Causes for optimism
At the start of the week we reflected on a rallying of the prices shares in AMD and NVIDIA. This came on the eve of NVIDIA's NVISION event and Intel's developer forum and was a welcome indication of optimism in the technology sector in spite of continued warnings about the state of the economy.
AMD was certainly feeling optimistic; VP of GPU sales John Byrne shared his confidence at staying at the top of the graphics performance pile for a while yet. Meanwhile AMD's CPU arm revealed a number of CPUs designed specifically for its Business Class platform.
Of course the major CPU-related news of the week was always going to belong to Intel. Already well ahead in terms of outright performance, Intel revealed some more details on its next generation of processors, codenamed Nehalem but officially named Core i7. HEXUS even managed to get hold of one and benchmarked it.
Core i7 won't be officially unveiled until later in the year, but there were plenty of products launched including a bunch of new mobile CPUs and some motherboards designed for local system builders.
Intel culminated IDF with a look to the future. CTO Justin Rattner delivered a view of the future that included the possibility of transmitting power wirelessly, much as we currently do connectivity. It all looks very clever and exciting but is unlikely to happen anytime soon, although perhaps somewhat sooner his prediction of machines becoming smarter than human beings.
Closer to home, distributor Target Components celebrated its tenth anniversary with a big bash at its Castleford HQ, featuring presentations by a number of vendors. A further attempt to show traditional trade shows how to do it was also announced by Ingram Micro, which will be repeating its Retail Expo show next month.
