A graphic Lunar New Year cometh in Taipei

WHILE I'M INSTALLING the updated GPU drivers for Intel's first 'Fusion' CPU and GPU dual-die chip, the Core i5 661, and fixing any minor hiccups from the old revisions, let's look at what happened during the past week's Taipei fortnightly visit, a few weeks before the Lunar New Year holiday season kicks in. The Chinese New Year's Day this year falls on, guess when, Valentine's Day!

In January, Taipei winter can be a quite pleasant affair. The temperatures hover around 15 degrees C, or what the locals call "freezing cold". Well, compared to the freezing temperatures that the EU and US experience at the same time on one hand, and persisting Singapore 30C beach 'winter' on the other, I'd rather call the Taipei January refreshingly cool.

Equally refreshing was the onslaught of hardware platforms for Intel's first 32nm CPUs, the dual core Core i5 661 Clarkdale. The H55 and H57 chipsets are implemented on a variety of mostly microATX and yes, even smaller miniITX mainboards, all supporting DVI and HDMI direct screen outputs. A closer check discovered that, in many cases, the screen output is limited to 1920x1080 resolution, though. Don't hope to reliably drive your 2560x1600 30-inch LCD out of these. But then, if you can afford such a monitor, you can surely take a matching high-end GPU on top and, Intel would hope, a high-end LGA1366 socket CPU to drive it, too.

The vendors I spoke with are generally upbeat about the prospect of this cheap, power-saving platform from Intel, as well as the opportunity to innovate a bit with a variety of display outputs. Some, like Asus, add VGA for old budget monitors, others add DisplayPort. There are also the versions with the H57 chipset which, besides its 'accelerated' storage feature, also add a PCI bridge sitting off the CPU or chipset PCIe lanes to connect extra USB3 and SATA3 ports, which are still not integrated in Intel's latest chipset iteration.

The issue of performance is still on the minds of some when it comes to Intel's integrated GPU. While the direct QPI access to the CPU and decent bandwidth from the dual channel DDR3-1333 memory do provide a boost over the G45 integrated graphics chipset from Intel's Core 2 generation, for example, the feeling is that Intel could have done more in beefing up the integrated GPU chip's hardware oomph itself.

Well, it could if it did the integrated GPU chip in 32nm process too - that die is still on the 45nm process while the CPU die is made on the 32nm line - but then, that shrink and the resulting speedups are left for the Sandy Bridge processor generation a year from now. There, you'll have four cores plus GPU, all on one die. The Intel Haifa team in Israel will most likely have engineered that integrated GPU for much more performance, especially since the absence of desktop Larrabee in any form anytime soon has been known within Intel for quite a while.

Good stuff comes in the form of real 'green' power usage focus. Many of the new boards come with full support for 1.35V or even 1.2V low-voltage DDR3 memory, not just saving up to half of power, but practically eliminating the memory heat issue. When added to the very low CPU plus integrated GPU power, and combined with a low power simple SSD, you can now have a slim, very compact home theatre PC under your LCD TV, all consuming less than 80W even when running 3Dmark Vantage as measured at the plug by yours truly.

As the new 32nm CPUs with integrated GPUs don't overclock that well once the integrated GPU is enabled, many of the new mainboards don't have the extraordinary overclocking and tuning features that their high end brethren have. After all, this is an entry level line.

Talking about the high end, we all know the crowning glory of the 2010 PC and workstation processors will be the six-core Gulftown flavour of Westmere in the usual LGA1366 socket. Yes, both the Core i7 980X and its Xeon 5600 series brethren will be plug compatible with their quad-core Nehalem predecessors. In most cases, the existing mainboards will just need a BIOS update prior to installing the new CPU.

Fewer boards for the Taiwanese to sell there? Not exactly the case. With the new processors, Intel has also prepared a major stepping update of the Tylersburg chipset for both the desktop and the workstation and server markets. So, for the best performance and compatibility you might also want to, guess what, get a new mainboard too.

It doesn't sound as bad to get a new motherboard in this case, as anyway one might want to update to USB3 and SATA3, as well as improved memory performance, as newer boards should have a more optimised memory system allowing higher speeds using all three channels per CPU. However, there's still no publicly expressed commitment by any vendor to release a dual LGA1366 spiritual successor to Intel's Skulltrail. So, getting a fully overclockable dual-CPU Westmere-EP board is still a bit away, 'til we find out who launches what in March.

On the whole, the high end mainboard landscape is not changing much yet, as Asus and Gigabyte rule the roost, while DFI, EVGA and MSI continue behind them. MSI's long term mainboard presence is questioned by many, while DFI and EVGA are expected to continue focusing on their own high-end niches. On the other hand, giant Foxconn's once much vaunted Quantum Force high-end mainboard venture is all but forgotten now.

Finally, the workstation and server mainboard vendors here are starting to venture further beyond OEM design contract dependence and, after Asus somewhat succeeded in promoting its own - still very limited - branded boards and solutions in this segment, more vendors might move a step further to get more from this high-margin market. Just like in any other field, when compared to the low cost and increasingly high value mainland, Taiwan's IT futures are not in low cost volume stuff any more. Rather, it's either high-end or The End. µ