PC Expo 2001 New York Coverage!
Big Technology In The Big Apple

By, Dave Altavilla
June 29, 2001
 

 

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!