HP is first to announce true quad-core laptops

HP's claiming not one but two laptop firsts today. Over at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, it's taken the wraps of its new EliteBook 8730w Mobile Workstation - a laptop it claims is the first with an Intel mobile quad-core processor and the first to sport a true high-color display. Read on for more.

Till now, quad-core laptops have generally used repurposed desktop parts to achieve four cores but the 8730w uses a genuine (and as yet unannounced) Intel mobile 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme processor. That doesn't quite give it the clock speed of some of the high-end Duos but does give it the edge in multitasking jobs like video encoding where all four cores can be put to use.

The 8730w's new 17in 'high-colour' display is also unique in its ability to trow out a full 16 million colours - or roughly more than 60 times as many as a standard, 260,000-colour, laptop LCD. It's no match for HP's billion-colour DreamColor desktop displays but it is sufficient to allow colour-critical visual editing on the move without recourse to an external monitor.

It'll be available in the States before the month is up starting at $1,699, although that's for the dual-core Core 2 Duo models. Core 2 Extreme pricing is yet to be announced.

Two 15.4in models have also been announced for release next month; the EliteBook 8530p and 8530w. They also get as yet unpriced Core 2 Extreme options. Core 2 Duo models will start at $1,499.

[ Press Release]