using the specifications of the NEX series as a base it can be expected that the camera will record to MemoryStick or SDHC card in the AVHCD format in – most likely – a full 1080p high-definition resolution at an expected 30 frames per second.

The use of interchangeable lenses will offer videographers a wealth of options for changing the capabilities of the camera, with options including macro, wide-angle, and telephoto lenses – and with the pre-existing A-mount lenses as options, the camera will enjoy a wide selection from launch.

Sadly, Sony has yet to announce a firm release date – or, indeed, pricing – for the camera, beyond a vague commitment to an official launch some time in Autumn.

As first reported over on HardOCP, some of Newegg’s customers reported receipt of apparently fake versions of Intel i7-920 CPU retail boxes – containing mock CPU, heatsink, and blank documentation.

With a YouTube unboxing video showing the external realism, it’s not hard to see how the issue wasn’t spotted until customers started to unbox the fakes: from the outside, the only apparent issue is a few grammatical and spelling errors on the English blurb. Once the package is unboxed, however, the problem becomes apparent: a solid, fake heatsink; a blank instruction manual; and a non-functional, slightly curved processor.

While many are seeing this as a case of fake processors being snuck into Newegg’s supply chain, the official line from the company – as reported over on TechPowerup is that the fake retail boxes aren’t intended to be malicious. Instead, the retailer has claimed on its Twitter page that the fakes are “demo boxes” which were mistakenly shipped to customers by “one of our long-term partners.”

Whether the claim of demo boxes is anything other than face-saving by the retailer, the fact that the company has “already begun proactively reaching out to the affected customers” and ensuring that their purchases are replaced with fully functional units will come as a reassurance to Newegg’s customers.

Still, it does raise the question of how exactly the mix-up occurred: if the items are, as the company claims, demo boxes – why the effort to make them look as realistic as they do, complete with fake heatsink and blank manual? If the boxes are, as many instead believe, counterfeits – how did they enter Newegg’s supply chain and make it as far as being shipped to customers? So far, the company is remaining silent as to the long-term effects this issue could have on customer confidence.

Launching first in Korea – to be followed by a US and European release towards the end of May – the LX9500 is designed to appeal to the top end of the home entertainment market, featuring energy-efficient LED backlighting to achieve an impressive 10,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio and a 480Hz picture engine.

The real killer feature is, of course, the 3D: powered by active shutter glasses, LG claims that the immersion offered by the LX9500 will “set
a higher benchmark in the global 3D TV industry.”
The glasses themselves – which produce the 3D effect by alternating which eye is able to see the picture at any given moment – are described as “comfortable to wear for an extended period of time” and last up to forty hours between charges.

LG is hoping to secure itself a chunk of the market with this and its other 3D TVs, stating that it is aiming for a 25 share by the end of the year.

With an impressively slim body at just 22.3mm and a 16mm bezel, the LX9500 is certainly an impressive beast, but it’s going to take personal
experience of the effect before people are likely to be convinced by the potential comfortable to wear for an extended period of timeof 3D TVs in general – not to mention the availability of suitable content.

Although Intel had previously promised that Larrabee-based products would be launching in the first quarter of 2010, the company has chosen to make a rather late announcement that it wasn’t being exactly honest with that launch date. As reported by PC Magazine, company spokesman Nick Knupffer admits that “Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,” and states that “as a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product, but rather be used as a software development platform for internal and external use.”

While Larrabee’s innovative architecture promised a different way of looking at the process of rendering graphics – described by Intel chief executive officer Paul Otellini back in 2007 as “a highly parallel, many core product comprised of an array of Intel architecture cores” promising” “teraflops of performance” – the truth of where the product was came out at IDF back in September, almost two years after Larrabee’s original announcement, when a demonstration by senior research scientist Bill Mark used a Larrabee prototype to run the real-time ray-traced Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demonstration incredibly slowly. Interestingly, despite the embarrassing demonstration, Intel was still claiming at that time that the first Larrabee product would be “discrete performance graphics” boards – not an SDK.

While the news that 2010 will only be seeing an software development platform for Larrabee will be a blow for Intel, the company hasn’t completely given up on the idea of launching its own discrete graphics processor to compete with rival AMD and Nvidia – but it’s likely to be 2011 at the earliest.

The first is an article about the agreement ‘twix AMD and Intel over the latter’s allegedly anticompetitive behaviour, written back in November of last year.

As reported over on Wired, the two companies have agreed to settle their disputes – and it’s an agreement which sees AMD compensated for Intel’s past misdeeds.

Under the terms of the agreement, Intel is to pay rival AMD a whopping $1.25 billion (£754 million) in a five-year cross-licensing agreement which sees Intel compensating its rival for allegedly working to exclude it from the marketplace. In turn, AMD is to drop all pending lawsuits across the globe and withdraw all complaints it has made to regulatory bodies regarding Intel’s behaviour.

In a remarkably understated joint statement, the two companies claim that “while the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.”

The agreement finally settles the bad feeling between the two companies which has been ongoing since 2005, and will allow the two companies to concentrate on producing neat new products rather than attempting to litigate each other into submission.

The deal is certainly a welcome one for AMD, which has seen its share price increase by more than 30 percent on the news and should help to get the company get back on track in the processors marketplace.

If a leaked slide from a presentation authored by Sun Microsystems is to be believed, Intel is planning on launching a six-core processor aimed at the server market.

Although the Intel Dunnington has been rumoured for quite some time, the slide is the first evidence that Intel is planning to ditch its usual ‘cheat’ of putting multiple chips in a single package and is instead aiming for a true six-core single-chip processor.

The slide shows a six-core chip with each core paired up with a buddy to share a 3M chunk of level 2 cache for a total of 9M of L2 cache along with a whopping 16MB L3 cache shared between all three pairs. If the figures are right, that’s one heck of a lot of cache RAM and will certainly help to alleviate any nasty bottlenecks lurking around the yet-to-be-finalised Dunnington front-side bus.

The cores themselves are based on the Penryn architecture and will be built around a 45nm process to keep heat production to a minimum. The thermal profile is a fairly respectable 130W, which might seem a lot from a desktop perspective – after all, the ‘energy efficient’ models of Core 2 Quads come in at under 100W – but is pretty impressive for something that can replace six discreet processors.

The slide features an Intel Xeon logo, suggesting that the chip will be marketed under the same moniker as Intel’s existing server chip products. The launch date is given as some time in the second half of 2008, so we don’t have too long to wait to see if the rumours are true.