Intel had one of the largest booths on hand but it was primarily filled with stands by partner companies. Of particular interest was the Serial ATA table, partly because of the technology, and partly because of the cool modded Antec cases showing off their Serial ATA wares.

We were told by the Seagate representative that devices (HDD, motherboards, adaptor cards) will hit main stream retail shelves by October - just in time for Comdex. I for one can't wait, SATA presents one of the more exciting changes to the mainboard backbone to come in a long time.

AMD had a lot to say about their K8 family of processors (BTW, the K stands for Kryptonite) and had two demo boxes running Opteron processors on display, but they were locked down tight. There has been a lot of interest in the cases used to showcase this technology, and I suspect AMD's marketing department may even be considering doing a limited run for the official release of the Operton (hint, hint). What can I tell you about what is inside these magical cases? Not much,. AMD wasn't talking specifics.

We were able to at least take a shot of the new mobile T-bred part, and AMD had about 6 units on display from Compaq, Fujitsu, and others.