Notes from the show

INTEL, THE KING of the chip hill, was also hit somewhat by the global economic crisis, or the banksters' quickie profit venture, call it whichever you wish. Intel severely shrunk the Beijing Spring IDF to a one day China-only event, while the Taipei IDF, slated for late in the year as usual, was cancelled completely.

But even Intel couldn't ignore the little island whose vendors control the production of nearly 100% of all PC mainboards. So, Intel played it smart and weaved a little mini-IDF of its own for the huge vendor, buyer and of course press hack crowd present in Taipei, without having to spend too much dosh for a separate event.

The Computex keynote speaker this time was Intel's own Sean Maloney and, yes, with all the brand new toys and gadgets, you could mistake the stage for yet another IDF. Aside from the toys, his "Desktop Is Not Dead" statement made the biggest impact. After all, for all their fashion and popularity, laptops - not to mention netbooks - can't replace desktops' performance, features and the working comfort of a big screen and even bigger keyboard... that's the topic here. Whether you look at the corporate machine, a multimedia home theatre or an "enthusiast performer", the desktop still rulez.

Intel desktops

Talking about the performance, Intel's 5.07GHz (133 MHz BCLK times 38X multiplier) air-cooled - and yes it is special air cooling created with the assistance of Intel overclock wizard Francois Piednoel - Core i7 975 Extreme did steal the audience. But Intel's upcoming P55 chipset and its Core i5 CPU platform should give you almost all of those benefits at a far lower price. Its extra Turbo bins - two at full 4-core speed and up to four bins up when using just two cores - should spell serious trouble for AMD's Phenom II.

Intel turbo

Talking about Francois the french wizard and his pals, he was happily showing a very compact and completely silent little Core i7 975 gaming box with a nice LANparty style carrying handle. Using the Asus Rampage II Gene high-end microATX mobo with SLI and Xfire, it ran at the default 3.33GHz clock with all the turbo goodness enabled, and managed to stay at around 60 deg C when fully loaded. The trick? Well, the D-stepping here allows you to pull down the Vcc voltage all the way to 1.07 volts, saving a good 20% in power versus the default voltage, not to mention the heat!

So, either overclock or undervolt it, and you've got an interesting machine here....

Finally, Francois had another interesing thingie hidden under wraps - one of the first giant 8-core NehalemEX "Beckton" chips, each with 24MB cache. Imagine a high-powered dual-socket, 16 core, 32 thread, 48MB cache, 8-channel DDR3 desktop with two of these? Even Windows7 and many games would rarely come out of that huuuuuge cache! A dual socket AMD "Magny Cours" high end machine would have 24 cores in total, but only 12MB cache, so far more cache thrashing would occur. So, since both vendors will enable DP high-end machines with these processors too, this will be another interesting battle to watch in early 2010. µ