Big Blue says that the shiny new System z10 you just installed in your basement yesterday is officially obsolete and should be relegated to household media streaming/torrent duty in the wake of its replacement.  Behold the zEnterprise System, and its central compute server the zEnterprise 196, capable of processing more instructions than your puny humanoid mind could ever dream of issuing.  Don't look now, but your girly-man netbook just peed itself.

APPLE'S THREE NEW iPods are likely to make many of its fans part with their money as soon as they become available next week, but we can't say that we're ecstatic about the new models. Most of it was expected, but Apple did throw in a couple of surprises to keep everyone on their toes.

STEVE JOBS ANNOUNCED Apple's new Apple TV today and to say that the new model is a huge improvement in just about every way compared to the old one, would be an understatement. However, all is not well in the kingdom of Apple, as the new Apple TV still lacks features that most, if not all of it competitors offer.

VIEWSONIC IS YET again branching out into unknown territory with its first Android tablet. It's not ViewSonic's first foray into the handheld market, but it's the first time the company has done so with a non-Microsoft OS. The new ViewPad 7 doesn't look that different from every other tablet we've seen so far, but it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.

THOSE OF YOU that have been waiting for more details on Intel's mobile Sandy Bridge processor are in luck, as thanks to Anandtech we now have quite a few additional details of what will be on offer. One of the main missing pieces of the puzzle was the clock speeds of the integrated graphics, but it turns out that there's another surprise on store for us that had yet to be revealed.

AMD HAS ANNOUNCED that it finally has given up on the ATI brand name for its graphics cards and all its products will from now on just carry the AMD logo. Is this going to make a difference as to how people perceive Radeon graphics cards? Well, according to AMD, no.

LUCID'S HYDRA HAS yet to prove itself as a replacement for either CrossFire or SLI, but today Lucid announced a new solution which might see the company gaining some more ground. Lucid's new Unity graphics card design looks set to change the way that the Hydra chips have been used so far, as by moving the Hydra chips to the graphics card, the motherboard is no longer a limiting factor.

THE FIRST IN-DEPTH benchmarks of Sandy Bridge have appeared courtesy of Anandtech and it looks like Intel has done more than just a few tweaks to Clarkdale and has managed to come up with something quite impressive. Not only is the new CPU core a big improvement over Clarkdale, but Intel has really delivered on its promise to boost the graphics performance by two times that of Clarkdale. Some explanations as to how Sandy Bridge will overclock is also provided, but this is unlikely to make everyone happy.

WELL THAT DIDN'T take long, the first 3DMark Vantage numbers for one of AMD's upcoming ATI Radeon HD 6800 cards has made its way onto the internets with a bit of help from a Chinese forum member. Normally we'd be very sceptical to post something like this, but the creator behind GPU-Z told us that the screen shot appears to be the real deal.

AMD APPEARS TO have slipped in the codenames for its entire Northern Island range of GPUs in its latest Catalyst 10.8 driver release. Confused? Well, it turns out that AMD had some internal naming issues as the 32nm Northern Island parts never happened thanks to TMSC pulling the plug on 32nm, but now the code names have been applied to AMD’s upcoming 40nm Evergreen refresh that is set to launch later this year.

ZOTAC HAS FINALLY launched its CULV powered mini-ITX motherboard that we spotted back in June at Computex. Alongside it Zotac also announced a pair of new ZBOX mini PCs which also use Intel's CULV processors paired up with Nvidia's ION chipset. We're still waiting for a few more products from Zotac that we were shown behind closed doors at Computex, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, instead let's take a closer look at today's announcements.