Introduction
You know, this Comdex is great. Sure, there are not that many people around. We think it has to be less than 100k, which is less than half of last year. But, who knows? Comdex attendance data always seemed inflated in the past. This year, though, it’s actually not bad to be here. You get to talk to people. You get to see stuff. No one looks too harried or haggard.
And, there are scantily clad servers waiting on you at every slot machine as you ponder your Comdex article deadlines and feed the one armed bandit your rent check. It’s a sort of bliss.
Nvidia Power Breakfast
We started off day one of Comdex with a power breakfast courtesy of Nvidia and the new NV17M. A better introduction for this might be: «How now to make friends with the media on the first day of Comdex!» We, the hungry press, were on time for our power breakfast, but Nvidia wasn’t. Never leave a pack of hungry tech journalists waiting too long. There was already a long line of media waiting to get in to eat breakfast, and the ensuing rush when the doors of the meeting room opened up onto the buffet was to be our only confrontation with a crowd at this year’s Comdex.
Who doesn’t want a free breakfast on the first day of Comdex, but, is it really in your best interest to leave a bunch of hungry media folks standing outside your meeting room for almost 30 minutes, waiting to eat? Survey says, NO! However, this is what happened. It looked like some sort of an angry herd of zombies, waiting to eat in some form of disorganized chaos.
As we already told you in our Day 0 report from Comdex, Nvidia was keen to make sure that we knew that the new NV17M was the laptop technology of the future. Now, with over 90 million Nvidia based graphics cards shipped and closing in on 100 million by year’s end, the NV17M reprsents a new level of 3D graphics for the mobile platform. Being one of the world’s single biggest semiconductor companies is a fact not lost on Nvidia.
Nvidia is betting its reputation on the new technology of this chip. In some ways, it sounds like nothing more than an advanced mobile GeForce 3, but, in fact, the NV17M includes the features found in the GeForce 3 chips and more, adding a few new wrinkles in order to make things interesting. With Nvidia’s goal of being able to run everything at 1024×768 with a playback rate of 60fps, it is as fast as any GeForce card that shipped a year ago. Nvidia could not be pinned down when asked how much it will add to the cost of the average notebook. You should expect to see it in a notebook from Toshiba toward the end of February, 2002.
ATI, Too
Lest it be forgotten, Nvidia isn’t without competition. ATI is doing its best to regain its reputation with its drivers for the Radeon series cards. New driver features which have been in development for some time will add ATI’s own «Smooth Vision» enabled to the feature set. It will feature user-selectable performance and quality modes, with ten different performance combinations. ATI promises that they are hard at work on driver development, with over 400 of their staff involved in that effort. ATI also told us that we can expect regular driver refreshes on a quarterly basis, as well as better access to beta drivers. The also went out on a possible limb by telling us the following: «In future driver development we can expect the focus to no longer be on driving up the frame rate where it doesn’t effect the game play.» In addition, [ATI] stated that they are still committed to driver optimizations that will enhance the performance of Quake-based games, or games that use any of the Quake engines.
ATI also announced the Mobility FIRE GL 7800 mobile GPU for MCAD and digital content creation, as well as other 3D applications. While the Mobility is based on the Radeon technology in order to increase the Fire GL 7800’s performance, it also includes a high performance and optimized OpenGL driver. The Mobility Fire GL will support 128bit DDR memory and Hyper Z technology to boost memory performance. With these new and advanced features, we can expect to see many of the desktop replacement notebooks becoming available with the new Mobility Fire GL 7800.
Belkin
A visit with with the folks from Belkin revealed that they are continuing with their strategy of releasing new and agressively priced networking products. Belkin now has a complete line of 802.11b wireless networking products available, which looked quite good. Although, at this time, Belkin has no plans to enter the new 802.11a market, you never know, that could always change. Right now they are happy to continue to focus on the 802.11b technology. Also of intrest from Belkin were their new rack mount KVM products.
AOpen
News from AOpen was that they too are going to start releasing a variety of new networking products in both the wired and wireless networking areas. They also intend to release a variety of switches and wireless access points products. Our first look was positive and the products looked to be more well thought out and designed than some of the stuff that we have seen in the past.
AOpen also announced a major refresh of some other video card product line as you can see in the picture below. For the most part it was the same old thing as far as video cards go at the moment. Not much new to report on AOpen’s new video cards.
