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

To: Charles R who wrote (80375)	11/18/1999 12:35:00 PM
From: Pravin Kamdar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572219

Comdex Part 3: The major exhibit halls with most of the flashy booths are at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It's a good walk between the LVCC and the Venetian/Sands (where all the keynotes and many of the component level booths are). This makes it inconvenient to go between the two, but the sheer size of Comdex dictates the separation. On Tuesday, Since I was not interested in the Cisco keynote presented by John Chambers (I'm a Nortel Networks believer/invester) or the Novell keynote I decided to spend the afternoon checking things out at the LVCC. Well, there was simply too much on display there to hope (or want) to attempt to report on it all, but I will tell you about some of the things that I found interesting. First of all, there was no AMD exhibit booth. AMD did have a meeting room for invited guests only -- as I found out when I attempted to go in. They did give me a page with a list of all the booths that were showing AMD Development platforms, SuperG Plateforms, and EasyNow! Platforms. The lack of an AMD booth was disappointing, but considering the price of having a booth at Comdex, and that AMD is trying for an upward surprise this quarter, it is probably for the best. Intel did not have a booth, either (at least I didn't see one). Intel did sponsor a little pavilion at the Sands that showcased spaceage computer designs (with Intel inside) form various vendors. I think the best booth I saw (and I am a little biased) was the National Semiconductor booth. They had a raised stage with go-go dancers known as "The Device Girls". Above the stage hung a large video screen cube with projections of the dancers on the three outward facing faces that you could see from all around the hall. It was quite an attention getter. The booth had two large circular displays that you could walk around and look at all the cool information appliances and thin terminal devices form a multitude of vendors. I got to check out the Webpad. It was pretty cool, but was taken to a higher level of design by Samsung. They had a Webpad that was thinner, lighter and very stylish. It plugged into a craddle similar to the way the Palm Pilot does. This cradle charges the battery and connects it to a keyboard and mouse, so that you can sit in front of it like a laptop, or just pull it out of the cradle and head for the couch while using the pen interface. I WANT ONE! For those of you that participated in the Foveon camera discussion and hunt for company and product information last spring over on the NSM/Cyrix thread, you'll be interested to know that at the National booth, I had a special treat. That's right, Foeveon was there and had their own section at the National booth. Not only that, they had their camera system there and I got my picture taken with a hot blond model in a low cut top -- each of us holding up a big lolly-pop. The picture was printed out for me on an Epson 900 printer, and I got to tell you, not only is it photographic quality, it's professional photographic quality. I got a glossy marketing brochour for their camera system, but it didn't give any technical specs. Their rep did tell me that they use three sensors at 2024x2024 resolution. My photo was a 12 meg file. I wish there was a way they could have given me the bits and that I could post it for you guys. Companies like Microsoft, HP, and Novell had giant booths, but can you say, "BORING!!!" There were many press stages at the LVCC. On one, I believe I was Rene San Miguel form CNBC. On another, ZDnet TV was filming a discussion with four guys including Dvorak. I also, saw Walter Mossburg getting filmed for PCWeek TV. Kind of cool. Comdex is famous for all the free stuff. You could enter to win an Audi TT coupe from Buy.com, and some little company was having a drawing for a Porshe Boxer. There were all kinds of freebees, but I didn't waste too much time signing up for them. I did enter for the TT coupe and for a reference book set from O'Rielly (sp?). I also got CDs for Star Office, the new Winstone 99 tools, Windows 2000, and Borland development tools. Walking around the exhibit floor gives you the feeling that the CRT is dead. Flat panel displays were everywhere, and it appears that they will soon begin to displace crts in the consumer PC market. Nearly every booth was using large screen plasma displays from Pioneer or NEC for their presentations. In Comdex Part 4, I'll tell you about the excellent Sun Micro keynote, the Xerox keynote and some cool stuff I saw on a second trip around the exhibit floor at the Sands. Pravin.