Cooler Master seems to be showing keen interest in small-scale cluster computing, or at least the casing, power and cooling part of it. In a bid to flex its engineering muscle, the company that is known best for its coolers and PC cases, is coming up with an intensive cluster-computer dubbed "20 Cores PC". What might look like an overgrown PC case from the outside, with enough room inside to accommodate an enthusiast PC setup, water-cooling, massive storage, and still room left to hide things, actually is a modified ATCS 840 to perpendicularly stack up to five mini-ITX motherboards, in essence, five systems. Armed with decent skills in networking and virtualization, one can build a small cluster-computer out of those five sub-PCs.

The 20 Cores PC Cooler Master plans to demonstrate this CeBIT has five motherboards powered by an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 processor each (hence 20 cores). Each CPU is water-cooled by the cooling system in place. Each motherboard has all essential components connected such as dedicated memory (2 GB per board), and fixed-storage. Each PC additionally has its own optical drive. In the cooling efficiency tests conducted by the company, it was noted that after five hours of full-load, the hottest CPU reached only 66 °C, with an ambient temperature of 30 °C and chipset temperature of 38 °C. The temperatures seem impressive indeed, though credit goes to the three 200 mm ventilator fans, a 120 mm fan, and a water-cooling system consisting of five pumps and a large radiator. The entire unit is powered by a Cooler Master 1,200 W power supply.

AMD would be releasing its desktop 45nm CPUs, starting with two models under the Phenom II X4 banner. At this point in time, there is a great deal of uncertainty about when AMD plans to stock retailers with the new CPUs. The company's own roadmaps pointed out to a Q1 2009 launch, with several sources reporting then, that an early January launch was likely, but now it seems unlikely according to sources, who suggest these processors to stock up in March or later.

Meanwhile, a slide showing what looks like the the company's performance projections for the Phenom II X4 940, made its way to Expreview. The Phenom II X4 940 quad-core processor (Black Edition variant) would serve as the company's flagship desktop processor in the months to come, until it gets a proper AM3 refresh, and taken over by Phenom II X4 945. In the slide, the Phenom II X4 940 is pitted against two seemingly mainstream quad-core processors by Intel: Core 2 Quad Q9300 and Core 2 Quad Q9400. A percentage comparison in the gaming performance across some games and 3DMark06 is shown.

Intel has ported the Core 2 Quad Q9400 to the embedded platform, where it would be used in industrial PCs. The Q9400 is a 64-bit x86 quad-core processor based on the 45nm Yorkfield core. On the embedded platform, the Q9400 would be supported by the Intel Q45 and 3210 core-logic (chipset).

According to Doug Davis, vice president of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group and general manager of the Embedded and Communications Group, the company assures seven years of support and product lifetime for the new processor. The provision of four advanced execution units would step up parallelism and responsiveness in multi-threaded and multi-tasking environments.