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YET ANOTHER cool San Francisco September comes, and with it another annual Intel Developer Forum. This is a special year for The INQUIRER at IDF as two of us hacks will be covering it. Let’s have a quick look what to expect on the processor front, where Intel still considers itself the king.

Armies of ARM chips are attacking the mobile battlefield, firmly dominating smartphones and quite strong on the tablet front too. On the other side, the fastest single chip commercial general purpose CPU in the world right now is still IBM Power 7. And AMD has started an onslaught in the mainstream mobile and desktop markets with its nascent Fusion APUs.

Sounds tough? Not really – in all other areas, Intel leads firmly in both performance and features right now, not to mention its market share dominance that doesn’t seem to be waning. Its desktop and mobile Sandy Bridge chips are not only the fastest x86 CPU cores in their markets, but also spread across the widest price ranges. And half a year from now, 22nm Ivy Bridge chips will continue that dominance. The current Westmere 6-core CPUs for high end desktop and server platforms have no meaningful competition from AMD yet, as we await the Bulldozers in those roles. But, by that time Intel’s Socket 2011 Sandy Bridge E chips will be out as well.

These are exactly the things we should see during this year’s IDF – the incremental refreshes to the existing Sandy Bridge quad-core mainstream line, followed by early exposure of the high-end 6-core and 8-core Sandy Bridge E/EN single socket Core i7 3960X and dual socket Xeon E5 systems, maybe even some quad socket monsters, and then quite a few even earlier Ivy Bridge 4-core demos.

Expect to see some really lovely mainboards on the dual socket front, with the two CPUs connected using not one but two QPI links, and also having 80 PCIe V3 lanes altogether. That extra QPI link can help the PCIe devices from both sides communicate faster, even when there’s no inter-CPU traffic from their own threads. And, finally, it will be fun seeing boards with 16 DDR3-1600 DIMM slots across 8 memory channels. 256GB of really fast RAM is now a reality on a single desktop, and after all, memory is really inexpensive right now.

Finally, Intel’s MIC, or Larrabee, remains re-jigged as a – very capable, by the way – supercomputing vector co-processor, and is expected to be shown or at least discussed in greater detail here. Having up to possibly 2 TFLOPS of double precision floating-point power in a single chip, and then likely attaching it via coherent low latency QPI to the rest of the system CPUs, the result being a tightly coupled coprocessor, could benefit many desktops and workstations too.

Nor can we forget the Atom and its plethora of integrated low power SoC variants for smartphone and tablet applications, aimed at the market where – who would believe it – Intel is an underdog versus the all powerful ARM committee of (dis)agreeing but darn rich vendors. For all that and more, watch out for our show reports from IDF 2011 next week. µ

I mentioned in our Mid-Range SSD Roundup that most SSD vendors like sampling the best balance of capacity/performance when it comes to SSD review samples. For the SandForce SF-2281 with 25nm NAND that just happens to be 240GB. Unfortunately there's a pretty big fall off in performance when going from 240GB to 120GB due to the decrease in total number of NAND die (8GB per die x 32 die vs. 16 die). I've explained this all before here.

Enter OCZ's MAX IOPS drive. Using 32nm Toshiba Toggle NAND instead of 25nm IMFT ONFI 2.x NAND the die capacity drops to 4GB, which means you get twice as many die per NAND device. The end result? 240GB Vertex 3 performance for slightly more than 120GB Vertex 3 pricing.

I ordered the 120GB MAX IOPS drive at the beginning of the week and just got it in yesterday so I've only had a small amount of time to test with it thus far. Check out the 120GB MAX IOPS drive vs. the Intel SSD 510 in Bench using our 2011 storage test suite. Expect the full review in the coming days.

Back on Tuesday NVIDIA put out a quick teaser about a new video card that would be launching today. As virtually all of you correctly guessed, it was the GeForce GTX 590, NVIDIA’s latest dual-GPU monster. Coming only two weeks after the launch of the Radeon HD 6990, NVIDIA wants their spot back as the single card king, and it’s the GTX 590 that will fight for it. But does the GTX 590 have what it takes to dethrone the 6990 so soon? Let’s find out.

The AMD Radeon HD 6990, otherwise known as Antilles, is a card we have been expecting for some time now. In what’s become a normal AMD fashion, when they first introduced the Radeon HD 6800 series back in October, they also provided a rough timeline for the rest of the high-end members of the family. Barts would be followed by Cayman (6950/6970), which would be followed by the dual-GPU Antilles (6990). Ultimately Cayman ended up being delayed some, and as a result so was Antilles.

So while we’ve had to wait longer than we anticipated for Antilles/6990, the wait has finally come to an end. Today AMD is launching their new flagship card, retiring the now venerable 5970 and replacing it with a new dual-GPU monster powered by AMD’s recently introduced VLIW4 design. Manufactured on the same 40nm process as the GPUs in the 5970, AMD has had to go to some interesting lengths to improve performance here. And as we’ll see, it’s going to be a doozy in more ways than one.

Only a short month after the launch of the GeForce GTX 465, NVIDIA is back again with a new card: the GeForce GTX 460. Built on their brand-new GF104 GPU, the GTX 460 shakes up the mainstream in a big way by bringing NVIDIA's DX11 Fermi family to a 9 card and in the process righting what was wrong with the GTX 465. Along the way we'll also see just what NVIDIA did to the GF104 GPU to make this happen, and why GF104 is much more than a simple GF100 derivative.

It's been a while since we've been able to write a glowing review of an NVIDIA card, but today we'll see why NVIDIA is offering the right combination of price and performance to claim the 0-0 as their own.