Last night, our brand new motherboard editor Evan Lieb brought you coverage from the Technology Showcase at IDF. Today, having a rare bit of free time, I made my way down to the Technology Showcase to do a little looking around myself. For those of you that aren't familiar with IDF, the Technology Showcase is an area where Intel and other manufacturers using Intel components/standards can show off their products; the Technology Showcase is much like a scaled down version of Comdex or Computex but only friends of Intel may have an exhibit there.

In the interest of time we'll keep this coverage to only the major technologies and follow up tomorrow morning with the rest of the Technology Showcase. Today we'll be talking about Intel's Tidewater and Big Water form factors, PCI Express, Banias and Intel's new motherboard targeted at the enthusiast market.

Tidewater & Big Water: 6 Months Later

At the Spring 2002 IDF Intel announced Tidewater and Big Water, two new form factors for the next-generation of PCs. Tidewater is more of an evolution of the current microATX designs while Big Water is a more radical departure and is also around 1.5 - 2 years out.

Intel was showing off their Tidewater reference design at the Showcase so we snapped a couple of pictures:

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As you can see, the Tidewater case is much like a conventional microATX solution with a few modifications. What's most impressive is the low profile cooling and power supply that are both able to tame the likes of a Pentium 4.

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The inside of a Tidewater system is cramped but that's the tradeoff you make when dealing with such a small form factor.

Intel also had a mechanical sample of a Big Water system sitting right next to their Tidewater reference design:

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Note that the mustard color PCB is just a plastic board used to outline exactly where components will go according to the Big Water specification, there are no traces printed on the board itself and thus it isn't functional.

Not very wide at all for a desktop PC.

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Looking at the motherboard you can see that there are some interesting changes made from the present day ATX specification. First, the CPU is closer to the front of the case while the ICH (aka South Bridge) is moved closer to the rear I/O ports; although this wasn't the primary reason for the move, putting the ICH back there does reduce trace lengths for the high speed I/O ports coming off of the chip.

The memory banks have been shifted from the lower right to the very left edge of the motherboard, another interesting move. This keeps the memory modules from blocking the path of airflow over the CPU and chipset, it also provides a low-profile area for the power supply to sit above.

The most dramatic change is the push of the expansion slots to the far right of the motherboard. If you'll notice there are two different slot sizes, here's a close-up of the longer slot:

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This is a 16X PCI Express slot which will offer the highest bandwidth of all the PCI Express solutions. This particular slot would be best suited for graphics (e.g. AGP replacement) and is essentially a 16 channel version of a 1X PCI Express slot (remember that PCI Express is a serial standard and thus is easily expandable by increasing the number of parallel channels).

Next to the 16X slot we have three 1X PCI Express slots; note that the slots are backwards compatible, so a 16X slot can accept 8X, 4X or 1X form factor cards.

The board above gives you an idea of what the PCI Express connector will look like.

One of the features of PCI Express is that you can also have modules that are PCI Express compatible; so instead of having to install a card you can just plug in a module (e.g. Compact Flash module, hard drive module, etc...). Intel had a set of wooden blocks that give you an idea of what sort of size we're talking about here:

Great, but remember it's just wood at this point. It won't be until the end of 2004 until we see some silicon in there.

Banias in Action

Intel's Banias CPU, which we've been talking about a lot today, was running on a desktop reference board at the showcase. The board was using the Montara-GM chipset which only differs from the Odem chipset in that it has integrated graphics:

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Here's a close up of the Montara-GM GMCH (Graphics & Memory Controller Hub):

What's interesting is that even with a very low profile heatsink, the fan was not spinning while the system was idle. The fan would only need to spin up when there was some activity and even then not to a very high speed:

You can't really see it from this picture, but the Banias CPU has a socket very similar to the current uPGA Pentium 4 sockets in terms of its size.

There were a couple other Banias systems on display including this one (below) with a slightly larger heatsink:

The heatsink was not even warm while the system was idle which is quite impressive. We did receive an interesting tidbit today, it seems as if the Banias CPU will debut at 1.6GHz early next year when it is officially released. Not only that but at 1.6GHz it will outperform a Pentium 4-M running at the same speed, obviously due to the larger cache and other micro architectural enhancements. The fastest Pentium 4-M will still be faster than the fastest Banias however.

Intel's Enthusiast Motherboard

Intel had an interesting motherboard on display - a Pentium 4 solution based on an upcoming chipset for the enthusiast market. Traditionally Intel has only made very stable motherboards, but that were generally undesirable to the enthusiast community because of their lack of features. Intel has heard the wake up call and has since started making their own enthusiast class boards and you can tell them apart by their black PCB instead of the conventional green.

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The boards still meet all of Intel's standards and should be just as stable as their other OEM solutions, but with a few more features.

The I/O panel of this board should give you good idea of some of the features that this board should offer. From left to right we have 2 PS/2 ports, a cluster of 1 IEEE-1394 port and two USB 2.0 ports, the usual parallel and serial ports, both digital and analog 6 channel audio outputs and finally 10/100 ethernet as well as two more USB 2.0 ports.

Analog Devices drives the 6-channel audio on this board with their AD1980 codec.

Lucent (Agere) provides the IEEE-1394 support.

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Silicon Image's controller provides two Serial ATA channels and offers RAID support for the motherboard as well.

Believe it or not, Intel may actually offer overclocking options on their motherboard in addition to the features mentioned above. Unfortunately the support would only come through a software utility made by a third party but it's a step in the right direction. If Intel would add some serious overclocking features to the board it could spell trouble for many of the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers; even as it is, this Intel board is quite tempting as no one has been able to match their stability when it comes to motherboards.

Final Words

Tomorrow is our final day here at the show and we've still got worlds of information to give you so stay tuned.