The plot thickens

Let's rewind about a week and a half, shall we?

AMD called a little get together to talk about dual core down in Austin. I went down for a day and spent some quality time with people like Fred Weber and got a lot of questions answered. Also during those meetings AMD put just about everything on the table, needless to say most of that is under NDA.

Wednesday night I got an email from Intel, saying that the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 would be at Derek's place on Thursday with the NDA lifting on Monday. Hmm not good, Derek was out of town and I wanted to handle the dual core review anyways since I knew I'd have to spend a good amount of time coming up with benchmarks. I called Derek that night and got him to make sure that his wife would overnight the machine to me so I'd have it on Friday; I would lose one day of testing, but that's better than not having the system.

At the same time, NVIDIA had sent their nForce4 SLI Intel Edition for review. The NDA on that would lift Tuesday (today). The first system NVIDIA sent was DOA, so I didn't have any prior testing with it. I figured dual core was more important so I dedicated the weekend to the Intel article, and I figured I'd spend Monday on NVIDIA.

I got back to CT Thursday and started working on how I was going to test; Friday I got the dual core system and got to work. The period of time between Friday and Monday morning was pretty much a blur, lots of benchmarking, lots of frustration but luckily nothing went wrong hardware wise.

After the dual core piece went up I immediately started working on the NVIDIA testing...except, you guessed it, the 2nd board was DOA (the first one was damaged in shipping, the second one was just plain dead). No NVIDIA article for Tuesday, so I went straight to work on Part II of the dual core article. The premise for Part II was an in-depth look at the cheapest dual core Pentium D that will be launched: the $241 2.8GHz part. I finished all but the home brewed multitasking tests around 4AM; I took an extended nap until 9AM, woke up and got back to work.

What happened after that is truly surprising, and is the reason that Part II isn't up right now. In benchmarking for Part II I uncovered an interesting application for my Multitasking Scenario tests that isn't related to CPU testing. A little further digging (as well as a bet placed with Johan) has left me with enough material for an article focusing on multitasking, but from the perspective of a different hardware component. I'm still running tests, but this will be my next article, quickly followed by Part II of my dual core series. I'm not going to say any more, other than that it confirms something I concluded just under a year ago in another article. Is the suspense killing you yet? :)

You'll hear from me again in a few hours.