IDF Fall 2004: Intel Technology Showcase

Introduction:

For a couple hours every day Intel allowed press and forum attendees to walk through the technology showcase and spend time with the companies who paid to have booths. What was nice about IDF is that the number of people attending the show is under 6,000 including the press, which was an army of 600 key domestic and international story hunters. Although for some this may seem like a large forum, but overall the event was small and private. Everyone that walked the show floor could easily talk with the companies who had booths. So for developers wanting to hold a private one on one conversation with a company they want to partner with this was the ideal place to get your foot in the door. The Intel Technology Showcase is not about having booth babes or radical demo systems. It is about giving developers access to key companies in the industry that they may want to partner with. Lets go ahead and see what the show had on display with focus on what our desktop readers would be interested in.

Nvidia had the just launched Geforce 6600 GT’s on display for everyone to take a look at. They also had some Geforce 6800 Ultras running on Supermicro boards supporting the 16X and 8X PCI-E slots. We saw similiar systems down in Dallas for Quakecon 2004, but it is always fun to take one of these demo systems for a spin. The developers at the showcase are not the gamer types, so there was never a long line for these demo machines. Everyone around the booth seemed to enjoy gaming on the SLI systems, but I’m not sure how much was the cards and the huge wide screen LCD displays they were using.

ATI was on hand showing off their X600XT AIW PCI-Express card and also the ATI TV Tuner that is based on the 1x PCI-e slot. THe TV Tuner has full DVI, VGA and HDTV support, but it is only have the option for an HDTV input.

Corsair and Kingston were on hand showing off their enthusiast lines of memory. Corsair had a system up and running PC2-5400 Pro modules and was showing a new memory configuator that Corsair will soon have up on their public website. The configuator will help aid consumers in finding which modules will work best for your motherboard/chipset combination. Corsair also had some interesting news on the water cooling side of things though. Turns out that Corsair will no longer be working with Delphi on their future projects.

Kingston had a clear cased demo system running some of their new PC2-5400 HyperX modules. They also had some of their new generation DataTraveler that have read speeds up to 19MB/sec and write speeds of up to 13MB/sec. Their original USB key had a maximum sustained write speed of only 1.5MB/sec, so the new generation is up to 9 times faster than the original. That should be a night and day difference and make a great product even better.