Intel Developers Forum

Advancing the Internet?

Intel's Developer Forum is an exclusive meeting for developers to hobnob with Intel's own engineers, and listen to the spin on what software they'll have to develop for tomorrow's hardware . This year, Intel's big focus is on the Internet, and of course, the recently prototyped IA-64 architecture, also known as the "Merced."

Among the keynotes and tracks being presented this year in Palm Springs, you'll find a number of IA-64 conferences, talks on new high-end workstation standards, RAM, and Streaming SIMD Extensions. In fact, only one track is geared towards the ongoing progress of 3D, with both 3dfx and Nvidia providing talks on various subjects such as "The World's Best Computing Platform" and "Balancing System Performance with Advanced Graphics Pipelines."

Bring on the bombshell

Among all the gearheads and gearheaded festivities, it's both surprising and expected that Nvidia would choose to coincide their most significant announcement to date with the IDF. Today, Nvidia introduces the GeForce 256, a world changing 3D chip that they refer to as a GPU.

Anyone who's been watching Nvidia's website for the last few hours has no doubt seen the prophesying message: in less than x hours, the world will change…" Now that's a pretty bold statement! So what is the GeForce 256? What in the world is an GPU? And what happened to that next-generation product they were working on for the last year, the ambiguously monikered "NV10?" That's what we're here to find out!

It's been so over 30 minutes...