This weekend Intel announced its new line of chipsets (the controllers that pass data between all of the different parts of a PC, such as the CPU, memory, and graphics). You'll forgive our scepticism that this is, according to Intel, "the most extensive, most ambitious PC platform improvement in years", but it is obviously a big step forward for consumer computing because of its liberal use of the letter X and the word "Express" (no "Extreme"?). Introduced into Intel's consumer products (though long available in the server market) is PCI Express (think of it as a broadband connection for your graphics card to your computer), which comes in two flavors: PCI Express X1 and X16. X1 almost quadruples the throughput of PCI, while X16 (meant primarily for graphics) nearly doubles AGP 8x (and is about 30x the speed of PCI), for a full 4 GBps data throughput. The chip sets are fascinatingly named the 915 and 925X Express (wasn't the "express" implied?), and they also feature support for serial ATA with RAID (which Intel has dubbed "Matrix" — more X's!), integrated "High Definition Audio", and DirectX 9 compatible integrated video. Score one for the Intel Marketing Team X2000!
