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HP Middle East has rolled out a new regional THink printing campaign aimed at small business users, to tie in with an expansion of its OfficeJet colour inkjet printer family. The widening of this product line includes the launch of what HP claims is the world’s fastest desktop all-in-one machine for small businesses and new high-capacity Vivera ink cartridges.

HP’s new printers include three new high-performance Officejet Pro ‘all-in-ones’ (or ‘multifunction’ printers), three new HP Officejet Pro single-function printers and a new low-cost Officejet All-in-One.

On the inkjet consumable front meanwhile, HP has unveiled a new range of high-capacity (high yield) HP Vivera ink cartridges, including the cost-focused HP 88XL.

“HP will continue to deliver faster speeds and greater affordability while meeting the colour printing needs of a demanding business environment,” said Amr Hassan, the general manager of HP Middle East’s imaging and printing group, HP Middle East. “Today’s introduction of the HP Officejet Pro All-in-Ones represents another milestone for HP’s high-performance inkjet systems, allowing us to provide small businesses with new colour printing choices that are faster and 25% cheaper than low-end laser printers.”

HP’s new Officejet Pro printers include the L7000 all-in-one, which HP claims can print professional documents at laser quality speeds of up to 12 pages per minute (ppm) black and 10ppm colour. The firm also believes this $313 release results in cost per page savings of up to 25% over comparable laser machines.

HP’s Officejet Pro K5400 printer series meanwhile delivers laser-like quick print speeds, similar quoted cost per page savings and costs from $190.

HP’s new Vivera ink range meanwhile has been optimised for plain paper office printing and designed to work best with HP’s Everyday Papers with ColorLok technology, specified exactly for office use.

Interested readers can check out HP’s related webpage over at www.hp.com/go/pageyield. For a limited time period, the HP Officejet Pro L7000 all-in-one printer series and the HP Officejet Pro K5400 printer series come with a free-of-charge warranties of three years (instead of the usual one).

Photography firm Nikon has updated its entry-level digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera line with the launch of its new D40x.

The camera usurps the D40, released in November 2006, as this firm’s top entry-level model. Compared to its predecessor, the newer D40x offers a 10 megapixel Charged Coupled Device (CCD) (rather than with only a 6.1 megapixel model).

Other differences include an increased burst mode of 3fps compared to 2.5fps, and a lower ISO setting of 100 (versus 200 on the D40). A low ISO setting enables a camera to capture photos with very little noise.

Besides these differences the two cameras are alike in that both use Secure Digital (SD) memory, make use of Nikon’s own 3D Color Matrix Metering II image processing engine and support USB2.0.

The D40x, like its predecessor, is offered without a built-in focus motor so only Nikon’s own AF-S and AF-I lenses can be used for auto focusing. The camera is expected to retail for approximately US $799 with a free AF-S DX 18-55mm lens kit.

Information Technology giant HP has taken its first step into the consumer-tablet PC market with the launch of its new Pavilion tx1000 Entertainment Notebook PC.

“At HP we are continually striving to provide our customers with new, innovative PCs that allow integrated mobility, performance and technology features. The tx1000 tablet PC is the perfect convergence of these features with brilliant entertainment and multimedia applications,” explained Elena Danici, category manager for HP PSG Middle East’s consumer products.

Tablet PCs are essentially laptops that feature swivel-capable touch-screen LCDs. These screens can be used as normal laptop screen when working or viewing multimedia content and can also be turned around for close-quarters presentation use. Once folded flat, like a slate, a user can also use the supplied stylus with a tablet PC’s touch-screen, to jot down notes for example.

Up until the launch of the tx1000 yesterday, HP only produced tablet machines for business use, such as the tc4400. The tx1000 however integrates business-friendly features, such as a built-in biometric fingerprint scanner, along with consumer-friendly options such as a 1.3 megapixel webcam, wireless remote control and wireless LAN support. The PC also boasts a 12.1” LCD screen, weighs 1.9kg and ships with Windows Vista Home Premium edition.

The tx1000 is already on sale in stores around the Middle East with an asking price of US $1634. HP’s own extended warranty and service option - Care Pack - can be purchased as an extra for approximately $135.

TI has developed an ultra-low-voltage DC/DC booster chip that could lead to mobile phones and other electronic devices that never need recharging.

The TPS61200 step-up chip can work with input voltages as low as 0.3v at over 90 percent efficiency, TI claimed. That means it can run directly off low power energy sources such as fuel cells and solar panels, while still putting out a usable 3v to 5v.

It can also work the other way around if the input voltage goes too high - for example, during a start-up surge – by dropping it to the desired output level.

Current step-up converters need an input of at least 0.7v, said TI’s product line director Uwe Mengelkamp. That means they are OK for running 3v electronics off a single 1.2v NiCad battery, but not a single solar cell - solar cells are at their most efficient between 0.4v and 0.5v cell voltage.

The new chip will allow designers to incorporate solar cells and fuel/air cells – which work best at 0.4v to 0.6v - without having to put several in series to boost the voltage, Mengelkamp said. He added that cells in series need over-voltage protection circuitry, and can be damaged if one is blocked from the light or air but the others are not.

