Dell's ultra-thin LCD concept with DisplayPort going retail?

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Displays

Remember that super swanky Dell monitor concept we went ga ga over back at January's CES? Yeah, we still find it hard to believe it's a Dell design. Well, it'll apparently be up for sale later in the year. What's more, it features the new VESA approved DisplayPort 1.1 interface which allows Dell to keep the panel depth to a crazy thin 0.5-inches. Although DisplayPort is said to support a resolution 4x that of today's HDTV resolutions, the panel on this pup was only pumping an estimated 1920 x 1200 when we saw it. No specs or price but we expect good things given Dell's past performance in delivering top-notch displays on the cheap.

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Researchers tout better, brighter LEDs

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Displays

A pair of researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science seem to think they're well on their way to building a better LED -- one that's not only brighter than existing LEDs, but more energy efficient and less expensive to boot. According to Physorg, the team's biggest success so far is red phosphorescent LED (or PLED) that delivered a record-breaking 18 lumens per watt (compared to an average of 12 lumens per watt with current red LEDs). The key to that, it seems, was to simplify the LED as much as possible, which they did by adding a polymer powder and liquid mixture to a "previously top-secret material" developed by Canon. The resulting "paint-like product" was then used to coat a layer of glass, with a charge then added to get the whole thing going. From the sound of it, these new wonder LEDs should be making their way into consumer products sooner rather than later, with Canon (naturally) reportedly already having licensed the technology and the first commercial products expected in "about three years."

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AppleTV hacked to run Xgrid

from Engadget by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Desktops, Home Entertainment

It's no secret that the Apple TV is just a stripped-down Intel Mac running a lightly-tweaked version of OS X, so simply getting an app to run on the system isn't really a big deal -- we've seen full installs of OS X running on the device at this point. On the other hand, if you're just using the Apple TV as a media extender, that processor is just sitting there wasting spare cycles when you're not using the device, so this little hack to run Apple's Xgrid distributed-computing client on an Apple TV seems pretty slick. The hack is pretty simple if you've already poked around inside your AppleTV -- it mostly involves copying over the Xgrid Agent and configuring a few preference files. After that, your Apple TV's spare horsepower will be available to your network's Xgrid Controller, but you won't have disturbed the functionality of the device at all. Just the thing to speed up those VisualHub video transcoding sessions, eh? Now, if only someone would wedge the Folding@home client into this thing (hint, hint).

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8-core NextDimension PC stretches the definition of portable

from Engadget by Conrad Quilty-Harper

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

No, the laptop industry hasn't bypassed the idea of quad-core laptops in favour of octo-core machines, since NextComputing's 8-core flextops are machines you wouldn't want anywhere near your lap. Based as they are around the Intel Xeon 5300 processor, the NextDimension Pro and Evo can take advantage of the relatively low power requirements of 100W for two quad-core CPUs (down from 160 Watts for its power hungrier desktop equivalent). For a sense of just how expandable the NextDimension machines are, consider that they can hold up to twelve 160GB 2.5-inch 7200RPM hard disk drives. They also manage to pack in four PCI / PCI-e slots in the Evo model, and Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, and support for 24GB of memory through four DMA channels on both models. These 20-pound desktop machines with a handle will be shown off at Interop Las Vegas later this month, but beyond that we're not sure when or for how much you'll be able to lug one away.

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Toshiba's NC-MR technology could boost HDD capacity 'tenfold'

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Just days after Fujitsu tooted its own horn and suggested that it could increase hard drive capacity by 500-percent in a mere two years comes word that Toshiba coincidentally has a similarly grandiose claim. Aside from the obvious leapfrog game that's being played here, Tosh has apparently been working hand-in-hand with Tohoku University to develop "a phenomenon" dubbed Nanocontact Magnetic Resistance, or NC-MR, in which an "enormous difference in magnetoresistance is achieved when two magnetic materials are situated close together and connected by a contact point that narrows to around 1-nanometer." Put simply, the prototype NC-MR structure is twice as large as today's read heads, and elements based on the NC-MR structure would have a "lower resistance than existing TMR elements, enabling the read heads to be miniaturized and still operate quickly." Of course, these sensational claims have yet to make it beyond the drawing board, and while you may be anxious to get one of these in your rig, you'll be waiting about five years or so if things continue as planned. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]

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