To close Day 1 coverage of the fall Intel Developer Forum, we’ve got lots of exciting hardware to show to you that most consumers won’t see for months. This new and exciting hardware is found at IDF’s Technology Showcase, where all types of companies come together to show off their latest products or the latest products from allied companies. We were quite pleased to see future technologies like DDR-II, Serial ATA, and PCI Express when walking around the show floor.

Granite Bay on Display

By far the most interesting Pentium 4-related technology on the show floor was Intel’s upcoming Granite Bay chipset. Based on dual DDR266 technology, Granite Bay offers a massive 4.2GB/s of bandwidth for the Pentium 4’s consumption. Intel can pretty much launch Granite Bay whenever they want at this point, but it seems as if they’re still waiting to see how AMD plays its cards with Hammer.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding Granite Bay’s launch, motherboard makers Tyan and MSI are saying Q4 as the launch date for their Granite Bay boards.

MSI's Granite Bay Motherboard

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Tyan's Granite Bay Motherboard

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DDR-II & PCI Express on the Floor

Walking along the show floor we came by Tyco Electronics’ displays of a DDR-II DIMM. Coming in at 240 pins, this particular DDR-II slot is supposed to be the standard DDR-II DIMM for future motherboards based on this technology, which aren't scheduled to be released until mid-2003.

Tyco Electronics also showcased some next-gen PCI slots, based on Intel’s PCI Express (previously 3GIO) technology. Nothing special to report about these slots except to say that PCI Express won’t hit the market full-throttle anytime soon.

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More Serial ATA

Serial ATA demos were everywhere on the show floor. The Serial ATA Working Group in addition to many other companies (like Fujitsu, NEC, and Promise among others) was showing off some type of Serial ATA demo. Fujitsu demoed their MHS series of laptop drives (which are supposed to be available in 30, 40, and 60GB sizes) based on Serial ATA technology; this particular drive ran at 4200RPM.

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Promise showed off their latest Serial ATA RAID controllers, variants of which can be found on some of the latest KT400 motherboards to hit the market (ASUS and MSI’s KT400 boards have Serial ATA Promise RAID controllers onboard).

NEC showed off one of their Serial ATA cards, which was able to run a grand total of 8 Serial ATA drives. These included Serial ATA desktop drives from Maxtor (2 drives), Samsung (2 drives), Western Digital, IBM, and Seagate. The 8th drive was Fujitsu’s Serial ATA MHS laptop drive, which we just mentioned above.

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Strolling down the show floor, I caught wind of a Serial ATA demo consisting of two Serial ATA Western Digital drives (in RAID). During the demo, one of the Serial ATA connectors was slightly tugged on, causing the system to reboot. The Serial ATA connector was still in place, but apparently tugging at the tiny Serial ATA cables was enough to cause system instability (or a reboot in this case). The same wouldn't have happened had it been an IDE cable which leads us to believe that there's still a few kinks to be worked out with the Serial ATA interface before it's ready for prime-time.

SiS & ALi Demonstrating Chipsets

SiS was also present at the showcase showing off, among other things, their R658 Rambus-based chipset. SiS is expecting R658 boards to hit the market in Q4 with official PC1066 support. With R658 motherboards expected to debut at significantly lower prices than other Rambus-based motherboards, we might finally start seeing low-cost PC1066 solutions on the market. SiS has had their own fabrication plant for a while now, so they’re able to leverage the economies of scale and produce chipsets at lower costs than their competition (compared to fabless companies like VIA, NVIDIA, and ALi for example); therefore, it won’t be too unexpected to see $100 R658-based (PC1066) motherboards some day.

The only other chipset maker present on the show floor was ALi. As of late, ALi hasn’t really been concentrating on what they’re best known for, CPU chipsets. Instead, they’re going after other markets, which include DVD drives and 802.11 wireless devices. However, ALi did show off their Pentium 4 chipset, the ALi M1563, which they claim will be available in Q4 this year. They also claim this board will officially support DDR400 once JEDEC approves a specification.

Final Words

It’s been a very interesting and entertaining day 1 at IDF in San Jose so far. From Banias to Dual Core Itaniums to Serial ATA to DDR-II, and much more, there’s a lot to talk about. Hopefully Day 2 will bring loads more technology to look at and discuss. As usual, we’ll be on the show floor with coverage of any technologies that come our way.