Introduction

It has been a busy few days. On Thursday I flew up to Sydney for the Australian media product announcement presentations from both ATI and nVidia relating respectively to the codenamed R420 and GeForce 6800. We will talk more about the R420 when the NDA expires early next month. nVidia has the spotlight for now.

On Friday I attended the Intel Solutions Summit (ISS) at the Sydney Exhibition and Convention Center located in the stunning and beautiful Darling Harbor area which I hadn't had the pleasure of visiting until this week. ISS is basically Australia's version of the Intel Developer Forum (or IDF for short). Different from IDF, ISS is a partner only event and media aren't supposed to attend the event - not that it stopped us this year.

On entry to the event at the reception area, the friendly people from The Forum Group (the organizers) did all they could to get me into the showcase area where companies such as nVidia, Seagate, Aopen, FIC, Crucial and Kingston were displaying their new products to their Australian partners. In the end, it was our good friends from nVidia who got me into the showcase area but it was on the condition (direct from Intel - as far as I know) that I only visited the nVidia booth - mind you, with a member of The Forum Group present making sure I didn't terrorize any other exhibitors or guests. So suffice to say - security was high - maybe a little, too high?

Anyway, after getting through the entrance to the ISS showcase, we walked as if I were on the way to seeing a top secret NASA project, straight to nVidia's gold sponsor booth where we were able to see quite a few interesting engineering sample machines in operation with upcoming nVidia and Intel parts along with our own real life Aussie version of Nalu, nVidia's own exquisite drenching senses creature of the sea.