Intel toys with Chocolate Rain, X48s and R680s

CES HAD A BUNCH of tidbits from Intel that didn't get much play.

They ranged from Alienware to Chocolate Rain, SSDs to scooters, and all were of equal importance to the IT aficionado.

The teeming Intel CES booth - Standing room only!

At the CES Intel booth - a lively and multi-faceted affair as you can see - there were lots of toys on display, but little of it got written up many times. The first was Skulltrail systems, note the plural. The most relevant one was the Alienware Skulltrail box, meaning there will be OEM systems based on this beast.

Time for that third mortgage

There will be ones offered up in all sorts of configs, from NV to ATI, so you can pick your favorite GPUs and toys, provided you have hit the lottery in the recent past. To show they were not picky, there was an ATI based box just below the NV one.

What to be seen in at CES

From there we were whisked off to the X48 demo, yes the oft- delayed X48 is real, and the boards were everywhere at the show behind closed doors. Intel had one, and the best part was they had an ATI 3870X2 aka R680 in it. Ooooh, pretty. You can see how shiny it is below, it clearly has two GPUs on one PCB.

Two, two, two GPUs in one

That brings us to SSDs, Intel makes flash, or it sort of does, depending on how the sale of the unit is going this week. In any case, it also makes SSD controllers, something very few if any others do. If it leverages its silicon prowess, it could have SSDs significantly faster than anyone else out there.

The one thing Intel did do that the competition did not is make a decent looking case. Most put the SSDs in the cheapest possible box and simply slap a logo on it. Intel at least made an effort to look good, and it shows. I hereby award the Inq 17th Annual Best Dressed SSD of CES award to Intel, this year, they deserved it, especially after the close call of the 13th, running in 1999.

The hippest SSD at CES

Last up, Intel had a demo promoting viral videos, and to show it off, they had Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain fame. If you want to see what a viral video is, check out the hit count here, it has 13 million+ hits on this page alone, and about a dozen spinoffs.

Tay Zonday with an Intel badge

Intel used this to show that its chips are pretty darn good at making such videos, and even better at encoding/decoding them. Not many home video users are going to stress a Core Number Numeral, but codecs compiled for the new instructions won't hurt.

There was nothing earth-shattering or unexpected at CES, just evolutions and refinements of what we already know about. When evolutions are 4GHz OC'ed eight-core gaming boxes and refinements are ultra-fast SSDs, who are we to complain? µ