The 15-inch Alienware M15x, which was introduced back in January, is a mobile gamer's paradise. You now have a choice of the speediest Intel mobile processors, including a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i7 720QM, a 1.73GHz Intel Core i7 820QM, and finally the world's fastest mobile processor, a 2GHz Intel Core i7 920XM. The illuminating wonder of a notebook will be configurable with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M GPU (with 1GB of RAM) and up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM to take on the harshest of games.

As for aesthetics the main chassis appears the same, though you can now get it in metallic red, silver or black. And for those that love to game after dark the entire body lights up customizable color accents.

Shockingly the price is actually pretty reasonable for a high end gaming system. It will start at $1,500 and it will be configurable on Dell.com. It will ship for now with Vista and with Windows 7 come October 22. [Alienware]

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A Way Better Operating System

We have been blunt about it: Windows 7 kicks ass, especially Vista's. Sure you can upgrade a current Vista laptop to Windows 7 but there's a hassle involved. Buy a laptop now and you get a free upgrade to Win 7, but the laptop manufacturer (not Microsoft) has to send you the install disc via snail mail after October 22. A clean install of the OS done at the factory is more likely to be hassle-free. On top of that, a number of laptops will be optimized for Windows 7, meaning they will have new hardware features that will take advantage of the new operating system which brings us to point number two.

More Power

If you have been looking for the opposite of a netbook and a high-end mobile machine, you'll have your pick come November (actually, late October). That's when Intel ought to roll out the latest edition of the Centrino platform, codenamed Calpella. This chipset is expected to feature a less power-hungry version of the Core i7 desktop processor we like so much, with perhaps mobile Core i5 and Core i3 versions on the way later. We expect a slew of these laptops to hit then. We already know that MSI will ship 15.4 and 17-inch notebooks powered by Intel's new Core i7 7200M, Core i7 8200M, and Core i7 920XM with Windows 7.

Mac users take note: The Centrino platform is also found in all manner of MacBook—just without the Intel sticker—so this applies to you, too. And fans of the shiny white plastic MacBook know that it's due for a cosmetic upgrade, so whether you want the faster processors in a unibody MacBook Pro, or a full makeover, inside and out, on the plastic MacBook, it pays to wait.

The arrival of 64-bit-savvy Windows 7 and Snow Leopard means that system builders will also be able to bump up the RAM. Now it will make sense to go beyond 4GB, pushing us out of the current RAM rut, though perhaps at an added cost.

Serious Weight Loss

The thin-and-light laptops that are coming are so thin they make me hungry. If you don't care about the kind of horsepower needed for games and 1080p video, Intel is also shipping new dual-core ULV processors. Laptops that used to cost north of $1,500 now thanks to Intel's ULV (once called CULV) are gonna be under a grand. The new dual-core chips are aimed at ultra thin laptops (those right in between netbooks and mainstreamers, like the Acer Timeline). MSI told us about the new Core 2 Duo SU4100 and SU7300 chips—it is our guess that these are the same chips that will be in Sony's rail-thin X Series and Samsung's X120.

Sweet Deals

It may still seem too early think about holidays but, hey, autumn starts in two weeks. Many of these new notebooks will be released at the end of October to coincide with Windows 7's Oct. 22 official launch date, and a scant month later we hit Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the biggest sales days of the year. Retailers and manufacturers would be stupid if they didn't mark down even the newest stuff, so if you hold out just a few weeks, you will not only get the best laptops out there but you'll get them at some unbelievable prices.

Future Features

We don't necessarily expect you to wait for GScreen's dual-screen laptop, but some other pretty great new technology will start hitting notebooks before year's end. SuperSpeed USB (aka USB 3.0) will be showing up soon, and after Windows 7 arrives, more and more laptops will be built with multitouch capability. Additionally, chances are good that the price of solid-state drives will start dropping, and that more laptop manufacturers will also start selecting the faster SSD models.

The future is upon us. So don't buy anything right now. Save your money, handcuff yourself to a piece of furniture, and wait it out. Just two months, that's it.

Intel's next generation Centrino platform, codenamed Calpella, will be launched at the end of September, says MSI. That means speedy new notebooks with Nehalem based mobile CPUs and chipsets will be arriving just in time to put Windows 7 on the hard drive.

MSI will ship 15.4 and 17-inch notebooks powered by Intel's new Core i7 7200M, Core i7 8200M, and Core i7 920XM with Windows 7. The Clarksfield CPU of the mobile Core i7 platform is expected to be a downscaled version of the desktop version we like so much, but will be one of the biggest jumps in laptop power we have seen in awhile. Intel's mobile Core i5 and i3 (codenamed Arrandale) are not planned until the first quarter of 2010.

Also coming from Intel around the same time (our guess this is all coming at September's Intel Developers Conference) are new dual core ULV processors. Intel's ULV (once called CULV) is aimed at ultra thin laptops (those right in between netbooks and mainstreamers, like the Acer Timeline). MSI plans to use the new Core 2 Duo SU4100 and SU7300 chips in its X420 (update to X400) and X620 (an update to the X600) which will ship with Windows 7.

Why do we care? MSI tells us the price of these seriously slim notebooks will stay in the same ballpark (around $600 to $900), but the chips provide better performance than the Celerons that they were formerly using.

