The Microprocessor Forum has been an industry bellweather and the jumping off point for many processor announcements in the past.

Transmeta was the first out the gate with an announcement at this year's event. The T6000 Crusoe , followed up a day later with the announcement that its president of seven months was being deposed as the company struggles to build on the hype it generated when it first went public. I can't really get excited about a company that has less than $40 million in revenues after all the print they got on CNET. But, I hope that we get to do some THG testing on the Crusoe in future because, Transmeta has gotten a bit of a bad rap about its claims on performance and power consumption, and maybe not all of it is justified.

The Forum itself was very badly attended, not surprising in light of the events of the last month. However, this didn't stop a large number of companies from presenting and participating at the event.

A measure of the focus of the industry is the fact that prominence at the conferece was given to server and workstation processors and developments in this area of the market.

Equal attention was also given to providers of components for the non-PC devices such as set-up boxes, Internet appliances, and so forth, as well as sessions devoted to networking processors, and programmable chips.

For us, the main factors of interest are the emerging products and directions being taken by competitors in the server market. While AMD managed to get a lot of ink in the technology press devoted to its 8th Generation Hammer architecture, there was also some interesting input from Via's Centaur Technology on its product roadmap, and Intel announcements on its server and workstations roadmaps for IA-32 and IA-64.

Hightened security meant that all glassware had to be enclosed by a triumvirate of bartenders. Sadly, there were not enough journalists and other healthy imbibers around to cause the liquor supply distress. Sign of the times, folks, when getting a free drink at these shindigs requires no standing in line.