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HP's have a very tidy notebook on the horizon dubbed the Envy 13, due to hit the streets on October 18. The folks at Engadget managed to get a hold of one early and have taken a bunch of snaps showing us just how sweet this thing looks.

It's not cheap, though. HP are pushing it for $1,700 U.S. but Engadget feel there's enough reasons why this is somewhat reasonable for what you're getting.

- This is one sexy laptop. It's incredibly quality in its construction, and intensely attractive. The screen in particular is a knockout, showing up very bright and vibrant behind its glossy, mirror-tastic sheen

It is no secret that if Apple says they are working on something (or even rumored to be working on something) the tech press stops for a second and then beings to type hasty and enthusiastic articles for publication.

Well while the keyboards are busy with fresh copy for the rumored Apple Tablet a spark of an Idea from MS could be missed. The idea in question is Microsoft's Courier Booklet.

The new booklet seems to be an innovative idea that could possibly bring the tablet to the real world (finally). It looks like a book and in fact the GUI has page-like markers for flipping between your stored files and applications. This is called the Infinite Journal, this is a journal that is limited only by the amount of storage you have on the Courier. You can also publish your journal online and pull it down in a few different formats (Courier File, PowerPoint and PDF).

Word's come in from the horse's mouth that NVIDIA's first DirectX 11 (GT300) GPU is shaping up okay and should make it for a Q4'09 launch, despite previous reports indicating delays and yield issues.

It seems that the GT300 has been taped out long ago and that yields are fine. This statement comes from a senior product manager for the GT300, but we also have this from our own sources [who have been saying this all along].

So where did the rumors of sub 2% yields come from? Well according to the unnamed source it looks like AMD's Competitive Analysis team mistranslated some information that stated only 9 chips per wafer worked. This information quickly spread around the internet and became what we like to call "the repeated truth". Bear in mind that this was the same team in charge of spreading rumors that Larrabee is now in its third or fourth generation of silicon, which is direly incorrect. But we'll address Larrabee and the turmoil there in a future article.

Just saw this interesting video where an NVIDIA ION based netbook plays a flash video using the GPU. It is pretty impressive, especially when you see them pop it up on the big screen. Of course there is something that is bugging me about this demo.

If you watch the screen displaying the demo from the ION is flickering very badly. It made watching this a little rough and gave me a headache. Besides that it means that the ION was being displayed on a screen with at least a 120Hz refresh this is twice the refresh on the smaller screen (which should be running at around 60Hz).

I know you are wondering what this has to do with anything; well you see the faster the refresh the slower your frame rate can be and still maintain the appearance of full motion video. It is an old trick, back the CRT days it was not uncommon to see 100Hz refresh rates making 20 FPS games look playable. After all if memory serves the human eye refreshes at about 50Hz. So at 120Hz you are more than doubling the screen refresh which removes much of the stuttering you would see at 60Hz.

Asus loves its high-end customers. First they dropped out the "RoG (Republic of Gamers)" line as their high-end products, now they have their "The Ultimate Force" (TUF) boards.

The first of this new line of board is being called the Sabertooth 55i. This is going to be a P55 with quite a few unique features and improvements over even their RoG boards. The first is the implementation of what Asus is calling E.S.P. this stands for Efficient Switching Power. This is intended to provide clean power to the CPU and memory as well as the PCI-e Slots and controller (now on the CPU). According to the hard-sell from Asus it raises the efficiency of power conversion from 60% to an impressive 90%.

But the fun does not stop there.

Over the past few weeks we have been covering some of the new developments that Intel has been showing off at IDF. Many of these revolve around Intel's new 32nm Clarkdale and Arrandale CPUs. These 32nm beauties are a 32nm CPU sitting right next to a 45nm GPU on the same packaging. Intel is leveraging their new Lynnfield architecture which moves the GPU PCI-e bus onto the CPU die along with a dual channel memory controller.

The GPU is able to talk to the board through Intel's Flexible Display Interface Technology. Again as with Lynnfield this will enable a two chip design for systems. Of course the question that everyone should be asking is; what, if any, gains are there in terms of power and heat?

We know that we should see performance gains over the older three chip design and now it seems that we will get the added benefit of reduced heat and power needs. This is good news and is due to a couple of items. The first is, of course, the reduction from 45nm to 32nm. The second is the move to the two chip design we mentioned above. So far the power consumption on the new Clarkdale has been observed to run as "lite" as 28 Watts at idle and a meager 70 Watts under full load. Of course this has been on an Intel demo system so it is up in the air as to if we will see this in the wild. Still the lower power consumption is something to look forward to.