Xbox
Xbox, Xbox. Everywhere there was an Xbox. You could not escape the buzz surrounding the Xbox. Microsoft setup up an entire area deveoted to Xbox and the titles on Xbox. Although I could not get close enough to play any of the games, the games themselves looked very good. Halo (although I asked around, no one seemed to really know if Halo will be available for the PC at some point in the future) and Gothem Racing were the two titles that caught my eye. The general buzz about the Xbox is pretty positive, and people seem hopeful that Xbox might spawn PC-versions of Xbox titles. Being a PC gamer that doesn’t own a console system, Xbox has given me reason to start really thinking about the possibility of buying one. The games look good and the performance is good. Maybe I just need to give in, and start buying games for two platforms?
AMD
The shape of things to come for AMD’s Athlon XP core; a die shrink to Thoroughbred
AMD hosted a press-only event at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway where attendees could take a ride in a Dodge Viper down the drag strip at 150+ miles per hour. AMD continued to focus on speed with their announcement of the new 1.2Ghz mobile Athlon 4 and the mobile 950mhz Duron.
1.2 GHz Athlon 4 in AMD’s suite
AMD, Continued
The event also included a chance to meet AMD-sponsored IRL racing driver Scott Sharp, and to see the Delphi, the AMD-sponsored IRL car. Scott may not have known the ins and outs of the processor, but he did know that technology and computers are important to racing, and that beating him on Nascar 4 with an AMD processor running is difficult.
Here is a picture of the AMD sponsored IRL car. I liked the way that the picture kind of glowed from the flash do to the paint that that use on certain areas of the car to make it easier to see in IRL night races
Intel wasn’t inside the poor corvette that was forced to race the AMD-powered Dodge Viper. But seriously, the AMD event was great our hosts at AMD really rolled out the red carpet for us, and a good time was had by all.
Another speed demon from AMD? The unusually Kermit friendly Epox KT266A using an Athlon XP 1900+ built by Voodoo Computers of Canada.
Intel
We had an NDA briefing with Intel, which pretty much set us up for a rollicking new year of activity in 2002. Of course, you can probably find out most of what was said from places where they don’t honor NDAs, but we like to stick to this stuff. We are beginning to wonder why they say NDA, when it’s actually selective. Hmmmm.
Suffice it to say that Intel and its OEMs are likely to make a big push in January with a refresh of existing product lines that should help solidify Intel’s plan to make P4 ubiquitous, and say bye bye, and we do mean Goodbye, to the P3.
Intel also demonstrated one of its proof-of-concept products at Comdex, a sort of mish mash of ideas from a number of partners, under the banner of the Hannacroix Concept PC. Everything is USB, Firewire and Serial ATA, or, to put it simply, no legacy devices. Something like 11 USB 2.0 ports, 3 Firewire, Bluetooth on-board, Home Gateway CNR with internal 802.11 antenna. Sure, it works. Sure, it’s buildable. More to the point, it helps Intel and its partners, including Agere, Cirrus Logic and Cypress Semiconductor show that they have chipsets and implementations for OEMs to integrate some of this functionality down the road.
ECS Elitegroup
We browsed the ECS Elitegroup suite with Alexander Tao, GM of the Systems Business, and Chien Shih, VP of Tech Operations.
Chien Shih and Alex Tao show off ECS’s modular mobility products. It’s really a laptop without the screen. Keep the LCD display on your desk, unplug your system, take it home, plug it into an LCD there, and back again. Like carrying a loose leaf folder around. IBM has done some work in this area, too.
ECS is branching out into all kinds of areas.
Purple motherboards were the norm, and when asked why purple, the response was, «because all the other good colors were taken.» It was a classic remark, one for the PC-technology history books!.
ECS also showed us their Concept PC with no floppy drive.
Goodbye floppy drive
This is the beginning of a trend, or something. A drive bay solely made up of slots and USB ports to handle solid state media, compact Flash, and other memory stick-iness.
If Comdex is the legacy of a fading tech revolution, then maybe it’s not so bad if the PC says adios to its own legacy and we all move on. At least until the next tech revolution comes along, and some other clever sadist figures out how to herd us back to this city while charging a fortune for a cup of coffee.
Please follow-up by reading THG At Comdex 2001 — Day 2.
