Even though I wasn’t able to make it out to this fall’s Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, I was still able to get a hold of the same information being presented to those in attendance.  Intel is introducing the world to a totally new micro-architecture that replace both the desktop NetBurst and mobile Banias architectures in the second half of 2006.  This new architecture looks like it is taking the best from both of Intel’s current architectures and melding them into one that will be more than competitive with AMD’s K8 architecture.  A shorter and wider pipeline will give the new Intel architecture a much higher IPC and a focus on power savings will allow this same architecture to be used in mobile, desktop and server processors late next year.

This Friday I will be attending an event in San Jose hosted by ECS in which they will discuss with the media their plans for future products and the “new ECS.”  I am assuming that since we had such a long talk with ECS at this past Computex about ATI’s CrossFire technology that that is what we’ll be seeing this week.  It’s a long way to go for a single day’s meeting, so I hope it turns out to be worth it. 

After my first look at the Asus 7800 GTX TOP card I am finishing up the benchmarks for this card today and should have a complete review ready for you on either Friday or Monday.   I am also expecting a 7800 card from BFG soon that features built-on water cooling — that should be fun to play with and see how far we can push it!

I’ve got a lot of work to get done before I leave in the morning for the west coast, so I’ll sign off for now.