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PC Expo in New York» —>
Introduction
Things were certainly happening at PC Expo in New York last week. Not necessarily for PCs, but certainly for PDAs. There constantly were huge crowds at the booths of Palm Computing (PalmPilot), Handspring (Visor), and Sony, trying to get a closer look at the products. Especially Sony, also showcasing all kinds of other gadgets like new digital cameras and VAIO notebooks, was swamped by visitors all day. Sony previewed a prototype of its still nameless PDA based on the Palm OS. It features Sony’s Memory Stick media slot for removable memory, Jog Dial control for navigation, and in its first generation it is supposed to come with digital imaging capabilities. So far, Sony has not announced anything regarding availability and pricing.
While Sony, Palm Computing and Handspring base their PDAs on the Palm OS platform, they go different ways when it comes to expansion modules. Palm Computing unveiled at PC Expo that the new Palm products will feature a SD Card slot for data storage and I/O access. The SD Card was established by Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), SanDisk, and Toshiba. It is compatible with existing MultiMedia Cards (MMC), which means that users will be able to use these cards in SD-equipped Palm devices.
So, now we have expansion modules in form of the SD Card (Palm), Memory Stick (Sony), Springboard (Visor), and Compact Flash (TGRPro). All this gets pretty confusing for consumers, and of course the different technologies are completely incompatible. Haven’t these companies learned anything from the past? Proprietary standards are never a good idea. Just image this kind of thing had happened in the PC world. Major PC manufacturers like Compaq, Dell, Gateway and others decided to each use a floppy drive that is incompatible with the drives of other manufacturers. Well, you could not just simply copy a file to a floppy, take it to your friends’ house and copy it on his or her machine — unless it is the same brand. Even Apple decided at one point that it would be a good idea for Macs to be able to read discs that had been formatted on a PC… If handheld systems, and that also includes cell phones, MP3 players, and similar devices, all used the same expansion standard, it would be possible to share peripherals among them. What a concept!
Treasure Island
The next big thing at PC Expo was Transmeta’s Crusoe chip — or actually the first products with the low-power processor. Back in January, when Crusoe was introduced, the company would not name any vendors that had plans to actually build a system. At the Expo four major OEMs, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM and NEC displayed ultralight notebooks running with Crusoe processors. Because all Crusoe chips utilize Transmeta’s LongRun power management technology, they consume less power than common mobile processors, and thus extend the battery life. According to IBM, their Thinkpad 240 with Crusoe now runs 4 to 7 hours on battery. IBM plans to offer the Thinkpad in time for the holiday season, it will cost between $1800 and $2300, depending on the configuration.
Thin and ultralight: Hitachi’s notebook with Crusoe processor.
Transmeta’s booth was right next to Intel, by the way. Quite funny. Intel now seems to get slightly nervous about Transmeta, because just a few days before the PC Expo, Intel introduced two special low-power processors for notebooks: a 600 MHz mobile Pentium III, and a 500 MHz mobile Celeron with SpeedStep, Intel’s power management technology. According to Intel, the processors consume between 1 and 2 Watts. But as the German computer magazine c’t pointed out in their recent issue 14/2000, it all depends on how you actually measure the power consumption. Intel based their measurements on a scenario called ‘Average Power‘, where the processor (maximum power consumption 8.1 Watts at 500 MHz and 1.1 Volts) is in sleep mode for 80 to 95 percent of the time. Transmeta on the other hand lets the Crusoe TM5400 play MP3, and it still only consumes only 1 W (or 1.8 Watts for DVD playback) — including the Northbridge. In case of the Intel processors, the Northbridge alone eats up 2 W (BX chipset). Taken all that into account, Intel’s mobile Pentium III should consume about 6 Watts while playing MP3 — about six times as much as Transmeta’s Crusoe. Go figure.
NVidia was also in New York, but instead of a booth at the Expo, they had rented a suite in a hotel to meet with customers and the press. The company introduced a new version of their GeForce2 chipset called GeForce2 MX. It is targeted at the mainstream PC market, and is a toned-down version of the GeForce2 GTS. Nevertheless, it comes with some nifty new features like for example Digital Vibrance Control and TwinView, the capability to support multiple displays — including two independent digital flat panels. The company will also offer a mobile version of the GPU and one for the Mac. According to nVidia first boards with the new GeForce2 MX will be on the shelves in mid July and cost less thean $150. For a complete review of the GeForce2 MX, please read Silvino Orozco’s article ‘Full Review of nVidia’s Geforce2 MX‘.
The Geforce2 MX is a bit of a blow for the competition, especially for ATI. Just recently ATI had claimed that no other company will be able to offer a mobile graphics chip before 2001 because the chips of the competition consume too much power. Well, as Dan Vivoli, nVidia’s VP of Marketing, put it: ‘It’s easier to take them down if they don’t see you coming.‘ According to Vivoli, nVidia currently also does not have plans to offer multiple chip designs of their GeForce2 family. On one hand multiple chips on a board mean higher costs simply because you need more silicon, so the cards would be more expensive. And, said Vivoli ‘as long as we can do with one chip what others need several chips for, we are okay‘.
