Intel
Intel is still saving money and thus you could find only one Intel booth in hall 11, the networking hall. Well, after all Intel is a 'netbursting' company these days, so why having another booth in hall 13 with all those pathetic processor makers? Ah, yes, Intel still makes some microprocessors though. I guess Intel's CeBIT organizers must have forgotten this minor point. In the past Intel's hall 13 booth was the shiniest and largest, while they had one in hall 11 as well. Today one must do. That's the trade winds of our time.
In this networking booth (that is still lacking the nouvelle cuisine of past years, what a shame!) Intel showed an air-cooled Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz. This has to be taken as a sign that we've got to expect faster P4 processors very soon. It won't be long until Intel will release Pentium 4 1.7 GHz and 2 GHz seem to be possible with the P4-Willamette core as well, before 'Northwood' and Socket478 will replace the current Pentium 4 for Socket423.
Foster, Willamette's workstation/server brother, that will probably be christened 'Pentium 4 Xeon' is due out soon too. It's not quite clear how many versions Intel will release initially. 'Foster' will run in Socket603 (coming with 603 pins, would you have guessed it?) and might initially only be available without third-level cache, just as the normal Pentium 4 for the masses. However, it may be that we will see Foster with 512 kB L3-cache soon as well. Tyan and Supermicro were displaying Foster boards with the i860 chipset at their booths.
'Tualatin', the next Pentium III core, is still meant to be 'on track' as well. It's supposed to debut at 1.26 GHz in a few months from now, but that would mean Intel gets the current Pentium III core 'Coppermine' to 1.13 GHz. I doubt that Intel will risk another unsuccessful attempt at that speed and expect that Tualatin as well as 'Coppermine-T' will debut at 1.13 GHz. This new-generation P3 won't have any particularly noteworthy performance features, but it will require less power and produce less heat. At the same time it will require a modified chipset. Don't worry if you should fail to see the sense of this future release of an unexciting processor that requires new platforms. You are in good company. The only sense in Tualatin that I can see is that it is targeted to take the place of Celeron in the 'value' segment, while Pentium 4 is supposed to rule the performance systems.