Won't be long now until my old Opteron setup gets updated to Intel QPI based goodness. :)

Oh, and it will be based on ATX, down from the Opteron's (ASUS) extended ATX..

finally, fdd, ps2, and parallel is killed off...hopefully ide too! i could use more usb ports for my printer, scanner, camera, webcam, mouse, keyboard, bluetooth adapter, and more to come!

why don't board makers just create an add-on card?
would it be that difficult to make such a thing optional?
i would prefer to drop parallel/serial ports personally
though i have to admit i'm still on a ps2 keyboard

These are going to be damned expensive, even not considering DDR3 pricing although we don't know where that will be at the time. I'll be waiting for the refresh I think.

Chipsets really seem to be Intel's weakness right now. I know that QuickPath is really fast, but AMD have cool chipsets with HT3 and large amounts of PCIe2 on them.

ATX is clearly an unstoppable killing machine, if Intel is going to demand that kind of heatsink clearance rather than try to resurrect BTX again.

Remember this is the high-end platform for Nehalem (a.k.a XE chips).

I suspect the mainstream flavors will have saner thermal requirements and offer more legacy support.

I believe, that would be the self contained heatsink.
QPI uses many more transistors relative to HyperTransport and requires mor juice. Add in the internal triple channel DDR-3 controller, and we're perhaps talking aout 120-150W.

What the hell hiding under that blue box?