Christmas is over and the New Year cheers are all but a couple of days away, and here I am looking forward to taking a peek at the offerings 2008 has in store, and probably getting my paws on them too. The year 2007 had some pretty marvelous (and not-so-marvelous) surprises in its sleeve, so one can’t help but wonder just how 2008 would be in terms of wowing geeks like me.

Anyhow, Korean company Trigem, the company that brought to us the Averatec line of notebooks, has a few goodies in store for us by late January or early February 2008. The one goodie that I’ve got my eyes on is none other than the LLUON Crystal micro-PC.

I’m sure you can relate when I say I love my gadgets small but powerful, and the LLUON Crystal looks to be exactly that. With a size that is 45.2mm wide, 277mm high and 244.1mm deep, it sure is petite. Don’t let that diminutive figure fool you, though – this baby can kick ass. The hard drive is 320 GB with 7,200 rpm. It also has a 1 GB memory and 1.66 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, not to mention a 256 MB GeForce 8400 GS video card. Trigem said that this baby can smoothly run that resource-gobbler Windows Vista.

For those who want more power, there is a more advanced version of the LLUON Crystal. This more advanced version comes with a 2 GB memory and a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, not to mention WiFi. An add-on to the LLUON Crystal is an optional 22-inch LCD monitor with a TV tuner.

As for the price, this mini-PC comes at around US$1,300 while its slightly powerful sister is tagged at almost US$1,500. Price does not include the monitor.

At one point or another, the Internet grapevine has been rife with rumors telling all and sundry that Advanced Micro Devices – AMD to you geeks – has a new surprise up its sleeve. Rumor has it that this surprise has something to do with a tri-core chip. Well, folks, as it turns out, the gossip on the grapevine is well-founded, and AMD is indeed working on a tri-core chip.

If you find it hard to believe what you are reading right now, check out last Sunday’s issue of The Inquirer right here.

The Inquirer story aptly posed the question people have indeed been asking about this move by AMD to work on a tri-core chip. The answer is simple and obvious enough: it is mostly because Intel, AMD’s closest competitor, is practically incapable of doing it. At least, not now.

To quote the Inquirer post:

“AMD is probably doing this for two reasons; the lesser being salvage, the more important one being that Intel can’t do it. Intel would have a far harder time making a tri-core part until Nehalem next September – it is easy to fuse off a core, far harder to MCM disparate cores.”

Is this a bad thing or a good thing? Well, we are not really sure how this will turn out to be, and who knows? Intel might decide to bite the bait and give AMD a run for the money. People who were dissatisfied with the performance of the quad-core might decide to give the tri-core a try. After all, having three cores working in your computer will still leave your computer running faster than just having two. Who knows?

In any case, if AMD does succeed in this endeavor of theirs, they will have greater flexibility, as the Inquirer post put it. That is not so bad at all.

Some of the average computer users that I know got overwhelmed when they first got their hands on a machine powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo chip. With the Core 2 Duo, they thought they already saw it all. But hey, I’m looking forward to seeing their faces when they hear about what aces Intel still has up its sleeve.

The second half of this year is when we start to get to see exactly what these aces are. According to this article on PC World, Intel is slated to bring to the masses the most awaited Penryn chips. These Penryn chips would be the first type of chips that will be introducing to the world Intel’s 45mn manufacturing systems, with high-k dialectric and metal gate transistors. This means we will have faster computers that keep raising clock speeds and yet consuming as constant an amount of power as possible. Sounds neat, doesn’t it?

But it does not end there. The article further states that in early 2008, Intel will start shipping its Nehalen family of CPU chips as well as the Tolapai. If the Penryn chips will give us a taste of what Intel’s 45mn manufacturing system can do, the Nehalen chips will give us a full blast of it. Intel said that the Nehalen chips will have as much as eight cores on a single chip, with an integrated DDR3 memory controller. There will be two threads in each core, as well as a dedicated cache memory, though a large and shared cache is also to be expected. On some Nahalen chips, there will be integrated graphics.

We have yet to read of details as to what exactly the Tolapai is, but people from Intel have already revealed that the Tolapai puts together an x86 processor core with an integrated chipset. Add to that an encryption co-processor. The Tolapai design has dedicated servers in mind, servers that take care of virus scanning as well as encryption.

With all these developments, the CPU as we know it will be radically different from what it once was. It will be all power and speed as we have never known it before. As the PC World article put it:

“As the number of cores increases, so does the number of threads that can be processed simultaneously, opening the door to further performance gains.

I don’t know about you, but I am marking my calendar until 2008.