AMD Preparing ‘Ultrabook’ Competitor?

In an interview with The Australian [paywalled], AMD’s AMD Australia and New Zealand country manager Brian Slattery said that the company is preparing a “ultrathin” line of AMD powered laptop’s to compete with Intel’s ‘Ultrabooks’.
Mr. Slattery told The Australian that the computers could be available as early as January, but didn’t confirm a specific launch date. AMD has yet to formally announce a name; though rumor has it they may opt for the moniker ‘Ultrathins’.
Mr. Slattery did confirm to The Australian that AMD doesn’t plan on being “prescriptive” in defining exactly what an ‘Ultrathins” configuration would have to be. Intel, in contrast, states that ‘Ultrabooks’ must be clocked at a minimum speed, and have neither optical drive nor solid-state storage. AMD would instead produce chips with integrated Radeon graphics on the processor consistent with an ultra thin form factor.
More details on AMD’s planned ‘Ultrathin’ lineup are expected at CES in January.
AMD has not yet responded to Hardware Canucks’ request for comment.

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NVIDIA Giving Out Tons of Prizes in Holiday Sweepstakes

With Christmas fast approaching, our friends at NVIDIA want to Gear Up their fans that have helped grow their Facebook community by more than 400% this year. So, NVIDIA is announcing the “12 Days of Gear Up Giving” sweepstakes, where GeForce fans can win daily prizes including GeForce GTX GPUs and 3D Vision 2 kits.
The Gear Up prize for each day is determined by Fan Tiers. As new Fan Tiers are unlocked, the prize for that day will update to reflect the new tier that the community unlocked. The more fans NVIDIA gets, the better the prizing gets. Total prize giveaway is $5,000.
Tier 1 (2000 fan increase):  Choice of 3DV 2 Kit or GTX 550 Ti
Tier 2 (3000 fan increase):  GTX 560
Tier 3 (4000 fan increase):  GTX 560 SLI
Tier 4 (4500 fan increase):  3DV 2 Monitor & Glasses
Tier 5 (5500 fan increase):  GTX 580 SLI + x79 motherboard
To boost your chances of winning, invite your friends to become GeForce fans.  NVIDIA will reward you for every friend that you refer by giving you an extra entry into the sweepstakes. One lucky fan will be selected to win daily.
To enter head on over to the NVIDA Facebook page. Contest is open to residents of the United States and Canada. Contest closes December 23.

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Thecus Announces N4100EVO 4-bay NAS Powered by Cavium Dual-Core Processor

Thecus is well known in the market for always putting innovative hardware and state of the art technology on the table for a fair price in order to guarantee our customers the best value. Thecus’s new N4100EVO NAS offer a broad range of advanced features and differentiate themselves with low-energy hardware for those who place strong value on cutting down their electricity costs and carbon footprint. This cost-effective hardware is the first four-bay NAS on the market to feature the speedy and efficient dual-core Cavium CPU to get the quick transfer speeds necessary for large backups and heavy use. The N4100EVO is designed to change the way you run your office, at home or at work.
Dual Core CPU
The N4100EVO doesn’t bust your budget and still has plenty of power to throw around. It integrates a Cavium dual-core processor, making file sharing, web hosting, and even heavy data backups easy and fast. This four bay NAS will also have 2 USB 2.0 ports for easy data backup to and from external hard drives and an LCD screen for more convenient administration.
Hardware RAID and the Powerful XOR Engine
The XOR Engine makes the N4100EVO the first SMB/home NAS on the market to use dedicated hardware to lighten the load of building RAID and free up the CPU to keep your NAS running fast. The N4100EVO embeds a dedicated XOR engine in order to speed up all RAID 5 computations and minimize one of the main drawbacks of RAID protection: rebuilding time!
As the demand for storage capacity continues to grow, SMB/home users are requiring greater integration of storage into their environments,” said Florence Shih, Thecus Technology General Manager. “The N4100EVO is designed to deliver performance, features, and reliability at an affordable price to satisfy these needs.”
“Cavium is delighted to be working with Thecus in introducing the revolutionary 4-Bay NAS product to the market,” says Douglas Cheung, Director of Marketing for Consumer and Home Networking at Cavium. “Our ECONA family of dual-core System-On-Chips (SoCs) deliver best–in-class NAS performance with the lowest power consumption. N4100EVO leverages these attributes of ECONA SoC to deliver an energy efficient 4-bay solution without compromising the performance or cost targets.”

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