CoolTechZone recently had the chance to attend AMD's Tech Tour in Atlanta, GA. Before we begin, let's keep in mind that this tour is mainly for system integrators and not the enthusiast community, however, you can ask as many questions as you want from the manufacturers that were present at the tour.

AMD Tech Tour is a way for AMD to target major cities where they hope to meet system integrators and answer their questions regarding AMD and the company's new products. This way AMD hopes to gain these system integrators onto their side and help them retail AMD's latest products.

This year's main focus was on 64-bit computing, Athlon 64 and Opteron processors, which were recently announced. There were also a lot of anti-Intel talk during the keynotes by special guests, which was expected but amazing to see how professionalism quickly disappeared in the room.

We talked to the vendors that were present at the show about the future of the hardware industry. Please keep in mind that much of the information you read here might or might not be new in the industry. AMD's keynotes failed to yield new information about the company and the products, however, there were detailed slides on the Athlon 64 microprocessors and the Opterons. Many hardware websites were quoted during the presentation, and the information was re-capped in a visual presentation. It was a good refresher course on the Athlon 64 and Opteron architecture nonetheless.

Here's a brief look at the schedule of the show to make sure you can follow us:

- Registration
- Product Showcase: Part 1
- Presentations: Part I
- Dinner
- Product Showcase: Part II
- Presentations: Part II
- End of AMD Tech Tour 2004

The show started at exactly 4:00pm and ended close to 9:30pm. Even though the registration was supposed to stop at 4:30, AMD still welcomed guests much later than 4:30pm.

Western Digital:

We first arrived at the Western Digital Booth, where Western Digital representatives were showcasing their 74GB 10,000 Raptor drives. They also had a server for visitors to look at, powered by AMD processors. Western Digital expects the SATA 2 standard to be out in late 2005 or early 2006. From what Western Digital told us, SATA 2 is not much to get excited about. Even though users will be able to access more bandwidth with the SATA 2 standard, the hard drives will be limited by spindle speeds.

Western Digital itself is not excited about the standard and did not comment on the future of hard drives in terms of speed and capacity.

[Gigabyte]