San Francisco, CA

This week, my dear friends, I'm visiting beautiful San Francisco, California.  I'm here as part of a delegation from my company, to visit with press and analysts.  The funny thing, is that we're actually stealing people away from the main event in town, the Intel Developers Forum:

Intel, my company's biggest competitor, holds this event each year and brings hundreds of journalists, analysts and developers to San Francisco.  As a sneaky, competitive move, we set-up a little battle HQ in a hotel just across the street from the event.  I was lucky enough to stay in the St. Regis Hotel.  Here's an example of the view from my room:

That's the Moscone Center down there...

We took over one of the largest suites in the hotel, and turned it into an amazing product/technology demo area:

 Our brand-new super CPU

A little war-gaming discussion...

This is a top-secret chip that we haven't shown publicly before...

Prepping for press briefings during the day

In one of the other rooms in the suite, we showed off the latest graphics technology that is second-to-none in the industry.  We gave a "sneak peek"of a future product, to an industry analyst.

In yet another room, we set up a unique display that included 5 separate monitors, all connected to a single graphics card in a single computer:

Can you imagine playing a game on this system? ; )  Here's a quick video of what it looked like, in action.  By filling a little of your peripheral vision, it make some people "queasy":

The highlight of the week, was unusual.  Our company was actually awarded a Guinness World Record:

The award was for the faster computer chip in the world.  Basically, we took our latest chip and kept feeding more electricity to it, to see how "fast" it would run.  To help you understand...when you push more electricity through a chip, the metal/silicon inside tends to resist some of the current - and makes the chip run hotter.  You know that normal computers have fans, to keep things cool inside.  For our achievement, we actually had to use liquid nitrogen and liquid helium, to keep this chip cool enough to run:

We even threw a little party to celebrate the award - and the "technical" press LOVED the achievement. This is as geeky as it gets, my friends.

The trip was successful, as I met with quite a few press from around the world.  I loved coming back to the San Francisco Bay Area, even if it was for a short time.

Now, on to Boston!