Remember Intel's Nehalem? Oh, wait, they didn't release that one yet! Anyway, there are a lot of things known about it already, like the fact that it may be faster than expected, will have support for triple channel DDR3, and - that's no good news for AMD, but it was expected - sooner or later, Intel's Nehalem will be a direct competitor to the AMD Fusion platform, although these two only have a few things in common. This is not about head to head racing, but about survival(AMD's, of course), but it seems Nehalem may not arrive in time, and so here's another opportunity for AMD to catch up!


Ehhh...did anyone say "delay?" Here's what Doug Freedman, analyst at American Technology Research, says - "Our checks suggest Intel’s Nehalem server parts will initially launch in single-socket only, which we believe will be viewed by customers and investors as a delayed ramp of the company’s second generation 45nm server architecture due out in late 2H ’08. We believe this may be viewed as the second launch delay in recent weeks and is likely to call into question Intel's solid record of on-time execution."

I don't think that many users can't get enough with the latest Intel processors, or even with AMD ones, and so probably hearing that Nehalem may be delayed isn't such a big disappointment, but it's funny to see that, after claiming last year that octa-core Nehalems will be shipping in 2008, Intel's CEO Paul Otellini is now saying they will only be able to produce the Bloomfield quad-core Nehalem this year!

Well, if the Nehalem chips really get delayed, and AMD manages to release the Shanghai 45nm server chip, we may see things slowly getting back on track for AMD, but I wonder why does Intel have to lie to its users? I always think it's better to say "I'll get there, but I may be late" and arrive on time, rather than doing it the other way around, as Intel seems to have done with the Nehalem chip...

A lot of people avoid liquid cooling systems for PCs because they are afraid of leaks, consider them too expensive, or simply don't need such a thing as "liquid cooling," but this is slowly moving from the enthusiast area to mainstream. Do you want a proof? What if I say that IBM uses water cooling in its labs on a regular basis, and they don't do it just for fun, because a prototype that integrates a whole new way of cooling 3D chips using liquids has just been shown to the world!


What they have in mind is to have 3D chip stacks, putting chips and memory on a board on top of one another, instead of placing them side by side. Why? To fill the space between the layers with cooling liquid, of course!

Thomas Brunschwiler, project leader at IBM’s Zurich research laboratory, said "As we package chips on top of each other to significantly speed a processor’s capability to process data, we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don’t scale. In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling. Until now, nobody has demonstrated viable solutions to this problem."

I know it may sound a bit out of this world, but if we think about the fact that the IBM team managed to pipe water into cooling structure as thin as human hair (50 microns), it all starts to make sense. By using the superior thermophysical qualities of water, they reached 180W/sq cm per layer for a 4sq cm stack!

Unfortunately, this is only a lab experiment for now, and since the results were presented at the IEEE ITherm conference in Orlando, Florida, in a paper called "Forced convective interlayer cooling in vertically integrated packages," we're not going to see this solution inside our computers in the near future, but it's good to know such a technology is not that far either...

Everybody seems to love Intel these days, except AMD, since Intel processors sell like crazy, no matter if the buyers are on a budget, or big spenders. Obviously, there are still plenty AMD customers around, too, some of them on a budget, and others simply AMD lovers to the end. South Korea's competition regulator doesn't seem to love anyone, since they are only trying to keep the market fair to everyone, so this time they fined Intel. No love, no hate, just a fine for Intel's behaviour, as we're going to see right away...


The story is very simple - Intel offered rebates to South Korean computer companies, undercutting its direct competitor, AMD. Well, don't say this is wrong or right - it's the opinion of the Korean Fair Trade Commission, and I don't have anything against it, unlike Intel.

The fine is as large as 26bn won ($25.4/£13 million), and Intel spokesman Nick Jacobs says its company "did not use rebates in an anticompetitive fashion." Of course. And I saw a pig fly today. Did you see pigs flying, too?

If there's one reason to hate those guys from VR-Zone, that's the fact some of them are now rollin' around a lot of hot pieces of hardware at Computex Taipei these days, and you can understand what you want from "hardware." As a first example, take the image below... but leaving this aside, there are a lot of other things to see there. After all, hot chicks are the salt and pepper of Computex, but the "main dish"...that's a completely different thing!


The first edition of Computex Taipei, also known as the Taipei International Information Technology Show took place back in 1981, when small and medium sized businesses in Taiwan got together to display their latest products, but since early 1990s, it really took off, becoming the second largest computer expo in the world today, after CeBIT. This year's edition just took off, and it is expected to last until the 7th of June, but leaving girls aside, here's a quick overview of what you should see there...

Asus tries to bring ultimate audio into our houses, apart from doing what they do best - motherboards, videocards, monitors, and all the rest. At Computex, you should go and see the latest Xonar cards, as well as the Asus chicks, of course!


Abit, once known as an exclusivist motherboard producer, now seems to push its brand name slowly into the consumer electronics market, since they have announced a digital photo frame with a built-in printer. I would really like to see that up close and personal, but anyway - if you're one of their older fans, don't despair! There are still enough Abit motherboards around, including high-end models, as we've been used to see so far from this excellent company.


There are a lot of interesting things to see from MSI, apart from the chicks present at the company's booth. A must see is the Atom mini-ITX motherboard which is being shipped as part of the barebone Wind system, as well as the MSI 9600 Hybrid Freezer videocard, with "semi-passive" cooling.


Apart from having its own Atom mini-ITX board ready, Gigabye also arrived at Computex with a interesting silent cooling solution for video cards, which you can see in the image above. Claiming that this passive cooling system "cools better than the standard Nvidia solution" is a very courageous thing to do, and I can only hope the Gigabyte GeForce 9600 GT Dual Core card can live up to these expectations.

As I said, these were only a few highlights. If you're in Taiwan or somewhere near, you should definitely go and check Computex Taipei, you have no excuse to miss it!

For about 5 years, I had a Quantum Pioneer SG 2.1GB HDD, which I had to give to someone as a replacement, and that beauty is still working great in a very old computer, somewhere. In the meantime, I added a Seagate drive to my computer. This one was a 8.4GB one, but after that, hell broke loose. I jumped straight to a 80GB one, after less than a year I got it replaced, because it died, then I got a 250GB one, then a new computer with a 320GB drive, and now, less than a year after the last purchase, I am thinking about a 1TB drive, and I can't say I am upgrading frequently...


All the above has a close connection with the latest news regarding the HDD market, because this is what happens everywhere - HDDs are so cheap, that it's a pity not to grab more and more storage as you move on, since any new drive gets full pretty soon, no matter how large it may be. I know, there are people who can still live their lives with a "tiny" 40GB or 80GB drive, but I'll leave them aside.

According to IDC, worldwide HDD shipments are expected to grow, despite the economic uncertainty faced by individuals and businesses all around the planet. Even more, disk storage systems shipments will continue to grow until 2012, IDC estimating a 53% yearly growth. Then, it's the end of the world, of course, so no additional forecast.(heh, just joking!)

John Rydning, research director for hard disk drives at IDC, said "Disk drive OEMs are very aware of the different competing storage technologies that exist today, and will exist in the future. They will rightly shrug-off these competing technologies for a later day, choosing instead to capitalize on the healthy and profitable opportunities that lie ahead in the hard disk drive industry."

I know SSDs may seem the way of the future for some, but it will surely take years until they manage to surpass HDDs in volume sales. The reasons are obvious, so it seems I won't be forced to move to SSDs anytime soon, as it happened with the AGP bus, for example.