NVIDIA's Kepler GPU may not be available for the desktop yet, but Acer has let their latest Ultrabook, the Acer Aspire Timeline M3, go on sale, and the company has decided to lift the embargo early for the mobile part. Yippee!

This Ultrabook marks the first time NVIDIA's Kepler-based GPUs have been included in an Ultrabook. Acer's Aspire Timeline M3-581TG is a 15.6-inch Ultrabook that sports a full-sized keyboard. The M3 still sits within the constraints of Intel's Ultrabook restrictions, but still packs quite a huge punch in terms of performance.

Acer's M3 features an Intel Core i7-2637M (1.7GHz dual-core, 4MB of L3 cache), 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM, a 256GB SSD, a 3-cell Li-Polymer battery, and the standout feature: NVIDIA's GeForce GT 640M 1GB. The GPU in question is known as the GK107 which sports 384 cores and operates at up to 625MHz. When idling the GPU clocks down to 135MHz, with the standard clock rate sitting at 405MHz, while it can scale up to 625MHz, when needed.

Marvell have just announced their third-generation SSD which has gone into mass deployment, the Marvel 88SS9187 SATA controller is powered by high-performance embedded processor technology and sports a 6Gbps SATA III interface.

Marvell have said that a number of high-profile SSD manufacturers are set to deploy Marvell's 88SS9187 controller immediately, with more partners to jump on board over time. Marvell's latest and greatest technology offers an open, world-class architecture that supports industry-standard, high-speed NAND flash interface with up to 200MB/sec per channel.

The new Marvell 88SS9187 controller also offers something new, a ground-breaking correction capability thanks to its high-performance ECC engine with Adaptive Read and Write Scheme and on-chip RAID functionality to allow use of the latest generation of NAND flash devices in the fast-growing SSD markets.

Regina Dugan, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is leaving and joining the warm, cuddly arms of Google. Dugan has only been with DARPA for three years, but was "offered and accepted [a] senior executive position" with Google, according to DARPA spokesperson Eric Mazzacone.

Mazzacone also added that Dugan felt she couldn't refuse an offer from such an "innovative company" like Google. Dugan has accepted the offer, and will slide into an unspecified "senior executive position" with Google. Currently there's no word on when exactly she'll join Google, but it should be over the next few weeks.

Considering Dugan worked for a company that worked on shape-shifting robots, Mach 20 missiles and mind-controlled limbs, it would have to be an extraordinary opportunity for her to switch ranks and join Google. Working for DARPA must feel like working for Skynet, so maybe that's what made her change her mind? Maybe she saw some crazy things at DARPA that just made her want to disconnect and have more of a "real" job where she could talk about what she was working on with her loved ones, friends, etc.

It was only a little over 24 hours ago that we reported that game retailer, GAME, had "two weeks to turn its fortune around", but it seems those two weeks were a bit of a stretch. It's now being reported that The Game Group PLC is losing share prices, and fast. Dropping from 62p per share of last year down to a catastrophic 1.28p per share yesterday.

In response to this, the group has now placed their entire business up for sale, desperately looking for a buyer. GAME owns 610 stores in the UK alone, with 6,000 staff, as well as another 4,000 staff and 663 more stores across the world, with brands such as ScoreGames, Centro Mail, GAME, Gameplay, and Gamestation. The board has said:

Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group have released a video showing off their work on reducing input lag for touch screens. Microsoft have said that most touch-sensitive devices have a response lag somewhere between 50 and 100ms. But, their new screen technology reduces this to not just 25, or 10, or 5, but 1ms.

For larger touch-based surfaces like Microsoft's Surface, input lag can be a huge problem. The input delay becomes especially perceptible when drawing or quickly moving objects on the screen with your fingers. This issue has prompted Microsoft engineers to look into other ways of improving touch screen input lag deficiency. Microsoft haven't revealed how the technology actually works, but the video below demonstrates how their research may greatly improve the touch-based user experience.

Assistant director at Microsoft Applied Sciences, Paul Dietz, compares most flavors of input lag from 100ms, 50ms, 10ms and 1ms devices, by dragging an object around with a single finger. Between 100ms and 10ms the difference is quite substantial, where from 10ms to 1ms, is big, but not as big as the jump from 100ms to 10ms. You can definitely "feel" how the 1ms looks/feels right when being compared to the higher input lags of 50, 100ms.

