We had an NDA briefing with Intel, which pretty much set us up for a rollicking new year of activity in 2002. Of course, you can probably find out most of what was said from places where they don't honor NDAs, but we like to stick to this stuff. We are beginning to wonder why they say NDA, when it's actually selective. Hmmmm.

Suffice it to say that Intel and its OEMs are likely to make a big push in January with a refresh of existing product lines that should help solidify Intel's plan to make P4 ubiquitous, and say bye bye, and we do mean Goodbye, to the P3.

Intel also demonstrated one of its proof-of-concept products at Comdex, a sort of mish mash of ideas from a number of partners, under the banner of the Hannacroix Concept PC. Everything is USB, Firewire and Serial ATA, or, to put it simply, no legacy devices. Something like 11 USB 2.0 ports, 3 Firewire, Bluetooth on-board, Home Gateway CNR with internal 802.11 antenna. Sure, it works. Sure, it's buildable. More to the point, it helps Intel and its partners, including Agere, Cirrus Logic and Cypress Semiconductor show that they have chipsets and implementations for OEMs to integrate some of this functionality down the road.