Dubbed as the "Single-chip Cloud Computer" (SCC), the 1.3-billion transistor processor one ups it's 80-core Polaris predecessor because it can run standard x86 software. So far, it has successfully booted Windows and Linux during demonstrations.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner explained what he envisions for the future of these superchips:

"The machine will be able of understanding the world around them much as humans do," Rattner said. "They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble humanlike capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability."

Speaking of powerful computing, this development comes only a couple of weeks after physicists demonstrated their first programmable quantum processor. [Intel via CNET]

Chips, Chipsets and Damned Chipsets

Okay, so the first thing to understand is that an Intel brand, like Core 2 or Core i7, actually refers to a whole bunch of different processors. Although they generally have the same basic microarchitecture (in other words, chip design), the brand envelopes both desktop and mobile chips, chips with radically different clock speeds, that use different motherboard sockets, etc.

Because of these differences, each particular chip is given a codename, chosen for obscure geographical locations (seriously, plug just about any codename into Google Maps). For instance, the original mobile Core 2 Duo processor was Merom, and it was replaced after about two years by Penryn, which was manufactured using a new 45-nanometer process to be more efficient. Quite different, these two, but Intel pimped both as Core 2 Duos nonetheless.

View Intel in a larger map
Although Intel doesn't market chips according to their codenames, the individual chip gets a model number that gives you an idea of how it compares, spec-wise (clock speed, cache size, etc.), to other chips in the same group. So, a Core i7-950 is gonna be faster than a Core i7-920, and a Core 2 Duo P8600 isn't going to quite stack up to a Core 2 Duo P9600. The difference between a P8400 and P8600 is obviously less than the difference between a P8600 and a P9600. To match a particular chip codename to a particular model number, though, you probably have to do some Googlin' (or Bingin').

In some cases, Intel pushes chips with a ULV designator for "ultra-low voltage," which doesn't mean anything in particular in terms of chip design, since it includes several brands of chips, from Core 2 to Celeron. The point is that these chips power notebooks that are almost as portable at netbooks, but are more expensive, so computer makers (and Intel) make more money.

While we're at it, I might as well explain what the hell Centrino is. It's not a single chip, it's a platform. That is, it's a combo meal for notebooks with a mobile processor, a chipset (essentially the silicon that lets the processor talk to the rest of the computer) and a wireless networking adapter. Typically, Intel releases a new combo meal every year, though they're all been called Centrino, with the most recent making the leap to being called Centrino 2.

The reason we decided to tell you all this stuff now is that Intel is gradually phasing out the Core 2 family, like Pentiums before that, and is moving Core i7, Core i5 and Core i3 up to take its place. This is how all the families relate to each other...

Nehalem Rising: Core i7, Core i5 and Core i3

Core i7 systems use a totally new microarchitecture called Nehalem, and it's badass.

The first set of Core i7 chips, codenamed Bloomfield, launched in November 2008 for high-end desktops. They're the most outrageously fast Core i7 chips, with triple-channel memory (meaning they're able to use memory sticks in triplets rather than pairs) and other blazing accoutrements.

The new Core i7 chips, launched last month, are for desktop and mobile. The desktop variant is codenamed Lynnfield, and it more closely resembles its mobile equivalent, codenamed Clarksfield, than it does the Bloomfield monster—dual-channel memory, not triple, for instance.

You'll be seeing a lot more Clarksfield in the next couple weeks, like in the HP Envy 15, since most computer makers were holding off for Windows 7 to drop their new laptops. All of the Core i7 processors are quad-core, even the mobile Clarksfield, so you're not gonna see it in anything like Dell's skinny Adamo.

Core i5 is going to be Intel's more mainstream Nehalem-microarchitecture chip brand, and as a broader brand, the chip differentiation gets a little more confusing. Core i5 actually includes some, but not all, of the desktop Lynnfield processors. For now, the only Core i5 chip is quad-core, but you're going to start seeing dual-core Core i5 chips, and soon enough they will make up the bulk of Intel's mainstream processors. In English: Unless you're looking for a crazyfast new computer, your next machine will probably run an Intel Core i5 CPU.

Eventually, dual-core Core i3 chips will come out, and as you can guess by the number, they won't be quite as fast—or expensive—as the Core i5 or i7 chips.

