IT IS mid October, and Taipei weather is great, something like London - 20 C, cloudy, with a bit of rain - lovely to take a enjoyable mile-long walk from the hotel to Taipei WTC. This happens to be the site of yet another IDF Taiwan this week - a week crowded with other events here as well, like Asus EEE PC launch and Rambus Developer Forum.

While most of the keynotes and news are regurgitated stuff from the last month's San Francisco "main event", there were few interesting keynote show off "improvements" worth keeping in mind.

Remember the massively overclocked 3 GHz X9650 Yorkfield Extreme desktop that ran at 5.56 GHz using triple cascaded phase change freezer at something under -100 degrees Celsius at the Frisco show? Well, looks like the sample got better: supposedly we're talking now about an early run of the X9770 3.2 GHz FSB1600 Yorkfield Extreme CPU, expected to be paired with the X48 - or as I call it, in Chinese lucky 4-less numbering system, X38.8 - chipset.

The same globetrotting & overclocking wizard, Charles Wirth a.k.a Fugger, owner of xtremesystems.org , did the job this time with the same 200-pound cooling gear, and broke the 5.8 GHz barrier. Not bad for a (still) pre-production CPU! I asked him afterwards about getting to a stable 6 GHz running all the benchmarks, the chap is confident - whether it will take another stepping, let's see.

On the other side of the world, a few miles away from home, the other overclocking king, Shamino, on the same day broke the 6 GHz Great Wall with LN2 cooling using the current X9650 Yorkfield - and matched to the system at a nice FSB2000!

However, it also required modding the Foxconn mainboard with bigger inductors and caps. The cascaded phase change freezer cooling can be (and is) packaged as a shipping product, while we're still a bit away from being able to buy LN2 cooled systems in shops - anyone with an idea here?

In the absence of that, I'd personally be happy if we can have simple, everyday use 5 GHz Yorkfields or dual socket Harpertowns (did anyone say " frozen Skulltrail"?) using standard single-phase freeze coolers that you get from BioHazard, Asetek and a few others any day. With the X9770, that should be achieved.

On the other end of the spectrum, Mooly Eden's mobile quad-core 45 nm CPU for the Montevina platform, while still almost a year away from being sold in notebook systems, had another live demo - the grapevine says that that this 45 W CPU sould be able to do 2.66 GHz/FSB1066 while still in the same TDP bracked as the future Extreme Edition 3.2 GHz / FSB1066 dual-core notebook Penryn. Not bad - no mention of any mobile tripod, sorry tri-core, CPUs though.

My concern is how to cool all that stuff - Mooly did show some nice fridge-like compressor stuff for efficient notebook cooling, but, with a 45 W CPU, an ever-hotter chipset and, often, a discrete GPU, I'm not sure if we may end up soon seeing an external "liquid plus heat pipe plus radiator" cooling gadgets for such laptops. µ