rob was here.

and not a drop to drink. Today was day 1 of computex. For those unfamiliar with this, it is the annual trade show where hardware developers show to the public what they intend on releasing in the upcoming months. Similar to the E3 trade show which happened last week (except that was about video games).

This years announcements seem a lot more revolutionary than previous years. In the last few years, the biggest breakthroughs seemed to be focused around advancements in mobile computing (centrino, low power mobile cpu's, etc) and the movement from 32bit to 64bit architectures.

The exciting thing about this year is the announcements of multi-core cpu's and gpu's intended for home users.

AMD has announced their AMD64-X2 lineup, which are dual-core 64bit athlons. Four models will be debuted in the near future (4200+, 4400+, 4600+, 4800+).. From what I've read, it appears that these new dual-core cpus are conformant with current socket 939 (Athlon64) motherboards. Very cool. This is AMD's answer to Intels recent Pentium 4D dual-core processor.

I've heard multiple rumors that intel has included some hardware DRM into their Pentium 4D processors, which may be employed to prevent piracy or copying of certain media. This combined with the fact that AMD's X2's have greater performance and run cooler than the Pentium 4 D make me inclined to stick with AMD upon my next computer upgrade.

Also today, in video card land, ATi announced it's new technology, dubbed crossfire, which allows for multiple videocards to distribute the graphics processing load. It seems that future motherboards have to support a new crossfire for this feature to work. Seems a bit expensive to me: 2 high-performance video cards and a high-end mobo to trick out your latest games! I won't be into that barrel until this stuff becomes standard, but it's intriging none-the-less.