Netbook's Best Friend: Atom N and Z

Atom is probably the Intel chip you hear about second only to Core 2 Duo: It's essentially the CPU that goes inside of netbooks. There are a couple of different variations out now, the N series (codename Diamondville) and the Z series (codename Silverthorne). The Diamondville chips are for nettops and netbooks (though as pointed out, nettop don't use the N prefix, just the chip number), and can handle full versions of Windows Vista and 7. Silverthrone is used in netbooks but was designed for smaller connected devices like UMPCs and MIDs. (This is why Sony shoving an underpowered Atom Z in the Vaio P, and trying to run Windows Vista on top of it, was retarded.)

The next generation of Atom is more interesting, and more confusing, in a way. The CPU is codenamed Pineview, and it's actually got the graphics processor integrated right onto the same chip, precluding the need for a separate GPU tucked into the netbook's overall chipset. The benefit is longer battery life, since it'll take less energy to crunch the same visuals. We'll start seeing Pineview netbooks sometime early next year, most likely.

Oldies But Goodies: Core 2 Duo, Quad and Extreme

Intel's Core 2 chips have been out three years now, an eternity in computer years. Because of this, and because they're the main ones used in most personal desktop and laptop systems, there is a metric shitton of different Core 2 chips.

It's also more confusing because there are way more codenames to wade through. Let's start from the top: Core 2 Solo has one core, Core 2 Duo two, and Quad has four (as does Extreme). From there, you have two distinct generations of chips within the Core 2 family.

In the first generation of Core 2 Duos, the main desktop chip was Conroe (with a cheaper variant called Allendale), while the main mobile one was called Merom. There was also a branch of Core 2 Quads called Kentsfield.

The next generation (that is, the current generation, unless you're already on the Core i7 bandwagon) arrived with a new process for making chips with even smaller transistors. Among other more technical differences, they were more energy efficient than their predecessors. With this generation of Core 2s, the mainstream desktop chips are Wolfdale, the desktop quad-cores are called Yorkfield, and the mobile chips are Penryn—if you've bought a decent notebook in the last two years, it's probably got a Penryn Core 2 inside of it.

Ancient History: Pentium and Celeron

Pentium is dead, except it's not, living on as a zombie brand for chips that aren't as good as Core chips, but aren't as crappy as Intel's low-end Celeron processors. If you see a machine with a sticker for Pentium or Celeron, run.

Okay, I hope that helps, at least a little—you should probably thank me for staying away from clock speeds and other small variations, like individual permutations of Core i7 Bloomfield processors, to hopefully give you a broader overview of what all's going on. Intel told me it'll all make more sense once their entire road map for the year is out on the market, but I have a feeling it's not gonna help my mom understand this crap one bit better.

Top image via soleiletoile/Flickr

Thanks to Intel for helping us sort all this out!

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about sweet potato chips, pumpkin pie or turduckens to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Two ARM cores, one running at 600MHz (for apps) and another at 400MHz, with a 200MHz 3D graphics core that supports OpenGL 2.0 (like the iPhone 3GS, which is actually an advtange over the Pre).

It's hard to know how much different it's gonna feel like in practice versus the Pre until we got our hands on a final unit—there's plenty of time for optimizations and other plumbing work this far out. [Palm InfoCenter]

The heart of the matter is that the trick to actually utilizing the full power of multiple processors—or multiple cores within a processor, like the Core 2 Duo you've probably got in your computer if you bought in the last two years—is processing things in parallel. That is, doing lots of stuff side by side. After all, you've got 2, maybe 4 or even 8 processors at your disposal, so to use them as efficiently as possible, you want to pull a problem apart and throw a piece of it at each core, or at least send different problems to different cores. Sounds logical, right? Easy, even.

The rub is that writing software that can actually take advantage of all of that parallel processing at an application level isn't easy, and without software built for it, all that power is wasted. In fact, cracking the nut of parallel processing is one the major movements in tech right now, since parallelism, while it's been around forever, has been the domain of solving really big problems, not running Excel sheets on your laptop. It's why, for instance, former Intel chair Craig Barrett told me at CES that Intel hires more software engineers than hardware engineers—to push the software paradigm shift that's gotta happen.

A big part of the reason parallel programming is hard for programmers to wrestle with is simply most of them have never spent any time thinking about parallelism, says James Reinders, Intel's Chief Software Evangelist, who's spent decades working with parallel processing. In the single core world, more speed primarily came from a faster clock speed—all muscle. Multi-core is a different approach. Typically, the way a developer takes advantage of parallelism is by breaking their application down into threads, sub-tasks within a process that run simultaneously or in parallel. And processes are just instances of an application—the things you can see running on your machine by firing up the Task Manager in Windows, or Activity Monitor in OS X. On a multi-core system, different threads can be handled by different processors so multiple threads can be run at once. An app can a lot run faster if it was written to be multi-threaded.

