intel posts

When Dell and its Alienware unit announced the Alienware M11x gaming laptop at CES last month we were genually thrilled. The promise of a small-ish laptop (11 inch display and 4.5 pounds) that could run even high end PC games well would seem to be the Holy Grail. Now comes word that the product is available for sale at Dell's online store.

The starting price for the product is $799. That gets you a PC with a Intel Pentium SU4100 at 1.3GHz and a 2MB Cache, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M grahics card with 1 GB of RAM, 2 GB of RAM memory and 160 GB of hard drive space. You can choose to upgrade the processor, memory, hard drive and a few other features but that will increase the price, of course. At the moment it looks like Dell is prepping to ship the first Alienware M11x out the door in the first week of March. We may have to see if we can get our hands on this puppy.

[Via Engadget]

Valve's Steam service allows them to (with permission) look at the hardware specs of their user's PC rig. The latest such survey for the month of December 2009 is now out and gives a solid view of what PC gamers have inside their machines.

The latest results are not exactly suprising with Intel still leading over AMD in terms of processors with just over 69 percent and Nvidia is still king of the dedidcated graphics kingdom with 63.46 percent. Windows XP is still the OS that gets the most use with 44.77 percent of Steam users. Windows 7 in only installed in 7.45 percent of Steam users' PCs. Ironically the 64 bit version of Windows 7 is in more systems with 15.61percent.

Some of you may remember that a DIY maker created a minor internet sensation by making a first person shooter controller that projected the actual game on the wall while you fired the weapon. Now it looks lime projector maker Microvision is creating a more refined version of this concept.

Using their PicoP display engine, the prototype FPS controller is being shown this weekend in Edmonton, Alberta in the Intel Extreme Masters PC gaming tournament. As you can see from the above video the game is projected from the gun-shaped controller with the image up to 200 inches in size. So far there's no word on when this prototype will be turned into a real product.

Late last week Intel announced that it was canceling plans to release a commercial graphic card and chip based on their Larrabee technology. One of the reasons this news was game related was the speculation surrounding Project Offset, a fantasy FPS under stealth development for some time at Offset Software. Intel bought the dev team back in February 2008 and many speculated that the game would be used by Intel as a way to show off what a Larrabee graphics chip could do for game development and performance.

So with this new Larrabee development, where does Project Offset now stand? Big Download contacted Intel and one of their reps responded back with a brief statement, saying only, "Expect an update in 2010 regarding Offset. " Hopefully that means the project isn't canceled.

For the past few years PC processor maker Intel has been preparing a high-end graphics chip code named "Larrabee" that it hoped would be used for, among other things, high performance in PC games. Now it looks like those plans have been shut down, most likely for good. As reported by VentureBeat, Intel has now admitted it has canceled plans for a consumer product based on the Larrabee design. Intel still plans to release a stand alone graphic chip product and it says it will reveal more about its plans in that area in 2010.

While Intel stated that Larrabee will still live on as a software development platform, it's clear that its plans to go up against Nvidia and AMD on high-end PC gaming graphics have suffered a major blow. Intel has also been developing a game under the code name of Project Offset. While its development has been in stealth mode for most of its life, some have speculated the game's development was being used to help market the Larrabee graphics chip. It's currently unknown what the current status of Project Offset is.

While certain upcoming military shooters have yet to reveal if they will have any mod tools, Codemasters' recently released Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising game has a full mission editor for anyone to make their own maps and missions in the game. Now PC processor maker Intel will be rewarding folks who come up with the best missions for the game in a new contest.

People who own the game can use the mission editor to submitted their creations to the contest (they have to have, among other things, an Intel i7 processor as one of the mission's objectives). Deadline for entries is November 29. After the top 12 are decided by the game's community via their votes, the winners will be determined by a jury of people from Codemasters, Intel and others. The people who create the top two missions will each receive a gaming PC valued at over $2,000.

The idea of the living room PC where people can play PC games on their big screen televisions is a dream that's been around for a long time. However it's never really gotten mainstream traction. Now PC processor maker Intel is using its big investment mucles to a new effort called GameTree.TV, a games-on-demand project from company TransGaming.

You may have heard of TransGaming. They have created software to allow a number of PC games to run natively on Macs and Linux boxes. Now they are working on this new effort which will use a set-top box (powered by Intel's CE Media Processor) to allow PC games to be downloaded and played on demand for a person's TV. Specific financial details on Intel's investment in GameTree.TV were not disclosed. TransGaming hopes to launch GameTree.TV sometime in the second quarter of 2010.

PC maker Dell bought Miami-based gaming PC company Alienware back in 2006 and since the Alienware brand has continued to be used by Dell as their main brand to sell PCs to hardcore gamers. Today at the Tokyo Game Show, Alienware has revamped almost their entire line of PCs with four all new desktop models (such as the new Aurora model above) as well as a 15 inch version of their high powered gaming laptop.

One of the most interesting things about these new products is what's not inside them. In a phone briefing to Big Download earlier this week, Alienware confirmed that their current product line that is announced today will not have any AMD processors. Alienware simply feels that Intel's current line-up of Core i7 processors outperform AMD's current line up. Alienware will still give gamers options to put in AMD's ATI Radeon graphics chips.

Check out Alienware's new products after the jump:

While AMD is launching their DirectX11 graphics chip today (and we presume Nvidia has plans of their own for new products) Intel has been working on their own dedicated PC graphics chip which has gone under the code name or Larrabee. This week the company showed off the first public demo of their technology at their Intel Developer Forum.

As you can see from the brief video above, Intel choose to use a modified version of a PC game to demonstrate their chip's support for ray tracing. The game is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Intel actually took all of the content in the game and put it into its ray tracing tech to run on Larrabee. The result shows a more realistic looking level landscape along with some spectacular water textures. Larrabee is not expected to be released by Intel until sometime in 2010.

In less than two months, Microsoft plans to launch Windows 7. The next version of their PC OS has already been praised for months for being more stable and having better performance than its predecessor Windows Vista, which pretty much belly flopped when it was released just under three years ago.

Many PC games have felt that the poor reception of Windows Vista has affected PC games and their development so obviously they feel the launch of Windows 7 (and its support for DirectX11, the next version of Microsoft's game graphics tech) could help the PC gaming industry. But just what do PC gamers currently have in their rigs, just before the launch of Windows 7? Valve's hardware survey on Steam is always a good baseline to use and they have just released their latest info on the subject for August 2009. We've decided to take a look at some of the more interesting stats in the survey; you can check out the entire survey numbers on the Steam web site.

Click on the image above to continue reading how Steam's survey shows us the state of PC gaming rigs before Windows 7's release