IDF Server aficionados were left wanting at this year's China-flavored Intel Developer Forum. The company kept banging on and on and on about something called a MID, which is neither a PDA nor an ultra mobile PC. The important difference between a MID and something else, according to Intel, is new usage models.

Whatever. They're not 128-way SMPs, so we don't care – except over on HardReg where we do.

Intel's server chip chief Pat Gelsinger did make an appearance here where he re-summarized several months of announcements. In addition, Gelsinger clocked (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/02/intel_monkey_king_xeon/) customers and partners with a monkey stick and showed off Tukwila – the upcoming addition to Intel's Drunken Uncle processor line – for the first time. It ran Solaris on top of Red Hat.

With Intel spending all of its time playing with toys, it was up to the partners to do the dirty work.

The FPGA co-processor lads from XtremeData were here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/03/xtremedata_fpga_xeon_data_warehouse/). You can see their tri-chip blasting through a batch of Black Scholes.

Take that Black Scholes

Gear from former AMD CTO Fred Weber's shop MetaRAM (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/25/weber_metaram/) was all over the place as well. Everywhere we turned, someone wanted to shove a double-stuffed Hynix DIMM at us.

This board shows off MetaRam's DDR3 play with Intel's upcoming "Thurley" platform that will use the Nehalem chips.

Double-stuffed Thurley

And again.

The touch, the feel of MetaRAM

We'd tell you all about the fantastic other server gear, but sadly, everything else was pretty bog standard. So, we'll leave you with heatsink porn courtesy of Dynatron (http://www.dynatron-corp.com/products/cpucooler/cpucooler.asp).

Heatsink Glory

And the glamor shot.

Isn't she lovely

All hail the monkey stick. ®

Related stories

XtremeData gives Xeon chips another math lesson with FPGAs (18 June 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/18/xtremedata_xd200i/
AMD refreshes slot machine CPU lineup (9 April 2008)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/04/09/amd_embedded_chip_3400e_3600_4200/
AMD shoves delayed Barcelona chip out of the door (9 April 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/09/amd_opteron_processor_chip_ships/
AMD will cut 10 per cent of global workforce (7 April 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/07/amd_cut_10_per_cent_workforce/
XtremeData swaps precious modily fluids between FPGAs and Xeons (3 April 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/03/xtremedata_fpga_xeon_data_warehouse/
Intel VP threatens to turn all Xeon users into 'monkey kings' (2 April 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/02/intel_monkey_king_xeon/
ScaleMP creates $10k four-socket box out of thin air (1 April 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/01/scalemp_four_socket/
HP intros midrange, easy-on-the-grid servers (31 March 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/31/hp_bl260cg5_dl120/
Intel slims low-power Xeon chips to 45nm (26 March 2008)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/26/intel_l5400_series_processors/
Intel wants to get into heavy petascaling (23 March 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/23/intel_gelsinger_petascale/
Dell quads up single-socket rockets (18 March 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/18/dell_poweredge_r300_t300/
Intel shoves Larrabee and visualization goldmine to 2010 (6 March 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/06/intel_visualization/
Intel plans power cuts for Harpertown (6 March 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/06/intel_roadmap/
Intel will flush Xeon line with six-core Dunny (25 February 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/25/intel_six_dunnington/
Intel rolls out Skulltrail high-end gaming mobo (20 February 2008)
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02/20/intel_launches_skulltrail/
New Mexico bets future on promiscuous supercomputer (9 February 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/09/encanto_computer_newmexico/
Rackable adds 1/4th busload of servers with quad-core Xeons (31 January 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/31/rackable_systems_13_quad_xeon_servers/