One of the reasons parallel programming is tricky is that some kinds of processes are really hard to do in parallel—they have to be done sequentially. That is, one step in the program is dependent on the result from a previous step, so you can't really run those steps in parallel. And developers tend to run into problems, like a race condition, where two processes try to do something with the same piece of data and the order of events gets screwed up, resulting in a crash.

Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch promises to take a lot of the headache out of parallel programming by managing everything at the OS level, using a system of blocks and queues, so developers don't even have to thread their apps in the traditional way. In the GCD system, a developer tags self-contained units of work as blocks, which are scheduled for execution and placed in a GCD queue. Queues are how GCD manages tasks running parallel and what order they run in, scheduling blocks to run when threads are free to run something.

Reinders says he's "not convinced that parallel programming is harder, it's just different." Still, he's a "big fan of what Apple's doing with Grand Central Dispatch" because "they've made a very approachable, simple interface for developers to take advantage of the fact that Snow Leopard can run things in parallel and they're encouraging apps to take advantage of that."

How Snow Leopard handles parallelism with GCD is a little different than what Intel's doing however—you might recall Intel just picked up RapidMind, a company that specializes in optimizing applications for parallelism. The difference between these two, at a broad level, represent two of the major approaches to parallelism—task parallelism, like GCD, or data parallelism, like RapidMind. Reinders explained it like this: If you had a million newspapers you want to cut clips out of, GCD would look at cutting from each newspaper as a task, whereas RapidMind's approach would look at it as one cutting to be executed in a repetitive manner. For some applications, RapidMind's approach will work better, and for some, GCD's task-based approach will work better. In particular, Reinders says something like GCD works best when a developer can "figure out what the fairly separate things to do are and you don't care where they run or in what order they run" within their app.

It's also a bit different from Windows' approach to parallelism, which is app oriented, rather than managing things at the OS level, so it essentially leaves everything up to the apps—apps have got to manage their own threads, make sure they're not eating all of your resources. Which for now, isn't much of a headache, but Reinders says that there is a "valid concern on Windows that a mixture of parallel apps won't cooperate with each other as much," so you could wind up with a situation where say, four apps try to use all 16 cores in your machine, when you'd rather they split up, with say one app using eight cores, another using four, and so on. GCD addresses that problem at the system level, so there's more coordination between apps, which may make it slightly more responsive to the user, if it manages tasks correctly.

You might think that the whole parallelism thing is a bit overblown—I mean, who needs a multicore computer to run Microsoft Word, right? Well, even Word benefits from parallelism Reinders told me. For instance, when you spool off something to the printer and it doesn't freeze, like it used to back in the day. Or spelling and grammar running as you type—it's a separate thread that's run in parallel. If it wasn't, it'd make for a miserable-ass typing experience, or you'd just have to wait until you were totally finished with a document. There's also the general march of software, since we love to have more features all the time: Reinders says his computer might be 100X faster than it was 15 years ago, but applications don't run 100x faster—they've got new features that are constantly added on to make them more powerful or nicer to use. Stuff like pretty graphics, animation and font scaling. In the future, exploiting multiple cores through parallelism that might be stuff like eyeball tracking, or actually good speech recognition.

Reinders actually thinks that the opportunities for parallelism are limitless. "Not having an idea to use parallelism in some cases I sometimes refer to as a 'lack of imagination,'" because someone simply hasn't thought of it, the same way people back in the day thought computers for home use would be glorified electronic cookbooks—they lacked the imagination to predict things like the web. But as programmers move into parallelism, Reinders has "great expectations they're going to imagine things the rest of us," so we could see some amazing things come out of parallelism. But whether that's next week or five years now, well, we'll see.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about parallel processing, parallel lines or parallel universes to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Grand Central Terminal main concourse image from Wikimedia Commons

Still classified as a Core i7 chip, the Xeon W5590 runs six 2.4GHz cores with 12MB of shared Level 3 cache and and 256KB of Level 2 cache per core. Hyperthreading support enables two program threads to run on each core, meaning that the whole system effectively delivers 12 cores. Price details have not been announced, but Westmere is officially due out in the first half of 2010. [Electronista]

Thankfully, Intel has put together a slide show to tell how the little things are made, from sand grains to the final packaging, going through all the dicing, the slicing, and the dancing. [Intel via Dark Roasted Blend]

Following the original 8086, it cost $100 when it was released in June 1979, which is about $300, adjusted for inflation. Today, $300 will buy you a Core i7 processor with 731 million transistors. How much more powerful is that than the 8088?

