Dual-Core Motherboards Key Players At Computex

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD was especially omnipresent at the show, said attendee Stephen Moll, director of operations at Computer Technology Link, a Portland, Ore.-based system builder.

"They had people in every motherboard space as well as in the video card space," he said.

Andy Kretzer, director of sales and marketing at Bold Data Technology, a Fremont, Calif., system builder, said his company's servers have been dual-core-ready for a few months, and some customers are currently upgrading to those servers.

Bold Data is also planning to build servers based on Intel's dual-core Pentium D.

Asus Computer International, Taipei, unveiled the K8N-DRE, a dual-core Opteron-based motherboard for 1U server solutions, said Timothy Lin, product marketing manager for Asus' office in Fremont, Calif. It is expected to ship in the third quarter with SCSI RAID and Intel's Intelligent Platform Management Interface on board. The company has been shipping a dual-core-ready workstation motherboard since April, he said.

Asus also showed some new Intel dual-core-based motherboards, including the P5LD2 with on-board Dolby Master Studio sound for mainstream users, and the P5WD2 with ECC-memory support and SATA RAID capabilities for performance users, Lin said.

In addition to its dual-core Intel-based motherboards that are slowly ramping up to full production, Elitegroup Computer Systems showed the new PF88, a motherboard with an Intel chipset for Pentium D support as well as an included riser card that allows a dual-core AMD processor to be used as well, said David Chien, director of the channel sales division at the Taipei-based company. The PF88 is set to ship in the near future.

Supermicro Computer, San Jose, Calif., showed its first four Intel dual-core motherboards, which are already shipping. The PDSG4 and PDSGE are based on Intel's 955X chipset and support PCI-X expansion cards and up to 8 Gbytes of dual-channel DDR-2 memory.

The PDSG4 also includes on-board U320 SCSI. The new PDSLA is based on the 945G Express chipset with integrated graphics, and the new PDSLE uses the 945P chipset.