Intel Extreme Masters; Taking Comic Con to the Extreme

The Global Challenge NY competition here at IEM Comic Con has been intense, the preliminary qualifiers have taken place and the finals have been set with WinFakt vs SK Gaming battling it out for the Counter Strike 1.6 championship, FruitDealer faces off against DongRaeGu in StarCraft II and fnatic goes up against SK Gaming for the League of League title. Follow all the action, including archived video of the matches, on the Intel Extreme Masters web site hosted by ESL.

The Global Challenge isn’t the only thing happening here at IEM Comic Con; here in the Intel Consumer Showcase we have been giving away stuff, lots of stuff! T-shirts, water bottles, USB flash drives, SSD 320 series solid state drives, and Intel Core i7 Extreme processors. Intel’s futurist Brian David Johnson has been in the house meeting folks, giving away t-shirts and autographing his new book The Tomorrow Project Anthology, co-authored with Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff and Will.i.am, plus he is hosting a panel “Screen Future: Gaming comics and TV around the world and five years from now”, Brian has been very busy boy here at Comic Con.

We also have a very cool demonstration of the ruggedness of Intel’s SSD 320 series solid state drive. We put it on a paint shaker along with a current technology disk drive, fired up the shaker an watched the current technology drive crash and burn while the Intel SSD kept on working. The secret is the Intel SSD has no moving parts to fail so the shaking doesn’t affect it. The Intel SSD is fast as well, information is stored in solid state circuitry and not on spinning platters so access to the data is some 20 times faster than current technology disk drives, applications load up way quicker.

I took a lap around the show floor today, (looking for goofy t-shirts) and stopped to watch a couple of artist working on their comic strips, interesting thing is they weren’t using pen on paper, they were creating their artwork digitally using interactive displays, drawing directly on the LCD screen, pretty cool technology and if I’m not mistaken the computer powering the display was an Intel processor, and that’s a good thing :-).

We are continuing our pop culture trivia contest on Twitter @IntelEdge with a PC powered by a 2nd generation Intel Core processor as the prize, and be sure to have a look at our flickr collection of photos taken here at Comic Con 2011.

And I did find the perfect steak so I will consider Intel Extreme Masters Global Challenge NY a total success.