Apple's new iPad is all that is really talked about these days, I personally think that an alien ship could land tomorrow in the middle of the White House lawn, or an earth-splitting 10-magnitude earthquake could happen on March 21/22 and it just wouldn't matter: because the new iPad is here.

After that's all said and done, one of the first video unboxings of the new iPad is here, where some folks over in Vietnam have claimed they have their hands on their retail version of the new iPad and have video evidence to prove so. The video above is your proof, and it looks great.

Not much can be understood, as I only speak English, but I have eyes and my eyes were greeted with the new iPad, and that's all I have to see. The video is just a tease of the flood of reviews, unboxings, and thoughts on the new iPad over the next week or so.

More details are arriving for NVIDIA's soon-to-arrive GEFORCE GTX 680, and these new specs are quite interesting. Fudzilla's source are saying that the new GTX 680 will sport two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors to provide a total TDP of around 190W.

Higher performance per watt is expected from not only users of the card, but NVIDIA, too. Considering the card features 1536 shader units, 2 (or 4GB) of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6GHz, a reported 'very high' GPU clock, we should expect very good things from the GTX 680. Performance is said to be in the area of AMD's Radeon HD 7970, where it wins in some benchmarks, and loses in others. These results are from NVIDIA, so we'll have to wait for some real-world testing.

The GPU itself is said to be around 300mm² in size, too. Price-wise, we should expect a US$549 price, but that is to be expected. NVIDIA is launching a card with more performance than the GTX 580, with much better performance per watt numbers. We should expect some competition in pricing, but that comes down to GPU flavor from other companies such as ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, etc as well as heated up competition from the already-released HD 7970.

Instagram is huge, I have so many friends who post their picture of the day on my Facebook wall, and to be 'cool', I've always wanted to get in on this, but, I have an Android phone. Instagram's co-creator, Kevin Systrom, used a presentation at South by Southwest's technology conference to showcase the Android-based version of Instagram.

The version shown was a closed beta, but should support multiple screen resolutions and should 'run very quickly'. Systrom did hint that there could be some features that the iOS version doesn't include, where he said to the audience "in some ways, it's better than our iPhone app".

Systrom didn't give a timeframe for when the app will hit Android, other than it is coming "really soon". Systrom also reiterated his view that Instagram had kept an iOS-exclusive app since launch its launch in 2010 in order to focus on the basics of scaling the platform, as well as coping with the insane number of users.

Earlier on today I did an unboxing video of the brand new and upcoming ASRock Z77 Extreme6 motherboard. This new board based on Intel's Z77 Express Ivy Bridge chipset is due out soon and comes with plenty of features packed in such as ASRock XFast 555 technology (XFast LAN, XFast USB, XFast RAM), Lucid VirtuMVP, Intel Smart Response, Intel Smart Connect and much more.

ASRock told us to say that this board supports 2nd and 3rd generation Intel Core processors and not "Ivy Bridge" processors, but at this stage of the game we're going to say Ivy Bridge, because we all know what we are talking about here.

ASRock's Z77 Extreme6 motherboard features a stylish and attractive gold and black color scheme which looks really great. The PCB is black and gold comes into the theme by way of the gold touches on the coolers as well as the Japanese golden caps. The board includes three PCI Express x16 slots for up to three-way SLI and CrossFireX support. ASRock does claim that the board can support Quad SLI, which it can, but only by way of using two dual-GPU video cards such as the GeForce GTX 590.

Apple's just-released iTunes 10.6 sports the ability for users to option higher quality audio conversion bitrates when syncing songs to iOS-based devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod. Before iTunes 10.6, users were given the option to down-convert higher bitrate songs to a crappy 128kbps level.

This allowed more songs to be synced to devices, but some users would rather higher quality audio, than savings to their device's storage capacity. With iTunes 10.6, users now have two options: to down-convert audio to quality levels of 192, or 256kbps, giving users three options of bitrate when syncing music to their mobile device.

iTunes purchases are encoded at 256kbps, but CD rips are at 320kbps, this means that the new setting allows people the option to reduce the quality slightly down to 256kbps when syncing to a mobile device, whilst keeping the higher quality 320kbps rip stored on their main desktop or notebook.