It’s that time of year again: Lenovo whips out some impossibly thin and light laptop. Last CES it was a 1.7-pound notebook , and this year it’s the Yoga 900s, a half-inch-thick, 2.2-pound machine that Lenovo claims is the world’s thinnest convertible laptop. Indeed, I had a chance to handle it in person and it really is absurdly, impressively thin and light. (I know, we always say that. But still.) Before you get too excited, though, it appears that the 12-inch Yoga 900s is the spiritual successor to a machine that … we didn’t like very much. That would be last year’s Yoga 3 Pro , a super-slim model that ultimately got a lukewarm review on account of its sluggish performance and mediocre battery life. The new Yoga 900s is even thinner and lighter, but it too runs on Intel’s watered-down Core M processors, which makes me think the performance isn’t going to be better. Lenovo says the battery life will be longer (up to 10.5 hours), but that appears to be with a lower-resolution screen, not the QHD (2, 560 x 1, 440) option. One thing you’ll get here that you won’t on the Yoga 3 Pro: active pen support. That’s something you won’t even get on the recent Yoga 900 , Lenovo’s similar but higher-performing flagship machine. If you can do without the pen support, though, and don’t mind a little extra heft, you’ll get better performance from the current Yoga 900. Undeterred? The 900s lands in March for $1, 099 and up. That’s not the only impressively thin and light machine that Lenovo unveiled today. The company also took the wraps off a more mid-range notebook called the 710s, which keeps its weight (and price) down by forgoing a touchscreen. All told, the 13.3-inch system comes in at 2.6 pounds and half an inch thick. And though it tops out at a fairly middling 1080p screen resolution, it makes up for it with up to a sixth-gen Core i7 processor, Intel Iris graphics and a PCIe SSD. Expect that to ship in July (just in time for back-to-school season), priced from $799. I saved the least interesting for last. In addition to those two skinny laptops, Lenovo also announced the Ideapad 700, a beefier machine with either a 15- or 17.3-inch 1080p screen and up to a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and optional discrete graphics (a 4GB NVIDIA X950M on the 15-incher and a 4GB X940M on the 17-inch version). Both are offered with up to 1TB in HDD or hybrid storage, or with a PCIe SSD (128GB or 256GB). As you’d expect for models this size, they’re not particularly light (5.1 and 5.9 pounds, respectively) and the battery life is relatively short: up to four hours. Look for those in June, starting at $799.
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Lenovo says the Yoga 900s is the world’s thinnest convertible
jjslash writes: For a few years now, Intel CPU overclocking has been limited to more expensive Core i5 and Core i7 ‘K’ processors. Skylake launched this year with the rumor of strong non-K processor overclocking through an adjustable base clock, but that never eventuated… until now. In overclocking circles it was rumored that BCLK (base clock) overclocking might become a possibility in Skylake processors, but it would be up to motherboard manufacturers to circumvent Intel’s restrictions. Asrock, Asus and a few other motherboard manufacturers are said to be issuing a BIOS update soon that will unlock base clock overclocking on Z170 motherboards. TechSpot has got an early look, overclocking a locked Core i3-6100 to 4.7GHz on air cooling. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
bigwophh writes: In Q4 2016, Intel will release a follow up to its Skylake processors named Kaby Lake, which will mark yet another 14nm release that’s a bit odd, for a couple of reasons. The big one is the fact that this chip mayn not have appeared had Intel’s schedule kept on track. Originally, Cannonlake was set to succeed Skylake, but Cannonlake will instead launch in 2017. That makes Kaby Lake neither a tick nor tock in Intel’s release cadence. When released, Kaby Lake will add native USB 3.1 and HDCP 2.2 support. It’s uncertain whether these chips will fit into current Z170-based motherboards, but considering the fact that there’s also a brand-new chipset on the way, we’re not too confident of it. However, the so-called Intel 200 series chipsets will be backwards-compatible with Skylake. It also appears that Intel will be releasing Apollo Lake as early as the late spring, which will replace Braswell, the lowest-powered chips Intel’s lineup destined for smartphones. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes: Intel is open-sourcing their work on creating a high-performance graphics software rasterizer that originally was developed for scientific visualizations. Intel is planning to integrate this new OpenSWR project with Mesa to deploy it on the Linux desktop as a faster software rasterizer than what’s currently available (LLVMpipe). OpenSWR should be ideal for cases where there isn’t a discrete GPU available or the drivers fail to function. This software rasterizer implements OpenGL 3.2 on Intel/AMD CPUs supporting AVX(2) (Sandy Bridge / Bulldozer and newer) while being 29~51x faster than LLVMpipe and the code is MIT licensed. The code prior to being integrated in Mesa is offered on GitHub. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have developed the first ever memory chip that’s entirely light-based and can store data permanently. Sciencemag reports: “Today’s electronic computer chips work at blazing speeds. But an alternate version that stores, manipulates, and moves data with photons of light instead of electrons would make today’s chips look like proverbial horses and buggies. Now, one team of researchers reports that it has created the first permanent optical memory on a chip, a critical step in that direction. If a more advanced photonic memory can be integrated with photonic logic and interconnections, the resulting chips have the potential to run at 50 to 100 times the speed of today’s computer processors.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 