Humphrey Cheung and Wolfgang Gruener

Cebit, the big daddy of all technology fairs, opened today in Hannover, Germany. In the coming weeks, several hundred thousand people are expected to push and shove through large booths and the tiny aisles of 26 exhibit halls.

You didn't think that Intel would leave all that dual-socket fame for itself, did you? At CES, Intel showed off an 8-core desktop system build on a 2P workstation board with two quad-core processors. Intel claims that the system trumps AMD's fastest Quad-FX by 61% in one key benchmark. And yes, we do have pictures of this beast.

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, formally launched the Xeon 5300 quad-core series as well as the Xeon 5300 series during his keynote at IDF. Gelsinger also mentioned that Intel is working on a new benchmark that will focus on the power efficiency of a processor.