Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video, Wearables

We’re sure you’re well aware of Nike and Apple’s mutual partnership (or two) by now, and this time Nike’s C.O.R.E. Backpack iD is getting some familiar iPod lovin’ with a built-in remote keypad system and dock connector interface. While we’re fairly certain you already own at least one piece of apparel with electrostatic iPod controls on them, they’ll eventually end up in the wash (we hope), leaving you liaison-less for the day. With Nike’s new pack, your books, laptop, Cheetos stash, and little white (or colorful) Apple are all taken care of on a daily basis. Nike allows you to fully customize the backpack, and aside from choosing your alma mater’s colors, the “Nike Flow” backpanel, or the sweet “security zippers,” you can opt to have the iPod controls built straight into the strap. Per usual, you can dictate the volume, track, and play / pause / stop functions while on the go, and it even boasts a handy headphone port as well as a storage compartment for when you ditch the cans and actually pay attention in class. The C.O.R.E. Backpack iD starts at just $55, but the oh-so-tempting iPod interface bumps the price up to $105, but it’s still a bit cheaper than your alternatives.

[Via iLounge]

 

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This year we’ve been hearing lots of the Core Duo, especially when it comes to the media and their loads of Apple laptop news. But now the reviews of the Core 2 Duos are in, and they’ve supplanted the Athlon 64 FX as the top pocessor out now.

The results also show a significant advantage for Intel over AMD by pretty much every metric that counts to power users: price, performance, power consumption, and all the combinations of those three.

We’ll spare you the extreme details that you need a degree in EE to understand—we have one and we still don’t—but suffice it to say that the Core 2′s performance on everything was excellent. The $316 Core 2 Duo E6600 is a great deal for the power it’s got, and if you’re after the most amount of power, there’s the Core 2 Extreme X6800 at $999.

If you’re into the nitty gritty like charts and performance comparisons, check out the links below. – Jason Chen

Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors
Conroe at last [Tech Report via Ars Technica]

Filed under: Desktops

The reign of Core Duo has dominated 2006, but now is the time for a line of desktop processors to take the stand for justice. Or something like that. Announced in June, Intel's Core 2 Duo is officially "out" today -- though you can't buy 'em just yet -- and bit-tech.net has given the Conroe and Allendale lines (4MB vs. 2MB L2 cache) an incredibly thorough rundown. We're not total chip nuts, so some of the architecture notes went a bit over our heads, but it's clear that the Intel's Core architecture has the makings of a champ. While sharing a misleadingly similar name, Intel's Core Duo mobile line isn't actually built on Intel's "Core" chip design, notably lacking 64 bit compatibility. However, the breakthroughs made in the "Yonah" Core Duo chips really shine through in the Core Duo 2, and the chip thoroughly trounced AMD's offerings in bit-tech.net's benchmark tests. Of course, at $999 in the high end (the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800), and with AMD timing price cuts for Intel's July 24th release party, you might not be quite getting the performance-per-dollar for your desktop that the Athlon has been boasting of lately. Luckily, even faster chips are on the way, and AMD and Intel are charging into a price war that should give us some of the best valued chips we've seen in a while.

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