Dell offers glimpse of monster quad-core laptop

Dell revealed its first quad-core notebook yesterday, a 17in monster that'll appear as part of its Precision mobile workstation line once Intel gets its four-core laptop chips out the door.

You'll have to wait until the autumn, the chip giant admitted, but it's likely to find a fair few folk will given the tantalising glimpses it's given of the beast's specs.

All Dell's revealing of its quad-core laptop

In addition to the first mobile quad-core CPU, the machine - dubbed the M6400 - will support up to 16GB of main memory - and 1GB for the on-board but unnamed GPU. Or GPUs - multiple components seem the name of the game here: it'll also take a pair of hard drives with a total capacity of 1TB.

The machine will drive a pair of 30in monitors, but its own screen is no fall-back. The 17in edge-to-edge panel is LED backlit and will deliver a full RGB colour gamut, Dell pledged. DisplayPort connectors come as standard.

There's a cute iPod-style clickwheel next to the trackpad to help out with video editing and the like.

Finally, the system sports a flame orange casing - black'll be available for more conservative buyers - that wraps the workstation in colour.