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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pravin Kamdar who wrote (80039)	11/16/1999 1:53:00 PM
From: Pravin Kamdar	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 1570826

Comdex Part 2: First of all the HP keynote by Carly Fiorina was disappointing. She has only been with the company for 100 days and talked as if she was born and raised with HP. I found this a little presumptuous and disengenuous (our culture has always been this, our culture has always been that -- what the hell does she know about it). Anyway, it is obvious that HP is trying to position itself as an "eServices" company. Her view is that the purpose of having products is to enable profiting from services associated with those products (she's on the right track here). As a woman, she talked about making the internet a warmer, friendlier, more intimate place (I could only image Lou Platt acting the same out on stage). Another good message was that she talked about HP's support of open systems and software, and announced that their eSpeak application code will be made open source on December 8th. At the end, a good video of still shots of Hewlett and Packard over the years was shown - starting with them working on a product in a little garage in the back of their yard in Palo Alto. I then went to the exhibit floor at the Sands. Tons of motherboard manufacturers had their boards on display. Intel i820 boards were everywhere. Very few Athlon boards could be found. I did see a demonstration of an Allidin 7 system with integrated Northbridge graphics from ArtX. A guy was playing Quake III and the graphics looked beautiful. This system was using a 400 Mhz K6III. A sister system using a 350 Mhz K6III was playing back beautiful DVD. This is how far along the Alladin 7 is. I was very impressed. THe ArtX guy would not get into frame rates and fillrates (versus gforce) with me, but the system looked very fast. He said that availability should be in Q1. VIA/Cyrix had a large booth showing several Joshua based boards. Joshua uses the MII core with an enhanced dual piplined FPU, 133 Mhz front side bus, 3DNow!, and 256Kb L2 cache. It is socket 370 and is designed to compete with the Celeron in the low end. It will come out in 1H with estimated PR ratings of 433 and 466 (with the Celeron as the PR reference). I didn't see anything on the KX133, but will go double check. One of the cool booths at The Sands was the Creative booth. I saw a demo of their Creative Blaster ADSL modem where three three simultaneous beautiful video streams from the web were shown with the modem at 1.5 Mb/sec. The video streams were from jamesbond.com (check it out if you have broadband). The people for Be OS also had a nice booth demonstrating their operating system. At noon, I attended the Sony Keynote. This was great. They started off showing clips from a new movie staring a digitally created mouse (with dynamic b-splines allowing natural movement of clothing on the mouse). They also showed a little demo of their robot dog. Then a guy came out and jammed on an electic guitar, only to find out that it was being recorded on a memory stick. The memory stick was then plugged into a memory stick Walkman and replayed to the audiance. An MP3 music player in the form factor of a writing pen was shown -- really cool. A video camera that used a mini disk was shown that has ramdom scene access and video editing features built in. A Bluetooth card about half the size of a memory stick was shown that could be plugged into all sorts of devices to give them wireless capability. Bill Joy came out and discussed trends in networked devices and the internet. Finally, George Lucas came out. Clips of the last Star Wars movie was shown, and George talked about the new digital camera that Sony and Panavision have designed to digitally film the next movie. After, the Sony keynote (and hitting the buffet at the Rio Suites), I went over to the Las Vegas Hilton and checked out the Linux exhibits. Redhat had a really lame booth with nothing much going on. Caldera and Corel had booths with installation and user interface demos. Corel linux ships with Word Perfect and runs the Corel office suite. It also includes neat things like an MP3 player. One of the most physically beautiful women I have ever seen was working at the TurboLinux booth. Borland (Inprise) was there giving away disks with trial versions of their development software. I wasn't too impressed with the Linux Expo. I then headed back to the Venetian for the Linus Torvalds keynote (had a few beers and won $50 playing video poker). Torvalds talk was a little dissapointing. He basically just talked about the benefits of open source and made a few digs at Mircosoft. He did highlight the scaleability of Linux -- all the way from had held devices to supercomputer clusters. Regarding Transmeta, he had a slide that said that they had a "Smart Chip" that "was built using software." All details will be disclosed on January 19th. He would not elaborate. He was running the Suse Linux distribution on his laptop and uses Redhat at home, but claimed that he did not have a favorite. He was then asked a very personal question: What was his favorite text editor? He said that he uses micro-emacs. Again being diplomatic, he said that it was not really emacs and not really vi. Well, today I hit the big exhibit floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center where all the big boys have their booths. I'll try to post the highlights later if you guys want me too (this does take up some of my time). Pravin.

To: Pravin Kamdar who wrote (80039)	11/16/1999 2:22:00 PM
From: Charles R	Respond to of 1570826

<Otellini (or whatever the freek the guys name is), said that they will ship double-digit millions of Coppermine in Q1, > That is a super aggressive ramp for Q1. Looks like it could be as much as 40% of Q1 shipments. If anything goes wrong, Intel's Q1 is toast. On the otherhand, if they can pull it off, cost structure should go down substantially and should help a lot even if Athlon comes on very strong.

To: Pravin Kamdar who wrote (80039)	11/16/1999 3:24:00 PM
From: greg nus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1570826

Pravin, CHIP WAR HEATS UP as an intelligence report from INTEL claim unable to meet demand. Pravin "He cracked me up when he said that the reason for the i820 problems was that they just innovated too much". Intel appears to have gone "A CHIP TOO FAR. Meanwhile, on another front, AMD continues to advance, gaining market share against little resistance in a brisk market.