Immeasurably. Even Intel couldn't tell us. Meaning if you took a Core i7 back in time to 1979, and Miles Bennett Dyson was an Intel employee, he would fuck the human race in ways you can't even imagine. Or, you know, we just would've had Xbox in 1983.

With the ascendance of Windows, the x86-based PC would eventually take over the world in its own way.

[Intel, Top image: Wikipedia, Thanks to Intel for their help!]

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Rumor also has it that most board manufacturers have already added support, so those of you with Nehalem rigs can probably upgrade to the new chip with a BIOS update. Saving a little money is definitely a good thing in this situation, because if and when a six-core Nehalem is released, expect prices to be in excess of $1000. [bit-tech via Trusted Reviews]

In addition, Intel announced the P9700 and P8800 Core 2 Duo desktop processors, which have speeds of 2.8 GHz and 2.66 GHz respectively, as well as the 1.3 GHz SU2700 ULV Pentium processor and accompanying GS40 express chipset.

UberGizmo says the SU2700 is the chip that will power the influx of ultra-thin laptops they've been touting as of late. But for the time being, that's it for details. Pricing and availability will come later. [Intel via UberGizmo]

Versus the previous generation Athlon X2, it starts at 3GHz, supports DDR3 memory and is part of the new AM3 packaging (which is backward compatible with AM2+). Also in the bag is the Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition, which is their first dual-core Phenom chip—so it can hit $100—but it's overclocked.

Sadly, that's it from AMD for Computex—no Atom killer or new hotness from ATI either.

AMD Introduces Next Generation AMD Athlon™ II Processor, Adds Dual Core to Record-Setting AMD Phenom™ II Processor Lineup

− AMD Athlon™ II processor delivers new native dual-core architecture, efficient 45nm technology and 3 GHz performance at an affordable price −

− AMD Phenom™ II X2 Black Edition processor combines value and unlocked potential for gamers and tuners on a budget −

COMPUTEX 2009 (TAIPEI, Taiwan) - June 2, 2009 - Bringing its acclaimed 45nm technology to new high-volume processor designs, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced two new dual-core desktop processors. Building on 10 years of AMD Athlon™ processor innovation, the new 45nm AMD Athlon™ II X2 250 processor gives mainstream consumers exceptional performance, efficiency and value. For enthusiasts and overclockers, AMD also announces the AMD Phenom™ II X2 550 Black Edition processor, the first ever dual-core AMD Phenom II CPU.* With this latest addition to the AMD Phenom II processor family, users can now experience the power of AMD platform technology, codenamed "Dragon," with dual-, triple- and quad-core configurations.

AMD Athlon II X2 Processor Details
The AMD Athlon II X2 250 performs exceptionally well when combined with AMD chipsets and integrated graphics solutions to create an all-AMD platform. Platforms featuring all-AMD technology can deliver up to twice the graphics performance of those with Intel integrated graphics.¹

Windows® 7 is optimized for multi-core processors like AMD Athlon™ II processors to give consumers an amazingly fast, simple and engaging PC experience.** For example, Windows 7 is tuned to make the most of the these new processors' power management features, such as AMD PowerNow!™ 3.0 technology. AMD power management technologies, in combination with Windows 7, can help OEMs and partners to build exceptionally green, cool and quiet PCs.
Based on AMD's acclaimed 45nm process technology, the AMD Athlon II dual-core processor has a TDP of 65W and can slash power consumption by up to 50 percent when doing basic tasks, up to 40 percent when running heavy workloads and up to 50 percent when at idle.²

AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition Details
AMD Black Edition processors, like the AMD Phenom™ II X2 550, help users to take control and unleash the maximum potential of Dragon platform technology's unprecedented performance tuning capabilities.* The same massive headroom that set world records in recent months is at users' finger tips, offering impressive performance at a price the competition can't beat.³

Users can also maximize their overclocking experience by utilizing the new features and capabilities of AMD OverDrive™ 3.0, designed to enable quick and effective tuning of their PC experience for optimal performance.*
With dual-, triple- or quad-core processors, AMD provides platform level solutions at multiple price points, each of which exceeds expectations for virtually any user.

