Last night I was playing around with Intel's new Lynnfield and wanted to see what I might be able to get out of it. I was not looking to spend a ton of time but wanted to see what the fastest stable overclock on air I was able to get.

So I hooked up my trusty ASRock P55 Deluxe that we reviewed with the Lynnfield and dropped the Core i5 750 into it. I also had an 8GB kit of Corsair Memory that I was testing (expect a review of it shortly)so I dropped that in as well. To get things off the ground I went straight to the OC Tweaker page and hit the EZ OC settings. I selected 4200MHz and let the board set everything up. I rebooted and was off and running at 4.2GHz no problem.

Restarting the system I headed right back into the BIOS. From there I pushed the BClK up to 215 MHz and made sure Turbo was enabled for that 21x Multiplier. From there I was able to hit the login screen but after entering the password I got an immediate blue screen. It looked like 4.5GHz was out of the question. From there I started working backwards. I ended up with a very healthy 210 BLCK at a 21 Multiplier. The Corsair memory was humming along at 1686MHz with timings of 8-8-8-24 1T. At this speed some of my tests started crashing so I backed the memory off a slower 1264MHZ but I was able to drop the latency to 7.

As a kid, I remember cartoons where the evil mainframe computer would take over the world by using a laser (of course an evil laser!) to tap into the world's systems and forcing the hero to save the day.

This is exactly what Intel is working on; well except for the laser and the evil part. Today at IDF, Intel showed a new method for connecting mobile systems to an existing network of devices. The new technology is being dubbed "Light Peak" and could allow mobile devices to connect to storage, display, networking, audio and pretty much anything you can conceive.

The new standard uses an optical connector (hence the laser reference) that is capable of sending up to 10Gbps at distances of up to 100 meters (about 333 feet). The idea is to reduce the number of ports and connectors needed for mobile devices (remember we talked about moving all of the PCI-e family onto the CPU?) and replace them with a single one that can pretty much do them all.

You know, I think we need to start a new section (to go with the random stupidity awards) maybe we will call it DX11 watch. After all with AMD and NVIDIA going back and forth about DX11 and its importance, why not see what the real state of DX11 is.

For starters, let's cover some things that we know. AMD has a DX11 card out. It is launched, public and available. There will be a DX11 operating system, Windows 7, available starting on the 23rd of October. Despite this future date, Steam is reporting a large number of early adopters.

Codemasters are implementing partial DX11 support (much like the DX10 surfaces in Bioshock) for DiRT 2 and the Battle Field Engine has been ported to DX11 completely.

With another round of IDF now underway, Larrabee is in the forefront of most minds and thankfully it was shown off publicly for the first time today, running on a six cored Gulftown based PC.

It was running the traditional game Quake Wars, ported to do raytracing.

Waves moved, geometry was not static, and in general it worked. Instead of multiple four core chips, the new demo was running on the 'GPU', although Intel would not call it that. The only thing on the CPU was the game engine itself, exactly what you would expect from a CPU/GPU machine. As we said earlier, B0 silicon, the bug fixed Larrabee, taped out a month ago, and would possibly be shown at IDF.

I love the launch of new graphics cards, especially when it comes to AMD products. The main reason for this is that NVIDIA normally send over an email asking if we've got samples and when we respond with a yes, we get some questions that they think we should be asking ourselves.

This time was no different; the email came through right on time with NVIDIA asking the "tough" questions. To be honest though, I'm not AMD, I don't really feel great about answering questions on behalf of AMD, so with an email sent we had someone who was willing to respond. That person was Chris Hook who is AMD Global Communications, now with Global Communications in your title, you've got to feel pretty safe that the right person is responding.

So, what did NVIDIA ask and how did AMD respond?

So what would you do with four screens on your favorite portable? This thought came to me today while checking out the news from Intel's IDF event being held at the moment.

At the show was an interesting concept, this is a laptop with a main screen and three (yes three) smaller OLED screens.

These three screens would be above the keyboard and could show a variety of widgets. The interesting thing is that they can be interacted with through multi-touch gestures and your standard mouse. You would be able to drag files between the screens, including the main one.

Ah the game of leapfrog is so much fun, your ahead, I'm ahead. It never stops. This game is even more fun for the IT industry. The four major players (well three actually) fight for position in the market place. Each wants to be "first" at something. For example AMD was able to say they have the "First" Native Dual and Quad Core CPUs. Intel can say they were "First" to 32nm. ATi (AMD) can say they were "First" to use Physics on the GPU and the First to leverage the GPU as a processor. NVDIA...First with PhysX and Full scale GPGPU support...

Well you get the picture. So, why do I bring this all up? Simply because Intel is announcing that they will have a 22nm process for 2011. This means that by the time that AMD (Global Foundries) is hitting bulk production of 32nm CPUs, Intel will be cranking out a full node smaller.

They are getting to this size with a reduction in leakage thanks to a new version of their Hi-K Metal Gate (HKGM) material. This reduction in size (and leakage) means more energy and heat efficient CPUs. A reduction in process also means being able to pack more transistors into the same space, which of course means more functionality.

Yesterday we told you about AMD announcing their new hexa-core Thuban CPU on the day before IDF. Well, that news has been eclipsed with a single act. Overclocking master Shamino took an early engineering sample of Intel's six-core 32nm Gulftown and pushed it to an impressive 6.386GHz.

To reach this speed he needed some LN and 2.02 volts. The 6.386GHz OC is very nice but was not bench stable. To run 3DMark Vantage for a CPU score he had to drop back to 5.9GHz (still a nice overclock).

At this speed the new Gulftown was still able to completely smash the existing world record for CPU score with a staggering 51,177 not using any GPU based Physics. Now when you consider that the current record is only 32,328 you can see just how impressive this feat truly is.

DX11 is supposed to be the next big thing. At least that is what AMD and Microsoft would like you to think. On the surface (and in reality) it is a good step in the right direction for gaming. The problem lies in the way that it might be implemented by developers.

When we first heard that DiRT 2 and Racecar Driver Grid 2 were going DX11 we were very excited. Now we hear that the DX11 implementation will be a partial effort. Codemasters is not going to launch the game with full DX11 support.

Our sources tell us that there will be some of the more visible DX11 eye-candy enabled, but not all. This is a little disappointing to be honest, especially given the fact that AMD is offering coupons for a free copy of the game when it launches around the 23rd of October.

In similar fashion to ATI's deal with Valve in providing coupons for copies of Half Life 2 upon launch when purchasing select DirectX 9 based ATI graphics cards, it's been said that the imminent release of ATI's next family of desktop graphics cards, the Radeon HD 5800 series will come shipped with a coupon that allows the buyer to grab a copy of Dirt 2, the first DirectX 11 based game to hit the market.

However, no doubt due to shaking hands on optimization processes that favour ATI based graphics cards, the game's original launch date of September 10 has fallen back and at the least it won't be available until sometime in November, whilst the 5870 will inevitably be on shelves well before then, so you'll have to hold onto your coupon for a while before you can make use of it.