Someone over at Google might be having one too many at lunch recently. For some reason they have sent a cease and desist order over to Cyanogen.

If you are not familiar with Cyanogen it is a software that allows you to root your Android Phone.

So why would Google do this? My thoughts are that someone jumped the gun on this and in typical corporate lawyer fashion; they do not understand the technology or method so they jump in it as a threat. Why do I think this? Well take a look at the order from Google and you will easily see it.

Remember all the rumors about bad yields of the GT300? Well nVidia has come out to confirm what we told you before. GT300 yields are fine and they are on schedule for a Q4 2009 launch. This launch should be at GTC in November with retail availability by the end of November.

Fudo over at Fudzilla is also confirming this with a direct statement from NVIDIA on the subject. They are claiming that the reports of less than 2% yields were based on a mistranslated report from AMD's competitive analysis team.

Also they say that the reports that the GT300 is a rebranded/respun GT200 are baseless. According to the report the GT300 is a ground up redesign and a new GPU. This is good news for the NVIDIA fans out there as recently AMD has been hogging all the press with the DX11 40nm Radeon HD5870.

Yesterday we described to you what new technologies like Intel's Light Peak could mean in the future. But there was no real hard evidence to show just how powerful something like this could be.

Today we have a video take by the gang at Engadget that shows a small sampling of what Light Peak is capable of even at this early stage of development.

What you see is a "hackintosh" system based on an Intel CPU and chipset. They then run 1080p video and a large file transfer over the Light Peak connection at the same time. Pretty impressive stuff if you ask me.

Codemasters is a company that has a good reputation for coding graphically impressive games. Both DiRT and Racecar Driver Grid look simply stunning. So what should we expect from DiRT2 for PC now that it has DX11 support?

PC Games Hardware sat down with Bryan Marshall, Technical Director of the Codemasters Dev Team, and asked that very question.

According to Marshall, DiRT 2 takes advantage of three of the main features to produce some stunning visual effects. These are Hardware Tesselation, Direct Compute 11 (compute shaders) and multi-threading the command pipeline. Tesselation allows Codemasters to greater detail to the objects in the game (such as water surfaces, crowds and cloth) while Compute Shaders allow for better post processing of visual effects.

Last night I was playing around with Intel's new Lynnfield and wanted to see what I might be able to get out of it. I was not looking to spend a ton of time but wanted to see what the fastest stable overclock on air I was able to get.

So I hooked up my trusty ASRock P55 Deluxe that we reviewed with the Lynnfield and dropped the Core i5 750 into it. I also had an 8GB kit of Corsair Memory that I was testing (expect a review of it shortly)so I dropped that in as well. To get things off the ground I went straight to the OC Tweaker page and hit the EZ OC settings. I selected 4200MHz and let the board set everything up. I rebooted and was off and running at 4.2GHz no problem.

Restarting the system I headed right back into the BIOS. From there I pushed the BClK up to 215 MHz and made sure Turbo was enabled for that 21x Multiplier. From there I was able to hit the login screen but after entering the password I got an immediate blue screen. It looked like 4.5GHz was out of the question. From there I started working backwards. I ended up with a very healthy 210 BLCK at a 21 Multiplier. The Corsair memory was humming along at 1686MHz with timings of 8-8-8-24 1T. At this speed some of my tests started crashing so I backed the memory off a slower 1264MHZ but I was able to drop the latency to 7.

As a kid, I remember cartoons where the evil mainframe computer would take over the world by using a laser (of course an evil laser!) to tap into the world's systems and forcing the hero to save the day.

This is exactly what Intel is working on; well except for the laser and the evil part. Today at IDF, Intel showed a new method for connecting mobile systems to an existing network of devices. The new technology is being dubbed "Light Peak" and could allow mobile devices to connect to storage, display, networking, audio and pretty much anything you can conceive.

The new standard uses an optical connector (hence the laser reference) that is capable of sending up to 10Gbps at distances of up to 100 meters (about 333 feet). The idea is to reduce the number of ports and connectors needed for mobile devices (remember we talked about moving all of the PCI-e family onto the CPU?) and replace them with a single one that can pretty much do them all.

You know, I think we need to start a new section (to go with the random stupidity awards) maybe we will call it DX11 watch. After all with AMD and NVIDIA going back and forth about DX11 and its importance, why not see what the real state of DX11 is.

For starters, let's cover some things that we know. AMD has a DX11 card out. It is launched, public and available. There will be a DX11 operating system, Windows 7, available starting on the 23rd of October. Despite this future date, Steam is reporting a large number of early adopters.

Codemasters are implementing partial DX11 support (much like the DX10 surfaces in Bioshock) for DiRT 2 and the Battle Field Engine has been ported to DX11 completely.

