Computex 2008 Starts Today

Computex 2008 officially starts today and we will have show coverage through Saturday. We arrived a couple of days early to meet with several manufacturers privately to find out what will make this year's Computex special. As it turns out, this year's show is not going to have any blockbuster product releases. The blockbuster releases featuring the next generation of GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD will occur in the next couple of months, Intel's next gen Nehalem architecture will be released this fall, and even the 790GX from AMD is going to have to wait until July.

In fact, one could argue that the big show will just be a smorgasbord of current product releases shown in the best possible light. However, we did dig up a little information for you before we start the parade of pictures. The Intel P45 is launching tomorrow and the various board manufacturers have lined up some very interesting products for Intel's last great hurrah with the Front Side Bus architecture. A new chipset launch would normally be a large event but initial performance numbers have already been published and the P45 is more or less a generational follow up to the P35 with the new ICH10 Southbridge making its appearance finally. It seems as though the true anticipation for new Intel product centers on the release of the Nehalem processor series and the X58 chipset.

We had an early opportunity to "play" with a Bloomfield CPU and X58 board yesterday outside of Intel's control or approval.  Our first impressions are quite positive based upon a quick run through of several major benchmarks. This particular CPU sample was running at 2.93GHz and initial performance in video/audio applications was simply superb. The board design and BIOS were just finalized for qualification testing so it is too early to tell just how well this platform will eventually perform. There has been a lot of speculation about Intel limiting overclocking and we do not have a final answer yet if this is true.

On our platform that featured triple channel DDR3, the processor multiplier was locked at 22 with a QPI bus setting of 133 to generate the 2.93Ghz CPU speed. Memory was running at DDR3-1066 with ratios available for 1333, 1600, and 1866. Due to the early BIOS revision, memory was only stable at 1066 in triple channel DDR3 operation but we were told 1333 memory speeds should be available shortly. Intel will allow a Turbo mode that increases the CPU multiplier to 23 and that was all our board/BIOS combo was capable of yesterday. We could not raise the QPI bus speed past 140 without incurring stability problems.

The board manufacturers informed us they are working on ways to increase the CPU multiplier past the single Turbo speed step and that QPI bus speeds should improve greatly once BIOS tuning is completed. While we wanted to provide clarification to the overclocking question, it is just too early to tell what the enthusiast can expect in the way of overclocking at this time. We will follow up later this week with some additional information after having more time with the platform.

The significant trend we noticed in our visits yesterday is the rush to produce sub-notebook designs based on Intel's new ATOM processor series. ASUS will be officially releasing the Eee PC 901/1000 series today along with MSI rolling out their Wind series. After working with both units, I have to say these units will make a perfect second PC for families needing something inexpensive, and they'll also work for students on a limited budget. We will have further details when the units are formally launched later today. However, we expect supplies to be limited at first since the demand for the ATOM processor is just incredible and we understand why now.

More later today....