Smarter Geek

Intel and Dell have just shown off the new Atom based dual core (N550) networks with a horizontal swivelling screen that converts the laptop into a slate form factor.

The new Dual core Atom processor means that the device has much better performance and can handle play back of HD video without the battery drain.

This new design looks really great and make me wounder why no one thought of this before. Personally I think windows running on a device of this form factor is going to be fantastic and ideally suited for Windows based devices…. I can definitely see this replacing my iPad.

Check out the videos below:

Source Dell’s Atom-powered Inspiron Duo: 10-inch netbook / tablet hybrid with a crazy swivel and Dell Sparta Atom N550 convertible tablet at IDF 2010

In my previous post “Microsoft shows off IE9 hardware acceleration still trumps Chrome 7 performance” I showed you a video of the performance difference of IE9 to Chrome 7 with hardware acceleration turned on. Now Microsoft’s IE Blog has published an article explaining how implement “Full Hardware Acceleration” unlike the other browser makers.

“Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. “

Needless to say I am very excited to see what other surprise’s Microsoft may have when they reveal the beta version of IE9 on September 15th.

Source The Architecture of Full Hardware Acceleration of All Web Page Content – IEBlog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

During one of the final session of TechEd New Zealand 2010 Nigel Parker from Microsoft compared the performance difference of the latest build of IE9 to Chrome. This demonstration shows that the hardware acceleration in IE9 is still much faster than Chrome even when hardware acceleration was enabled in the latest Chrome Canary build.

For some time Mozilla and Google would tout that performance of their browsers JavaScript engines as compared to IE but now that the performance difference is almost negligible Microsoft has taken a huge lead in what the next big performance benchmark for browsers, HTML performance.