Saturday, 11th of September, 2004, Iwill staged a demonstration of their new workstation, small form factor, and server class hardware at the Linux Cafe / Caffé Pronto in Akihabara. Lots of very interesting kit on show!

Thanks must go to Gary Lin and Sophie Huang of Iwill Corporation, Harimoto Tekihiro of Iwill Japan, and Louis Yang of Supreme Top Technology, for allowing me to take innumerable photos and offering a wealth of information. Any omissions or mistakes here are of course mine — and naturally there are many questions I should have asked, but did not think to do so at the time.

Iwill have certainly heard of 2cpu.com, and mentioned that it is widely regarded as the premier multi-processor focused review site. So keep up the good work!

The event ran from 11am to 6pm, and included multiple bingo prize giveaways of caps, USB memory key rings and the like. The stars of the show of course were the new hardware offerings.

• ZMAXdp dual-Opteron SFF workstation
• ZPC64 single-processor Athlon64 SFF
• Dual/quad processor blade server
• 4-way and 8-way servers
• DN800-L motherboard
• DK8ES motherboard
• Supreme Top memory

When will this technology be available? Well, the DK8ES and ZMAXdp are sampling now, and (unofficially) they should be available retail within six weeks. I've seen an online retailer in Japan advertising a mid October shipping date on the H401 1U server.

The event was very popular, with a real throng gathered about the bingo giveaways. The Linux cafe is located pretty much right in the middle of the PC hardware centre of Tokyo, and so drew in a great many passers-by with hardware on their minds. With a number of firsts on display, it seems Iwill are set to make quite an impact in the Opteron/Athlon 64 PC market.