Posted 07/14/09 at 09:30:36 AM by Paul Lilly

Netbooks might not be getting bigger (or else they'd be called notebooks), but according to Slashgear, the average screen resolution in systems using Intel's Atom N-series chipsets is going up, and with the chip maker's blessing.

"According to HKEPC, Intel has increased the maximum allowed resolution from 1024 x 600 to 1366 x 768, as seen on the recently-announced Sony VAIO W," Slashgear wrote.

As it stands right now, in order to use the higher resolution panels, companies must choose from Intel's Z-series Atom chips, or else forgo the preferential N-series pricing. Intel's reasoning for doing this has been to clearly distinguish between a netbook and notebook, but perhaps the company is now content to let the physical screen size separate the two segments.

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Posted 07/10/08 at 10:42:19 PM by Paul Lilly

Insert your own 'size matters' joke, but jesting aside, UC San Diego's new scientific display system is one big mother. The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space (HIPerSpace) boasts a screen resolution of almost 287 million pixels, or more than 10 percent bigger than the second largest display, which checks in at 256 million pixels.

To make the display possible, it took 70 high-resolution Dell 30" monitors arranged in fourteen columns of five displays each. Each 'tile' in the multi-tile paradigm sports 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, bringing the combined visible resolution to 35,640 x 8,000 pixels. But before contemplating such a setup for the baddest TF2 gaming environment on the block, it would take an area capable of housing a 31.8 feet wide by 7.5 feet tall display, and one can only imagine the GPU horsepower needed to try and run a modern videogame. Instead, the HIPerSpace is being put to better use displaying large data sets, giving scientists the ability to explore space in real time, model the impact of seismic activity on structures, predict climate changes, analyze the structure of the human brain, and a bunch of other tasks that have nothing to do with WSAD.

Find out how many quad-core processors and Nvidia GPUs it takes to run the mammoth display after the jump.

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