Intel
The Intel folks gave us a good sense of where the Pentium 4 is going in the near future. Pentium 4 production is already making the transition to Intel's 0.13-micron fabrication process. In January, the 0.13-micron Pentium 4 will reach the market, alongside motherboards based on the new spin of the 845 chipset capable of using DDR SDRAM.

At least, that's the plan. Virtually every motherboard manufacturer at the show was exhibiting 845 DDR motherboards that looked like finished products. The 845 with DDR looks ready to roll at a moment's notice.

The most intriguing item at Intel's place this year was an experimental motherboard worked up by some folks at Intel in order to demonstrate where the PC platform might be going over the next year or so. This motherboard was devoid of floppy connectors, ISA slots, traditional IDE controllers, and PS/2 ports. Instead, it had newer I/O standards: flash memory interfaces, Serial ATA connectors, USB 2.0 ports, and IEEE 1394 connectors.

Intel's experimental motherboard features less legacy tech,
newer standards like USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, and Serial ATA

The experimental mobo's killer port clusters.
Note the USB/1394 combo port cluster.

The ability to read various flash formats could finally replace floppies. We're ready!

The Serial ATA connector and cable are both much more compact than current ATA fare

Although Intel's recent efforts to move the PC platform in its direction haven't always been successful (think RDRAM), at least some of these standards deserve to succeed. We were especially taken with the idea of replacing floppy drives with some sort of flash media. At 150MB/s, Serial ATA is poised to do battle with ATA/133 over the coming year or so, but Serial ATA's smaller cables and connectors sure are tempting. Intel hasn't committed to integrating Serial ATA into its ICH (south bridge) chips just yet, but they're obviously backing the idea.