The machine in question, the Dell Precision T7500, has 12 memory slots supporting 1333MHz DDR3 RAM. How much would it cost to totally kit out your machine? 16GB 1333 MHz RAM costs $3,400, so to fill each of those slots would cost you $40,800. Not quite a bargain price but experts expect this price to go down over time as more and more people realize that you just can’t play the new Britney video on a machine with anything less than 128GB of RAM.

But what could be the reason for this delay? Well, remember yesterday when Intel announced its profits were down 90%? There’s a huge backlog of processors and motherboards that were supplied to meet a demand that never came. Intel is hoping some price cuts will help clear the warehouses. Also, the transition this year is from DDR2 to the faster DDR3, which is necessitating a new wave of DDR3-compatible motherboards. If Intel released the Lynnfield processors too early, they’d either need to make them compatible with DDR2 hardware or face slow sales because of low DD3 adoption numbers.

Either way, it dashes my hopes of getting a Nehalem-based MacBook Pro. Damn and blast!

• Dell has them in their XPS 730x starting today at $2K
• Alienware has them in the X-58 series starting at $1650 (or $3700, your choice)
• Gateway has them in the 6800 series starting at a suspiciously low $1250, considering how fancy the case is.

And of course they have all the other fixins as well.Keep in mind that Core i7 is not a magic bullet, though companies will try to tell you otherwise. It’s a fundamentally faster processor than the Core2, but a fast Core2 can still take on a slow Core i7, so check your hard hardware sites for the latest reviews before plunking down for a budget next-gen processor.

Lets look at the big picture here: MacWorld is in January, the Mac Pro’s are need for a CPU bump, and Intel is planning on releasing new Xeon server CPUs early next year. It sure looks good that the Mac Pro’s should receive a CPU upgrade soon but the question becomes, what CPU will Steve-O slap in the the Mac Pro? 

Chances are Apple will stick with the Xeon line up and the Core i7, or Nehalem, is the next logical step-up. Even though this upcoming CPU runs at comparable clock speeds as the current generation, benchmarks have soon a reasonable performance boost. Depending on the rest of MacWorld’s news, this might get pushed to a simple press release later on or it could be featured along with other Mac Pro upgrades – Blu-ray burner, anyone?

Check out the coverage at:
HardOCP
Tom’s Hardware
Anandtech
Tech Radar
Guru3D

Or your favorite hardware review site. I can’t wait to get one of these for my PC, and I’m hoping Apple is looking at making them available as well.

Basically, it means you’re going to be getting the most out of the silicon starting next month, or more likely early next year, since the ones coming out next month are super high-end, not really for end users like you and me. Still, it’s time to start checking under those cushions for spare nickels, because upgrade time cometh! [via Expreview and ZDNet]

Intel imagines a world with 15 Billion connected devices by 2015. As they see it, all that belongs to Atom, their mobile processor that already has over 700 design engagements. Stating that the “most profound technologies are the ones that disappear”, Pat Gelsinger Senior VP and GM of the Digital Enterprise Group for Intel set the tone for his IDF keynote speech with highlights from a future world of mobile computing.

Walking onto the stage through a mock front door, he demonstrated how embedded technology will integrate into our everyday lives. By demonstrating specific apps such as face recognition, a scene played out with the house welcoming him to the stage. In a humorous take on the ‘you got mail’ tagline, the ‘house’ offered that he had some two thousand audience members.

Further demonstrations highlighted how the Embedded Internet will eventually become ubiquitous. A BMW was on the stage to provide a demonstration of In-Vehicle Entertainment, with monitors installed in the head rests for back seat viewing. Using a 3D nav system from Planet 9 Studios, the audience was treated to a display showcasing how voice recognition could interact with the technology acting as a sort of virtual tour guide.

The next generation of Intel processors, Nehalem, features increased power management and improved virtualization. What they are calling Turbo Mode describes a process in which unused cores are detected and then turned off. Stemming from the simple concept of “shutting things off when they are not in use”, Turbo Mode distributes extra power to the cores that are in use. Calling the breakthrough “generational”, expect to see this utilized in future processors.

The commentary is all in French, but you can smell what Intel’s got cooking if you go through the slides here at Canard Plus. I assume you either want all the details or don’t care at all, so I’ll let you read them yourself.
Image credit: Canard Plus

The next round of Intel processors have officially been named Intel Core. The very next round of processors, previously codenamed Nehalem, will go by the name Intel Core i7. As always, model numbers will be used to differentiate the different chips.

Yes, there will still be an Extreme Edition, which is the one on the right up there. Useful, perhaps, for those of you trying to play Crysis at decent speeds.

These chips should go into production in the fourth quarter of this year, with up to four cores of processing goodness.

via Boing Boing Gadgets

In the tests they did, the Nehalems annihilated their Penryn Core2 Quad Q9450. Even at artificially limited clock speeds and lacking the optimizations surely forthcoming, it trashed Intel’s current flagship like it was nothing. Media encoding, memory access speeds, 2D and 3D graphical tasks, everything was improved by huge margins. I’m pumped for this. I may actually have to overhaul my system.