[AMD]

As Ars' Jon Stokes points out, this is new territory for Intel that "arguably pushes Atom into SoC territory." It has some implications for Nvidia's Ion platform. Not only are Intel's graphics built into the Atom CPU, but Nvidia's probably going to have major problems from a price standpoint, since Intel can drop the cost of the Atom platform (which it sells for $25) down even further. Unbundling the Atom CPU—like to pair it with Nvidia's 9400m for the Ion platform—costs $45.

Never a dull moment in netbook land. [Ars]

How ionic winds differ from typical cooling system is that by ionizing the air and passing it over a processor chip, the ionized air increased airflow on the surface, thus creating a cooling breeze over a hot microprocessor (as illustrated above).

Apparently, Tessera's cooling system not only consumes half as much power as other conventional laptop fans, but also can eliminate up to 30% more heat as well. It's pretty much the same technology from a couple years ago, yet reduced in size to fit your personal, portable needs. [Technology Review via BBG]

Intel's roadmap looks like this: Now they have Atom, which powers many of the netbooks on the market today. Next comes Moorestown, which is supposed to be like the Atom, but house two chips and be a low-power solution that can be customizable (the 2nd chip) for whatever gadget a client shoves it into. Moorestown isn't quite small enough for smartphones, but Intel's saying Medfield may be, when Medfield follows up Moorestown.

There's a lot of hinting, but not a lot of outright declaration here, so it's not certain that Medfield may be able to fit into something the size of an iPhone or a Pre or an Android. What they are saying is that they can fit into something the size of a UMPC or a MID or a large PMP—something that Nvidia's Tegra or Qualcomm's Snapdragon are aiming for as well.

The timeline for Medfield is 2011ish, so there's a while yet before anything materializes. But if Intel does somehow find a way to get their system-on-a-chip into your phones, that means bigger OSes and more laptop-like performance. We'll see. [Fortune]

What a Difference a Letter Makes
GPU sounds—and looks—a lot like CPU, but they're pretty different, and not just 'cause dedicated GPUs like the Radeon HD 4870 here can be massive. GPU stands for graphics processing unit, while CPU stands for central processing unit. Spelled out, you can already see the big differences between the two, but it takes some experts from Nvidia and AMD/ATI to get to the heart of what makes them so distinct.

Traditionally, a GPU does basically one thing, speed up the processing of image data that you end up seeing on your screen. As AMD Stream Computing Director Patricia Harrell told me, they're essentially chains of special purpose hardware designed to accelerate each stage of the geometry pipeline, the process of matching image data or a computer model to the pixels on your screen.

GPUs have a pretty long history—you could go all the way back to the Commodore Amiga, if you wanted to—but we're going to stick to the fairly present. That is, the last 10 years, when Nvidia's Sanford Russell says GPUs starting adding cores to distribute the workload across multiple cores. See, graphics calculations—the calculations needed to figure out what pixels to display your screen as you snipe someone's head off in Team Fortress 2—are particularly suited to being handled in parallel.

An example Nvidia's Russell gave to think about the difference between a traditional CPU and a GPU is this: If you were looking for a word in a book, and handed the task to a CPU, it would start at page 1 and read it all the way to the end, because it's a "serial" processor. It would be fast, but would take time because it has to go in order. A GPU, which is a "parallel" processor, "would tear [the book] into a thousand pieces" and read it all at the same time. Even if each individual word is read more slowly, the book may be read in its entirety quicker, because words are read simultaneously.

All those cores in a GPU—800 stream processors in ATI's Radeon 4870—make it really good at performing the same calculation over and over on a whole bunch of data. (Hence a common GPU spec is flops, or floating point operations per second, measured in current hardware in terms of gigaflops and teraflops.) The general-purpose CPU is better at some stuff though, as AMD's Harrell said: general programming, accessing memory randomly, executing steps in order, everyday stuff. It's true, though, that CPUs are sprouting cores, looking more and more like GPUs in some respects, as retiring Intel Chairman Craig Barrett told me.

Explosions Are Cool, But Where's the General Part?
Okay, so the thing about parallel processing—using tons of cores to break stuff up and crunch it all at once—is that applications have to be programmed to take advantage of it. It's not easy, which is why Intel at this point hires more software engineers than hardware ones. So even if the hardware's there, you still need the software to get there, and it's a whole different kind of programming.