What this all really means is that not only is MSI hitting the market with a crap load of notebooks that have brand spankin' new chips and a fresh Microsoft OS, but the other notebook vendors (yes, Apple) will most likely do the same. You may just want to wait to snatch up a new PC; the notebooks are a coming this fall.

Intel spokesman Bill Calder notes:

...we are focusing our strategy around a primary 'hero' client brand which is Intel® Core™. Today the Intel Core brand has a mind boggling array of derivatives (such as Core™2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, etc). Over time those will go away and in its place will be a simplified family of Core processors spanning multiple levels: Intel® Core™ i3 processor, Intel® Core™ i5 processor, and Intel® Core™ i7 processors. Core i3 and Core i5 are new modifiers and join the previously announced Intel Core i7 to round out the family structure. It is important to note that these are not brands but modifiers to the Intel Core brand that signal different features and benefits. For example, upcoming processors such as Lynnfield (desktop) will carry the Intel Core brand, but will be available as either Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 depending upon the feature set and capability. Clarksfield (mobile) will have the Intel Core i7 name.

Pentium, Celeron and Atom aren't going anywhere, but for their premium Core brand, chips will be broken down into the three categories above. Calder also stated that this transition will take time—and probably won't be implemented fully until sometime in 2010. The new system is not all that great to be honest, but it least it officially confirms that mobile chips will be called Core i7. [Intel via ecoustics]

Last week, you probably noticed new computers from Dell, Gateway and others using a brand new, bizarre-sounding chip from Intel: the Core i7. You might have even seen some benchmarks and features showing that this is a real beast of processor. Well, we're pretty excited about the Core i7, so here's a quick guide to why it's so awesome:

Hokay, so the way Intel develops chips is on what it calls the "tick-tock cycle". The "tick" is the improvement of its current microarchitecture, mainly shrinking it down to make it more energy efficient, along with other tweaks. As you now can guess, the "tock" indicates the launch of a totally new microarchitecture.

Penryn, for instance, was the tick to the Core 2's tock, shrinking it down from a 65-nanometer process to 45nm. Core i7 is a tock, using a completely new microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem. Core i7 Nehalem is actually a dramatic step forward, remedying several lingering Intel architecture deficiencies that AMD actually had them beat on years ago. So, here are four things that specifically make the new chip awesome:

Bye Bye Front-Side Bus
The ancient front-side bus setup has long been a drag on Intel's chips, and they're finally ditching it. The FSB essentially carried data between the CPU and memory controller hub (which is also out the window, more on that in a sec), but that didn't work so well when you started talking buckets of cores. In its place is a new tech called QuickPath Interconnect that'll make the old bottlenecks history and running tons of cores even better. QPI uses direct point-to-point connections that have a bandwidth of about 25GB/s, way faster than what FSB could offer. The downside is that it requires a new QPI-friendly motherboard. This concept is kind of cribbed from AMD, whose HyperTransport has been doing something similar for a longass time.

Integrated Memory Controller and Triple-Channel Memory
You might notice a pattern that a lot of Nehalem's performance boosts have to do with better access to memory and fatter bandwidth. Yet another tech that AMD held over Intel's head for years is an integrated memory controller, which Core i7 finally uses. Basically this just means that the memory controller is on the same die as the CPU, cutting down memory latency. Before, with Intel chips, communication had to take place across the front-side bus, making stuff slooooow. The last memory bonus is that Core i7 supports triple-channel memory. Right now, you're probably on a computer using dual-channel memory (in English, I mean that it uses RAM sticks in sets of two). Core i7 will make three sticks of RAM the new standard—so keep an eye out for plenty of 6GB and 12GB systems running around.

The Return of Hyper-Threading
Intel abandoned Hyper-Threading after the Pentium 4, but it's back in Core i7 (and Atom, but really, psh). Basically, it's a parallel-processing tech that runs multiple threads simultaneously. In English, it divvies up tasks so they can be crunched by a processor simultaneously, instead of one after the other. It short, it makes video encoding and other parallel-friendly processes run faster. We're interested to see what kind of gains this will produce in tandem with programs coded to take advantage of threading, not to mention the next great operating systems, Snow Leopard and Windows 7, which will supposedly make better use of multiple cores and parallel processing than current OSes.

Built-In Power Management and Overclocking
Core i7 is pretty much a beast already, but whereas Intel used to say that overclocking was bad for your processor, now with the Core i7, it's built right in. The Core i7 is really aggressive with power management, more so than Core 2, so it'll sip juice when it's not busy, and then crank the power when it needs it. In the BIOS now, you can set it to overclock the CPU in certain situations, and customize that by thermal ratings so it won't overheat.

So yeah, Core i7 gets our engines running, and we're not even chip nerds. (Honest!) Sadly though, right now there are just a few Core i7 chips available, and they're all for desktops. There's not much of a downside for portables—save for the need for new motherboards and the DDR3 RAM already used by premium laptops—but before you see it in a Dell XPS notebook or MacBook Pro, you're going to see it in a lot of desktop gaming and graphics-intensive systems. Laptops probably won't appear until way into next year, but we think they'll be well worth the wait.

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