Nehalem based Xeons on last day of March

Official launch on March 30th

Intel will officially launch the Nehalem generation of Xeons on the very last day of March. While it will show itself in Intel’s pricelist on March 28th, the official launch and availability is planned for the last day in Q1.

The new Xeon will also get a new logo, which is slightly different then the existing one, with a different colour scheme. We are not sure that many customers will be ready to swap their Penryn based servers for Nehalem based ones, mainly due to cost related issues, but we are quite sure that Nehalem based Xeons should end up much faster than Penryn 45nm based Xeons.

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Toshiba Satellite M645: The Steady March of Progress

Toshiba has spent the last half a decade carving out an interesting niche as a notebook manufacturer, with many consumer-grade notebooks that are ostensibly budget offerings but often feature a markedly different look and feel from the kinds of laptops vendors like Dell, HP, and Acer produce to serve this market segment. Oftentimes they can feel stylistically behind the curve, but every so often they produce a big winner as they did with their Portege R700 series.

Now, a trickle-down of style couples with modern hardware in a respectable new entrant in their venerable Satellite line: the M645. Our review unit features a shiny new Sandy Bridge mobile dual-core processor along with a healthy amount of memory, an Optimus-enabled NVIDIA GeForce 500M series GPU, and a Blu-ray combo drive, all in a reasonable 14-inch chassis. But it threatens to set you back a grand: is it worth it?

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