Back from IDF, and lots to do

I do hope none of you have been directly impacted by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I do wish that everyone could fit into that category, but unfortunately events like Katrina do happen, and they do not discriminate who they hurt, everyone suffers when something like this happens. On behalf of myself and Vinney, as well as the rest of the AnandTech family, our thoughts go out to all who have been impacted by Katrina. I am a firm believer in the idea that everything does work out in the end, but I do know that the journey to that end can be a very, very difficult one.

The more I grow, the more I find myself being more cynical of people in general (something that I do not like in myself), but I am always touched by the incredible displays of hope, kindness and care for one another whenever there is a time of tragedy. The worst does bring out the best in people, especially when the cause of the worst is something like Katrina. I saw it with the Tsunami last year and although the two disasters cannot be compared, their impacts on the kindness and generosity of people are similar. It is something that I find comfort in, it's one of those "there still is hope" kind of deals for me.

If you're interested in helping out, there is a good collection of links and phone numbers in a thread in ATOT.

In other, far less important and now seeming very petty news, I've got a couple of notes about last week's IDF.

IDF is always a lot of fun, more-so than most trade shows I go to simply because you've got more direct access to engineers, rather than being overwhelmed by marketing folk. There were some things that I saw at IDF that didn't make their way into any of the articles, so I'll just briefly touch on them here.

I had a brief look at Intel's memory roadmap at IDF. It looks like DDR2-800 (5-5-5) is on track for the high end memory of choice in the first half of next year. Despite the continual increase in memory speed, FSB frequencies appear to be stuck at 1066MHz for the foreseeable future. I'm not entirely certain what's keeping Intel from moving to faster FSB frequencies; it could be the fact that getting parallel interfaces to work at these speeds becomes more and more difficult, it could be a CPU packaging limitation, or it could be something else entirely. From what Intel has said, DDR2-800 will probably be the last DDR2 speed grade before the move to DDR3. Given that memory bandwidth has already exceeded FSB bandwidth, this isn't really anything to worry about.

On-chip CMOS voltage regulators sound like they will happen, but unfortunately not anytime soon. The technology will not only improve power management and reduce power consumption, but it will also enable some clever things when we get into the 4+ core realm.

There were a ton of VT demos all over IDF, and while most of them were pretty boring, I can say that I am finally getting excited about VT. I think the one usage model that really piqued my interest was an x86 Mac running OS X but with a virtual machine running Vista as well. Apple hasn't said anything publicly about VT support in OS X, but the combination would truly bring the best of both worlds to the end users and make it very easy to use.

Being out at IDF gave me a good break from the monotony of Branford. It's strange, but whenever I'm away I always want to be home, but as soon as we get back here the desire to be here fades in an instant. But I think you all get that by now, we don't mix with this area very well :)

The house is still coming along, but not much progress has been made since I last talked about it. Bricks are being laid, and cabinets, I believe, should finally be...finalized. The electrical integration part of home construction is somewhat frustrating to me, given that I do want to harness a lot of the technology that I've had the joy of playing with for the past several years and use it in our new home. Unfortunately, a lot of that technology just isn't ready to be integrated into the home. There is a lot of promise, but although we've got the technology for the home of the future, the UI, reliability, and integration of it all just isn't there, especially at a reasonable cost. The pricing on some of the "high end" home automation and integration systems is absolutely ridiculous, a lot of what companies like Intel and Microsoft have been describing for years now can be done today, just not very well, and not at a remotely affordable price point for most.

Today we've got Johan's long awaited sequel to his first Mac piece up on the front page, be sure to check it out. It's bedtime for me, gnite folks.