With another round of IDF now underway, Larrabee is in the forefront of most minds and thankfully it was shown off publicly for the first time today, running on a six cored Gulftown based PC.

It was running the traditional game Quake Wars, ported to do raytracing.

Waves moved, geometry was not static, and in general it worked. Instead of multiple four core chips, the new demo was running on the 'GPU', although Intel would not call it that. The only thing on the CPU was the game engine itself, exactly what you would expect from a CPU/GPU machine. As we said earlier, B0 silicon, the bug fixed Larrabee, taped out a month ago, and would possibly be shown at IDF.

I love the launch of new graphics cards, especially when it comes to AMD products. The main reason for this is that NVIDIA normally send over an email asking if we've got samples and when we respond with a yes, we get some questions that they think we should be asking ourselves.

This time was no different; the email came through right on time with NVIDIA asking the "tough" questions. To be honest though, I'm not AMD, I don't really feel great about answering questions on behalf of AMD, so with an email sent we had someone who was willing to respond. That person was Chris Hook who is AMD Global Communications, now with Global Communications in your title, you've got to feel pretty safe that the right person is responding.

So, what did NVIDIA ask and how did AMD respond?

So what would you do with four screens on your favorite portable? This thought came to me today while checking out the news from Intel's IDF event being held at the moment.

At the show was an interesting concept, this is a laptop with a main screen and three (yes three) smaller OLED screens.

These three screens would be above the keyboard and could show a variety of widgets. The interesting thing is that they can be interacted with through multi-touch gestures and your standard mouse. You would be able to drag files between the screens, including the main one.

Ah the game of leapfrog is so much fun, your ahead, I'm ahead. It never stops. This game is even more fun for the IT industry. The four major players (well three actually) fight for position in the market place. Each wants to be "first" at something. For example AMD was able to say they have the "First" Native Dual and Quad Core CPUs. Intel can say they were "First" to 32nm. ATi (AMD) can say they were "First" to use Physics on the GPU and the First to leverage the GPU as a processor. NVDIA...First with PhysX and Full scale GPGPU support...

Well you get the picture. So, why do I bring this all up? Simply because Intel is announcing that they will have a 22nm process for 2011. This means that by the time that AMD (Global Foundries) is hitting bulk production of 32nm CPUs, Intel will be cranking out a full node smaller.

They are getting to this size with a reduction in leakage thanks to a new version of their Hi-K Metal Gate (HKGM) material. This reduction in size (and leakage) means more energy and heat efficient CPUs. A reduction in process also means being able to pack more transistors into the same space, which of course means more functionality.

Yesterday we told you about AMD announcing their new hexa-core Thuban CPU on the day before IDF. Well, that news has been eclipsed with a single act. Overclocking master Shamino took an early engineering sample of Intel's six-core 32nm Gulftown and pushed it to an impressive 6.386GHz.

To reach this speed he needed some LN and 2.02 volts. The 6.386GHz OC is very nice but was not bench stable. To run 3DMark Vantage for a CPU score he had to drop back to 5.9GHz (still a nice overclock).

At this speed the new Gulftown was still able to completely smash the existing world record for CPU score with a staggering 51,177 not using any GPU based Physics. Now when you consider that the current record is only 32,328 you can see just how impressive this feat truly is.

DX11 is supposed to be the next big thing. At least that is what AMD and Microsoft would like you to think. On the surface (and in reality) it is a good step in the right direction for gaming. The problem lies in the way that it might be implemented by developers.

When we first heard that DiRT 2 and Racecar Driver Grid 2 were going DX11 we were very excited. Now we hear that the DX11 implementation will be a partial effort. Codemasters is not going to launch the game with full DX11 support.

Our sources tell us that there will be some of the more visible DX11 eye-candy enabled, but not all. This is a little disappointing to be honest, especially given the fact that AMD is offering coupons for a free copy of the game when it launches around the 23rd of October.

In similar fashion to ATI's deal with Valve in providing coupons for copies of Half Life 2 upon launch when purchasing select DirectX 9 based ATI graphics cards, it's been said that the imminent release of ATI's next family of desktop graphics cards, the Radeon HD 5800 series will come shipped with a coupon that allows the buyer to grab a copy of Dirt 2, the first DirectX 11 based game to hit the market.

However, no doubt due to shaking hands on optimization processes that favour ATI based graphics cards, the game's original launch date of September 10 has fallen back and at the least it won't be available until sometime in November, whilst the 5870 will inevitably be on shelves well before then, so you'll have to hold onto your coupon for a while before you can make use of it.