“Designers, including those in the portable medical, wireless and audio fields, are continuing to look at how to apply solar and fuel cell technology to extend battery life and differentiate their products,” he said. “It’s not certain what we will see first, but the ideas are endless.”

He said that a 25cm² solar cell (2in. square) could generate around 11mA in indoor daylight, and more in bright sunlight. That means a built-in solar charger in a device could fully charge a 600mA battery in 60 hours – that’s 10 daylight hours a day for six days.

Of course, there are potential drawbacks to the solar-powered phone or MP3 player. It will be harder to keep it hidden from thieves for a start, and we will kick ourselves if we leave it in a bag or pocket too long. Still, it could be a nice boost for the makers of transparent carry-cases. ®

SAN FRANCISCO–Intel on Wednesday confirmed plans to integrate critical system components and reintroduce hyperthreading technology in 2008, when it unveils a new chip blueprint.

In the past, Intel executives have spoken in broad terms about integrating components such as the memory controller and direct links between processor cores. But those technologies are on tap for Nehalem, the code name Intel has assigned to a chip family it will start producing in 2008, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, said during a briefing for reporters here.

“We view (Nehalem) as the first dynamically scalable microarchitecture,” Gelsinger said. What he means by that is that Intel chip designers will be able to pick and choose from a wide variety of ingredients to build chips for different types of computers, from powerful servers to small notebooks.

Chips based on Nehalem will have between one and eight cores, and will be capable of handling two independent software threads per core. Hyperthreading, Intel’s name for the concept, allows a processor to execute two different code streams at pretty much the same time. This was a feature found in Intel’s single-core Pentium 4 processors but largely discontinued with the advent of multicore chips.

Intel also plans to build chips with “point-to-point” links that directly connect processor cores with their neighbors, and install a fast link between the processor and memory with integrated memory controllers, Gelsinger said. Those were two design philosophies used by Advanced Micro Devices to break into the server market with its Opteron chip in 2003. Intel has thus far disdained those approaches.

Not every chip in the Nehalem family will come with all those features, but they will be available to Intel’s designers, Gelsinger said. Different customers require various types of products for their future PC and server designs, he said.

For example, Intel’s newest best friend, Apple, is pushing the chipmaker to develop chips with a lot of integrated pieces, including graphics controllers, Gelsinger said. Apple’s focus on industrial design means it’s looking at building ever-smaller systems, and integration is one way to accomplish that, he said.

But other customers building PCs for businesses or gaming have different requirements. And some server companies may want an eight-core processor capable of handling 16 threads, while others need a low-power chip for blade servers. “What used to be chipset variations with common cores will be standard chipsets with uncommon cores,” he said.

Intel will start producing Nehalem processors–the actual brand has yet to be revealed–in 2008 using its 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. But before then, it plans to introduce Penryn chips as the first processors to use that new manufacturing technology.

Penryn chips will come in several different core combinations, just like the current generation of Core chips. Desktops and servers will have their choice of dual-core or quad-core chips that will run faster than 3GHz, Gelsinger said. Notebook chips will continue to have two cores.

Intel anticipates that the Penryn chips will deliver a 20 percent boost in gaming performance over its current generation of Core 2 Duo processors, and a 45 percent improvement in the performance of media applications. The improvements come from new instructions, such as the SSE4 extensions to the x86 instruction set, as well as larger caches and faster front-side bus speeds.

 The age of multi-core is upon us, and the game of who has the highest clock speed has turned into who has the most cores (at least for now). Intel released Clovertown in Q4 of 2006, a bit ahead of its originally scheduled 2007 launch date. Obviously, the reason for the early launch was at least partially to ensure they were the first to market with quad core, ahead of rival AMD.

Clovertown is targeted at dual socket servers, typically in a 1-2U form factor. It launched with speeds up to 2.66 GHz, with 3.0 GHz on the horizon. Intel has also recently launched low voltage parts, which are rated at 50W and are clocked at 1.86 and 1.60 GHz.

So, what applications could benefit from eight cores? Today, the obvious choice is virtualization, although database servers, exchange servers, and compute clusters would also be good candidates. Virtualization is the primary target for Clovertown; a rack of ESX servers running on 2U Clovertown boxes would consolidate a significant amount of business applications in a relatively small foot-print.

Last year, at an IBM technical conference, one of their senior technical representatives said the following: “In the coming years, the operating systems we use today will be merely applications running in a single operating system”. Although you could say that’s true today, it’s only the beginning of what is going to be a complete shift in the traditional way we approach and think about “servers”. Virtualization is growing at an exponential rate, and the shift to multi-core is only going to accelerate that growth.

Although a significant portion of Clovertown systems will be deployed in virtualized environments, there will be some used in the more traditional single purpose server scenarios. However, there’s something to keep in mind if you plan to throw eight cores at your database server or any other server that is I/O intensive. You have now increased your processing power by at least two fold relative to a dual core configuration, and ensuring that your I/O subsystem is capable of keeping up with that extra processing power may be difficult. As you will read later in the article, we ran into significant issues with our test suite with eight cores and our I/O subsystem.