CES 2005 Photo-Report

This years 2005 CES show, was certainly a whirlwind adventure for us as we literally ran from meeting to meeting in the two short days we were able to attend the event.  For us this year, the show was about meeting up with all the good people at all of the various OEMs we work with and hearing about their roadmap product efforts, as much as it was about seeing all the great displays of leading edge technology.  Regardless, we do have a bunch of product display shots to share with you in the pages ahead. 

- Enjoy

Intel Dual Core , 64 and Steven Tyler

The Intel booth was the usual massive display of technology both from Intel and various partners.  Intel was showing off a bunch of mobile technology of course, and their latest Pentium 4 high end engineering status products as well. 

Left is Intel's Home Theater PC based on a Dual Core Pentium 4 processor with each core running at 3GHz.  While we were not able to run any benchmark tests on this machine, Intel was displaying Windows Media Center with a live video feed running on the system while navigating through several control features of Media Center, in a targeted display of mutli-tasked, mult-threaded smoothness.

Center is an Intel Pentium 4 6XX series processor based machine with 2MB of L2 cache running 64-bit Windows and a 1066MHz FSB.  Yes EM64T extensions are alive and well in the P4.  Finally, Aerosmith Front-Man and Boston Bad Boy, Steven Tyler breaks out with a little "Dude Looks Like A Techie" with Intel CEO Craig Barrett.  Too funny, we think they're almost the same age but ST grows his hair a bit longer and most likely adds a touch of color too...

Finally Intel told us in conference that Dual Core CPUs will be introduced sometime in 2H05 and most likely continuing the branding of both standard and "Extreme Edition" CPUs for these dual core products.  We also discussed the next generation "915PM" based "Alviso" mobile platform and its expected killer performance.  This platform is right around the corner and Intel didn't shy away from the fact that some desktop motherboard designs could well surface based on this platform.  In fact we're hearing rumors that sometime in Q1 that could specifically be a reality for at least one mobo manufacturer we spoke with.  Regardless, Intel was quick to point out the benefits of Hyperthreading in the P4 in real world multi-tasked end user usage scenarios.  They also confirmed for us some late breaking news that in fact Dual Core Pentium 4s will support Hyperthreading for quad logical CPU core system representation and this came direct from Intel CEO Craig Barrett supposedly.  Without question, Intel seemed to have the strongest showing of next generation product versus any other showcase we saw at CES.

AMD and ATi Voodoo SLI and Radeon Xpress

AMD Athlon 64 nForce 4 SLI from Voodoo:

Frankly in our opinion AMD's booth was a bit light in both the glitz and the goods. Above is a featured nForce 4 SLI rig from Voodoo running an NVIDIA Tech Demo.  No doubt about it, this rig is dialed up, slick and wicked fast.

Radeon Xpress:

ATi, on the other hand had both Intel and AMD supported motherboards on display, based on their Radeon Xpress chipset.  Left is a Radeon Xpress Pentium 4 LGA775 socket reference motherboard from ATi and right is full-up AMD based Radeon XPress system that is water cooled and heavily overclocked on a 310MHz FSB!