Intel Developer Forum Day 3 - More from the Tech Showcase

Up close & Personal with Marble Falls

The talk of the town this week has been Intel's Marble Falls 2004 concept desktop PC platform, which we saw at Craig Barrett's keynote on Tuesday. We were able to get up close and personal with the Marble Falls concept at the Technology Showcase and spend a little time looking at its technology:

From this picture you see everything that we've already told you about Marble Falls, from the very small form factor to the dual display technology. As we mentioned before, although this particular concept PC currently runs off of the 865G chipset (Springdale-G), it is really designed for the 865G successor due out sometime next year. The 865G successor will undoubtedly have multimonitor support, which is an area where Intel's integrated graphics have lagged behind the competition significantly.

The Marble Falls concept will also have PCI Express support, but it won't be for another IDF or two before we see that actually implemented in the concept PC.

Here (above) you can get an idea for the small form factor of the Marble Falls machine; to be more specific, Marble Falls does implement Intel's Big Water form factor that was announced at last year's Spring IDF.

Another interesting feature of Marble Falls is the Newcard interface present on the front of the chassis. The Newcard specification is a replacement to the current PC Card specification, and although in this case we're just looking at a mechanical mockup, it will eventually be a PCI Express based technology that makes it onto desktop PCs.

Unlike the PC Card, Newcard is designed to actually make a splash on desktops; the card controller will interface to the motherboard using the PCI Express bus, through most likely a x1 PCI Express interface.

The final point about Marble Falls worth mentioning is that the machine is virtually silent; at idle the machine produces 21.4 dBA, and 26.3 dBA when the machine is actually crunching. There is clearly a focus on making PCs in 2004 as quiet as possible, and Marble Falls is a step in the right direction.