Intel tech showcase needs thorough re-bore

EVERY Intel Developer Forum, whether in the US or somewhere in Asia, has some kind of Tech Showcase, essentially a mini expo with Intel itself and a bunch of allied vendors displaying anything from early demos of new technologies to the very current stuff on sale.

This year, the major news here at the bottom floor of Moscone West was the virtual non presence of the good ship Itanic, except for one demo system, and the omnipresence of 45 nm Penryn platforms at every level, everywhere - except for the quad-socket MP platform, of course.

Among those Penryns, do take a look at this X-shaped X38-based high end gaming PC - despite the unique shape, it manages to fit a full ATX board and dual GPUs with all the related trinkets. They probably won't sell too many of these in Far East, as X-shape is considered very unlucky by the Chinese.

Kingston, Corsair, Netlist and Supertalent showed their new high-end memories on desktop, mobile and server fronts. The interesting entries were Kingston's new ultrafast CL 3-3-3-6 T1 FB DIMM 800 for the upcoming dual-socket Skulltrail platform - as well as any other Harpertown Stoakleys that accept its SPD read - followed by Corsairs DDR3-1800+ Dominators and SuperTalent's standard-format SATA and PATA SSD drives of up to 128 GB. Fitting in 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDD bays, these drivers ship now and are a good indicator of things that may come from others, including Intel. I'd personally still like an internal PCIe v2 x1 parallel flash drive, as it would give us the lowest latency and highest possible bandwidth.

Asetek, the guys behind the HP water cooled gaming and workstation systems, demoed their inexpensive cascaded water cooling solution, with claimed zero maintenance as there is no need to top up the integrated liquid for 50,000 hours of operation, or some six years.

On top of it, a few Infiniband and 10GE entries, as well as Geneseo-compliant Altera FSB FPGA accelerators, round up the stuff interesting to me among the non-Intel bothies.

I'd personally like to see the Tech Showcase enhanced with more Taiwanese OEM presence: Asus, Gigabyte, Tyan and others have just as much to show at the application of new Intel technology as any of the US-based allies. Also, a bit of revamp with more exciting booths would be welcome.

Interestingly, Nvidia, the supposed leader in graphics and so on, had a minuscule ~2 square metre booth, with just two demo systems and nothing really new showed. I did expect more from this company, as, well, next IDF here might be too late for them - mainstream and, possibly, high end Larrabee-based Intel GPUs might be the ones getting all the attention then. I hope that Nvidia gets the picture and does something proper, prior to getting really, very literally, squeezed - on every single product segment - between solid rock (Intel) and bailed-out hard place (AMD) next year...