One of the things you always get out of an IDF conference is a lot of information about products other than Intel CPUs and chipsets. Although you rarely think about it, Intel's sphere of influence extends far beyond just the desktop world and into pretty much anything that requires silicon and processing power.

The one thing we were hopeful to see during the technology showcase at IDF was some examples of XScale enabled PDAs, maybe get a glimpse at Compaq's XScale replacement for the highly demanded iPAQ Pocket PC. Unfortunately we were left relatively unfulfilled with the only example of XScale PDAs on the show floor being these few prototypes:

We've been told that it'll be late in Q2 before we see XScale enabled PDAs starting to ship so start saving up your summer budget to upgrade those iPAQs and Jornadas.

Serial ATA RAID

At every IDF there is always a demonstration of Serial ATA, and usually the demonstration consists of showing off how small the cables can be and what sorts of transfer rates can theoretically be achieved. This time however we got something a bit different as there was a demo of Serial ATA RAID using Intel's IOP321 I/O processor.

The IOP321 is an XScale based I/O processor that is perfectly suited for performing the XOR operations necessary to calculate parity data for RAID 5 arrays. Operating at either 400 or 600MHz the IOP321 is supposedly quite well suited for these types of RAID arrays with 1.6GB/s of internal data movement bandwidth and a DDR memory controller for external memory.

The use of this I/O processor is only necessary for RAID 5 as creating the parity data can become very compute intensive thus eating up a large amount of CPU clock cycles, making a dedicated I/O processor perfect for the job. It's still too early to find Serial ATA in the mass market, much less Serial ATA RAID, but it was an interesting demonstration of the technology nonetheless and a reminder that even when ATA support is pulled from motherboards there will always be room for RAID controllers on-board.

Intel's E7500 Chipset Spreads its Wings

The recently announced E7500 chipset was making its first appearance in motherboard designs at the show. This chipset was called the first sexy chipset to come from Intel in quite a while by one of the motherboard vendors and we wholeheartedly agree.

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MSI had their E7500 platform on display however the design was still in engineering sample stages and thus not ready for evaluation. What was interesting however was the fact that MSI seems to be having more problems with the ServerWorks Grand Champion chipset which would mean that the E7500 will hit the market first.

This may only be limited to MSI however as Tyan seems to be further along in their Grand Champion development.

Attempting to prove their worth in the server market, MSI has designed a 2U server platform with their E7500 motherboard as a base. The chassis was relatively well designed although we'd like to see a 1U offering in order to truly be impressed.

Supermicro also had an E7500 board on display, there was no word on shipping timeframe however.

Finally we ran into Tyan whose E7500 platform is beginning mass production and should be available within a matter of weeks. We should have a board to review within the next two weeks to provide a full report on the performance of the E7500 chipset and the Tyan board in general.

Appro, the makers of the 1124 - the 1U AMD 760MP server that also hosts one of AnandTech's Databases - was sharing Tyan's booth with their latest offering based on Tyan's E7500 board. This 1U chassis is virtually identical to their 1124 except it houses dual Xeons paired with Tyan's E7500 board instead of dual Athlons and their Thunder K7. Designing this platform was a bit easier for Appro since the thermal and power requirements of the Xeons are noticeably lower than that of the Athlon MP processors.

Rambus at PC1200 speeds

A gold-sponsor at all IDF conferences, Rambus was present demonstrating a couple of interesting things.

With Intel moving to the 533MHz FSB Rambus will obviously be offering PC1066 RDRAM to pair up with the faster bus frequency but the engineers at Rambus went one step further to show the potential of the technology by overclocking regular PC800 RDRAM RIMMs to PC1200 speeds.

This was done with overclocking the FSB on their i850 test platform as well to 150MHz, effectively giving the Pentium 4 a 600MHz FSB. Needless to say that the performance improvement was impressive, and the numbers they were showing were around 30% higher than what we'd expect from a PC800/100MHz FSB system at almost an equivalent clock.

People often complain about having to install RIMMs in pairs on i850 boards. The reason behind this is that the i850 implements two 16-bit RDRAM channels to achieve its 3.2GB/s of peak theoretical memory bandwidth. Working together with module manufacturers and ASUS, Rambus presented an i850 board design that merged these dual 16-bit channels into a 32-bit wide RDRAM slot that could be populated by a 32-bit RIMM.

32-bit wide RDRAM modules

This would prevent the need of buying two RIMMs at a time but it would require that you use currently unavailable 32-bit RIMMs, however it is an interesting proposition for the future if more manufacturers start implementing it.

The board layout is relatively simple, a single 16-bit RDRAM channel is routed to one side of the RIMM slots while another channel is routed to the opposite side of the slots. The board used in this picture is the ASUS P4T-1066 which may be mass produced.