|
 The
Intel
booth was well attended and they were showing of some pretty
high end rack mount server gear.
Itanium and
Xeon were the theme of the day with a heavy emphasis on
the enterprise solutions and performance.
Unfortunately we weren't able to schedule any time with the
Intel reps, so we had to move on. However, we'll
be debuting a new toy from Intel next week, so stay tuned!
Transmeta's
booth was a fairly creative effort. Targeting the
portable market, they had several
Crusoe powered laptops set up in an Airplane Cabin like
setting. There were several units from
Casio,
NEC and others. Performance was pretty snappy with
these 600MHz. versions and as one would imagine, battery
life is a virtual marathon at 4.5 hours and 9 hours for the
larger battery options.
There was an amazing display put
on by Transmeta's third party OEM partner
RLX Technologies. They had a Crusoe based Web
Server blade that was tiny when compared to traditional
solutions.
In
left hand shot, you'll get
the idea. RLX's blade is on the bottom and it provides
all the horse power and features of the bloated full scale
"pizza box" design above it. In the shot on the right,
we stood in amazement at the full configured
RLX 324 42U Rack. That's right folks, 324 server
blades installed and running. So, you're
building a data center? These folks will give you
serious processing power and maximize your floor space
utilization.
Boca Raton, FL based
OmniCluster also has a solution for the Web Server/Data
center crowd. Perhaps geared toward a more cost
sensitive market space, their
Slot Server 1000 card gives you full PC functionality in
a PCI card (lower right shot).
On board is 10/100 ethernet,
EIDE, USB, Audio I/O, VGA, up to 256MB of RAM and a National
Semiconductor (Cyrix derivative) Pentium class Geode
processor. In the right hand shot with OmniCluster's
management software, you can see that the host machine
actually has 8 servers running, 7 plus the host itself.
We can see small office types really taking interest in the
price point ($600) and scalability of this product.
Our good buddy Eric Bafford of
Transcend, showed us around their booth.
Unfortunately, they were the only Motherboard OEM at the
show. However, that didn't stop them from stealing the
hearts of the many multi-processing freaks that were in
attendance. On display was their dually offering
supporting Socket 370 and of course Tualatin P!!!
processors.
Their DRC-3 board utilizes the
ServerWorks
chipset, this has two 64 bit PCI slots, Dual Socket 370s
that will support the Tualatin processors, Ultra SCSI, on
board ATI Rage video and more.
Ahh yes, and finally another
socket 478 Pentium 4 board makes its debut.
Here's a few snaps of Transcend's TS-ABD4.
We believe this is an SDR SDRAM
based version. Also, note that there is on board
10/100 ethernet, sound and two sets of EIDE channels.
Those of you looking to step up to the P4 but not willing to
shell out the cash for new RAMBUS memory, this may be your
board. Great stuff all around from a top notch
motherboard manufacturer.
Well folks that wraps up our
coverage of PCExpo 2001! Thanks for flying with us!
Speak your
mind quiet boy! Get in the H.H. Conference Room!
|
