Hammer gets thorough airing

THE FACT WE WERE out of the country meant we lost the plot a little on non-Intel stories, and a side-effect of that is that it's a while since we've done our famous Hardware Webwatch. So we'll try and put together a bumper bundle today - and promise to do better in the days to come.

We bumped into Michael from Lost Circuits at the AMD Hammer demo and also at the rather strange memory conference hosted by both Intel and Samsung - with our triathlon Rambus friend sitting on the front row. Now he's gone and done a really long and in-depth piece on IDF and that you can find here.

Ace's Hardware has confirmation that Intel won't be supporting Rambus RDRAM 1066 with its Tehama-E (850E) chipset, which will be launched in the second quarter of this year. Johan reckons that 1066 will attract a price premium and that's scaring La Intella off, a tad.

The lads at [H]ardOCP take a look at VisionTek's GeForce4 TI4600, and that you can find right over here.

At JC there's news that the Athlon XP2100 is likely to arrive next week. He also mentions that AMD is starting up a design centre in Boston headed by those guys at API. That Eva Glass is so well connected - how does she do it? All stories come true in the end, she reckons, although she's had some flakkety-flak about Microsoft's bid to make Nvidia slash its prices for the X-Box 2, whenever that arrives.

There's a review at Socket A of the Biostar M7V1B-A motherboard, which uses the Via KT266A chizzyset. AMD Zone, which is so closely affiliated to Socket A you can hardly see the joins, tells of a Tyan single Athlon board on the way. Meanwhile we are still hearing grumbles about its dual Athlon MP boards, with people thinking that it had better get a new BIOS out of the door, tout suite...

There's word at Xbitlabs of new chipsets and products based on them from SIS, Intel and Via coming at CeBIT next week. The same site also has news of ALI's chipset plans. Go here for the information. We'll be at SnoBIT next week too... whoohoo, maybe...

And at OC Workbench, we see that ALI has started shipping low consumption chipsets for Intel Pentium 4Ms.

HardwareLUXX has a review of the Epox 4BDA2+ 478 pin mobo - and that can be read by clicking on this spot.

Some extra IDF thoughts. Why did people start throwing mighty beachballs around the room during Kicking Pat Gelsinger's keynote speech last week? Well, because at a similar presentation at a sales conference three weeks before, Intel had used American footballs, and it was felt that hacks, analysts and other delegates had softer heads than sales people. That didn't stop one guy from being nearly knocked off his chair when a huge beachball was lobbed from only 20 yards away and caught him, so to speak, hopping... µ