Computex: Intel is Caught Napping

Although Intel has blanketed the show floor at Computex with balloons and signs, its presence has been overshadowed by the announcement of Nvidia's nForce, and the anticipation over AMD's launch of the Athlon 1400, the Duron 950, and the 760MP dualie mobos. To make matters worse for Intel, the company's new mPGA476 socket i845 motherboards (also known as Northwood in our past discussions of Intel's roadmap) that support single channel SDRAM for the Pentium 4 are proving less than compelling, despite driving much lower cost P4 systems. AMD's Athlon and DDR memory combination still leads on the price/performance curve, which means Intel is still playing catch up in this segment of the market. If that weren't enough, though Northwood uses a 0.13 micron process and is smaller than the Willamette chipset, it still dissipates enough heat to warrant a new cooler. Note: This story is brought to you by the staff of Tom's Hard Newsletter , on site at Computex in Taipei. To get complete, dedicated coverage of the event, subscribe to the free newsletter here .