Which brings us to OpenCL (Open Computing Language) and, to a lesser extent, CUDA. They're frameworks that make it way easier to use graphics cards for kinds of computing that aren't related to making zombie guts fly in Left 4 Dead. OpenCL is the "open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems" standardized by the Khronos Group—AMD, Apple, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung and a bunch of others are involved, so it's pretty much an industry-wide thing. In semi-English, it's a cross-platform standard for parallel programming across different kinds of hardware—using both CPU and GPU—that anyone can use for free. CUDA is Nvidia's own architecture for parallel programming on its graphics cards.

OpenCL is a big part of Snow Leopard. Windows 7 will use some graphics card acceleration too (though we're really looking forward to DirectX 11). So graphics card acceleration is going to be a big part of future OSes.

So Uh, What's It Going to Do for Me?
Parallel processing is pretty great for scientists. But what about those regular people? Does it make their stuff go faster. Not everything, and to start, it's not going too far from graphics, since that's still the easiest to parallelize. But converting, decoding and creating videos—stuff you're probably using now more than you did a couple years ago—will improve dramatically soon. Say bye-bye 20-minute renders. Ditto for image editing; there'll be less waiting for effects to propagate with giant images (Photoshop CS4 already uses GPU acceleration). In gaming, beyond straight-up graphical improvements, physics engines can get more complicated and realistic.

If you're just Twittering or checking email, no, GPGPU computing is not going to melt your stone-cold face. But anyone with anything cool on their computer is going to feel the melt eventually.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

• AMD tried to kill the megahertz myth before Intel. During the Pentium 4 days Intel kept pushing clock speeds higher and higher, before it hit a wall and abandoned the Prescott architecture. The message was clearly, "more megahertz is more better." AMD's competing Athlon XP chips, while clocked slower, often beat their Pentium 4 rivals. Ironically, AMD was the first to 1GHz, as some commenters have pointed out (don't know how I forgot that). Obviously though, AMD's performance lead didn't last forever.

• AMD beat Intel to 64-bit in mainstream computers. And we're not just talking about its Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. AMD actually designed the X86-64 specification, which Intel wound up adopting and licensing—so AMD's spec is used Intel's 64-bit processors to this day.

• AMD was first to consider energy efficiency in processor designs. Okay, this is kind of an extension of point number one, but during Intel's Pentium 4 'roid rage period AMD's processors consistently used less power than Intel's. Intel's performance per watt revelation didn't really start until the Pentium M (which was actually a throwback to the P6 architecture), which set the tone for Intel's new direction in its successor, the Core line of chips.

• AMD beat Intel to having an integrated memory controller. A tech feature AMD lorded over Intel for years: AMD's processors started integrating the memory controller with its processors years ago, reducing memory latency. Intel's first chip to use an integrated memory controller is the Core i7—before, the memory controller was separate from the processor. (Here's why Intel says they held off.)

Athlon XP and Athlon 64—those were the good old days, AMD's cutthroat competitive days. The days they were ahead of Intel. I miss them—at one point, every hand-built computer in my house ran AMD processors. I felt like a rebel—a rebel with faster, cheaper computers.

Unfortunately, I don't run AMD chips anymore. Intel came back, and came back hard. But here's hoping for another resurgence, and another 40 years, guys. Share your favorite AMD memories in the comments.

So far reviews have been generally positive, with the consensus being that the 2.8GHz chip with 2MB of L3 cache isn't spectacular, but it can deliver enough performance to handle the latest games. Because it's a Black Edition, users are going to want to overclock this thing, and the Overclocker's Club concluded that while it can't stand up to triple and quad cores, it could beat the Athlon X2 7750 as well as the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 in several tests. The overclocking process was a bit tedious and they could only push it to x1.5 over stock, but overall it gives you a decent bang for your buck. If you are looking for additional opinions on the 7850, Engadget has rounded up several reviews. [AMD and Engadget]

It's easy, really: Black is for high-end (except, uh, the weak Atom also uses a black background, oops); blue is for mainstream, white is for cheaper chips like Celeron and Pentium (expect when it's Centrino and Centrino 2). Okay, not so great on the colors. Let's move on!

Just like your favorite restaurant, now they have star ratings. Five stars is for high end like Core i7, one star is for not-so-great like Celeron. The issue for regular people is that the star rating appears on a computer's sales card (not the chip logo itself) and only describes the chip, not the whole computer. "Hey this computer's got four stars? That's pretty good!" Anyone else feel a Microsoft ad coming on? [PC Mag]