Discussions

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I strongly dislike CES.  I’m all for gathering of products and companies, but there’s generally more mess and less actual usefulness at CES.  The show is too huge, the locale is too Vegas, and for the most part trying to find out information about a product is difficult unless you know about it ahead of time.

That being said, I’m headed for CES at the beginning of January and here’s what I’m expecting to see.

I’ve talked about both Arrandale and Clarkdale, Intel’s first dual-core Nehalem based processors for mobile and desktop respectively.  I’m expecting to see lots of both at the show and hopefully a good number of Arrandale based notebooks on display as well.

Arrandale

Both of the ‘dales bring graphics onto the CPU package and down to Intel’s 45nm manufacturing process, which should result in lower platform power consumption.  Performance is going to be the biggest advantage of the ‘dale family.  If you’ve been waiting to upgrade your notebook, this is going to be the chip you will have been waiting on.

Pine Trail is next up from Intel at the show.  The second generation Atom processor, codenamed Pineview, brings graphics and the memory controller on die.  The latter which should improve performance for the in-order Atom core.  It’s not just notebooks you’ll be waiting for, if you’ve been thinking about a netbook you’ll want to wait until after CES.

It’s not all about processors though, I’m expecting to hear a lot from NVIDIA at this year’s CES.  There’s been a lot of talk of 2010 being the year of Tegra, and what better way to kick it off than with a press conference at CES?  I’m hoping to see some more Tegra based devices other than the Zune HD (hopefully some Tegra 2 based platforms), but that may just be wishful thinking.

Of course there will be the usual arrangement of TVs, digital media appliances and other gadgets at CES, but new CPUs and new SoCs are what I expect to be some of the highlights of the show.