Live from Taiwan: Cebit 2006 Preview

Cebit 2006 in Hanover, Germany is certainly Europe's premier Electronics show. Some would even say that it's the best Consumer Electronics show in the world. Cebit is fun to attend, but it is spread over many buildings in a city with inadequate hotel space, which means that you often have to stay many miles away from the Hanover show. From a press viewpoint, this makes Cebit a tough show to cover.

This year, AnandTech went to Taiwan just before Cebit to visit manufacturers who will be some of the top exhibitors at Cebit because most, if not all, of the new products at Cebit were born in Taiwan or China. This means that our readers are the first to see many of the new products, which will be producing all the buzz at Cebit this year.

It is still about 3 months until AMD is expected to launch their new Socket AM2, but this time gap has only made the AM2 information search that more frantic. Most major manufacturers will be showing a working AM2 board at Cebit, but they won't be displaying any benchmarks. Our guess is that AMD is still not ready to hang its hat on benchmarks. The second spin of the AM2, widely called DVT or DeVelopmenT, combined with the latest NVIDIA MCP55, Rev. A02 or the ATI RD580, is widely reported to bring AM2 performance very close to Socket 939 levels. The earlier EVT chip fell far short of Socket 939 performance levels.

It appears that an issue remains with the latest DVT AM2 in that single channel and dual-channel memory performance are virtually the same on the latest DVT spin. If this is corrected, AMD may finally see the performance gains that they told the industry to expect with the move to AM2 and DDR2. Another AM2 spin is expected in the next few days, and until performance is more representative of the final shipping product, AMD likely does not want benchmarks leaving the wrong impression.