The PC hardware industry has two hearts. The first, California's Silicon Valley, is home to the likes of Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. The second heart of the PC industry is Taipei, Taiwan, home to the likes of ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS, FIC, and a vast number of other computer component manufacturers.

Each year in Taipei, all these companies come together to meet at COMPUTEX, a PC and electronics component trade show. This year, the show is being held June 5th through 9th. We spoke with several companies in Taiwan about what their announcements will be so that we can now bring you in-depth coverage on the announcements from COMPUTEX.

Today we have information on announcements and products from Intel, VIA, SiS, AMD, ABIT, AOpen and FIC.

Intel is making a splash this COMPUTEX with their i815 and ICH2 chipsets. The i815 chipset is essentially an i810e with PC133 SDRAM support and external AGP4x. ICH2, Intel's new southbridge, adds ATA100, integrated LAN, integrated audio, dual-master USB, CNR and more to the mix. The i815 with ICH1 is called i815, and when matched with ICH2 it is called i815e. Several makers told us that, at least for the next month or two, i815 supplies will be tight as Intel ramps up production. Intel will also show their new i820e, which is the i820 northbridge matched to ICH2.

Recently, Intel recalled their MTH (memory translator hub) chips from motherboard makers due to a rare crash and data corruption bug. This left yet another black mark on the i820 chipset's dark past. Of all the motherboard makers we spoke with, not a single one showed us plans for an i820e board. They did, however, say that Intel will be coming out with a third revision of the MTH, called MTH2, MTH+, or MTH revision C. The new MTH will not be for the i820 chipset, but instead for Intel's upcoming Timna CPU, graphics and northbridge combo. i820e-based motherboards will probably come when RDRAM prices are lower, market demand is higher, and motherboard makers can justify the R&D.

We asked several board makers about their plans for Willamette, Intel's successor to the Pentium III coming late this year or early next. Though we did not hear anything new about the CPU, we did get a photograph.