Computex Offers Glimpse of Future
The annual Computex show held in Taipei in June this year was once again a reflection of what is unique to Taiwan's IT industry. Products that highlight the newest in personal computers (PC) were well represented. Dozens of Taiwanese companies reinvented themselves by offering new product lines that were cutting edge last year but now are being pushed for their price competitiveness. And the show continued to live up to its reputation as the place to see off-the- shelf new products that may or may not succeed.
No new central processor units (CPU) were at Computex this year. Rather, new chipsets that extend the power and marketability of the current generation of Intel, AMD and third party CPUs were highlighted. Also, new applications of the impressive computing power of today's CPUs were also in abundance as the industry searches for new products to hopefully kick-start the slumping IT industry.
Motherboards for P4
Intel rolled out its Brookdale 845 core logic chipset, which is built for its P4 CPU family and is made to support some form of SDRAM. The P4 comes in either 423-lead or 478-BGA packaging with speeds up to 1.7GHz.
Though Intel displayed over a dozen mainboards built around the P4 and 845 chipset, no technical data on the 845 was available at the show. The 845 chipset was not even shown on the displayed mainboards, but covered up by heat sinks or a dummy plug. According to an Intel spokesman, the product is not due for a commercial rollout until the end of the second quarter. Both standard and BGA packaging for the P4 will initially be supported. After about six months, only the BGA package will be offered, when the P4 is moved to a 0.13micron process.
It's as yet unclear whether the 845 will support standard SDRAM or DDR SDRAM, although its sister product, the 850, supports RDRAM for the P4 CPU. "The original prototypes of the 845 that supported DDR performed worse than those running SDRAM," said the president of one of Taiwan's major core logic makers. "Our mainboard customers tell us that when the 845 officially rolls out in August, only SDRAM will be supported. Support for DDR SDRAM is slated for the beginning of 2002."
Besides the 845 mainboards, this year's Computex had little new to offer in the way of mainboards. Most vendors offer P4 solutions that utilize RDRAM and Intel's 850 chipset. Ironically, VIA Technologies Inc (VIA) presented a realtime benchmark test at which its P4 core logic for DDR memory systems outperformed Intel's 850 core logic using RDRAM.
VIA CPU Hits 1GHz
VIA did introduce a semi-new CPU - the ERZA C3 CPU running at 1GHz(Fig 1). Previous C3 CPUs ran up to 800MHz and were made with 0.15micron process. The new C3 will be made at 0.13micron and will be targeted primarily at the notebook and PDA markets. "The 0.13micron process technology allows the C3 to perform faster with less power," said C J Holthaus of VIA. "The C3 runs at 4 watts at 700MHz, as opposed to Intel's P3 which consumes 16.1 watts at the same speed. Even at 1GHz, the C3 still only uses a maximum of 9.7 watts. The C3's low power consumption makes it a good choice for notebook and PDA products where battery life and heat concerns are main selling points."
The majority of notebooks at Computex used either an Intel P3 or Celeron CPUs or AMD's mobile Athlon. A few notebooks loaded down with Intel's P4 and 850 core logic were seen but mostly as a public relations hype. "The power demands of the P4 as currently offered are much too high for use in a notebook," said Per Lyngemark of PaceBlade Technology. "Low power CPUs such as Transmeta's Crusoe and VIA's C3 consume less battery power and dissipate less heat. The Japanese consumer in particular doesn't like a portable that uses a fan."
ALi introduced core logic that supports DDR SDRAM up to 3 Gbytes. The CyberMAGik (M1646) is a northbridge core logic chip for AMD's mobile Athlon CPU. It has a 200MHz frontside bus and a 128-bit dual pipe integrated graphics engine. The DDR SDRAM shares system and graphics memory duty.
VIA also plans to offer a core logic for notebooks that use a DDR memory solution. "DDR is a natural for notebooks since it operates at 2.5V vs 3.3V for SDRAM," said Shane Dennison, marketing section manager for VIA. "We will introduce core logic that supports DDR probably at the end of the year. Getting the memory module makers to offer DDR modules for notebooks is the limiting factor now. Notebook technology usually lags behind that of desktops."
IAs to Drive Growth
While higher speed CPUs and memory solutions should attract expert users and industry insiders, Taiwan's computer makers know, however, that price has been driving the IT industry for the last few years. "The growth in the industry is in India and China," said Richard Brown, marketing director for VIA. "In order to really drive sales volume there, sub-US$300 IT products must be made available."
Companies such as National Semiconductor of the US and Rise Technology came to Computex with system-on-chip (SOC) solutions for Internet appliances (IA) that they hope will meet this market demand. National's Geode 1200 is one such chip. The chip is built around a 32-bit x86 CPU core operating at 266MHz. It has a 64-bit SDRAM interface, a 2D graphics engine and a wide variety of video and other peripheral controllers. The Geode is targeted for a variety of IA products such as Webpads, thin clients and set-top boxes.
Rise displayed the ultra low-power requirements of its x86 CPU core, the iDragon mP6 (see NEA July 2001 issue). A test board with the mP6 was shown running on just a single AA battery, and an entire VCD movie and several hours of MP3 music were played with the test board with a power reduction of just 0.4V. This CPU is targeted at upcoming 3G products such as cell phones and PDAs. The iDragon uses a super-scalar, super-pipeline, single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) architecture that can meet the computational demands of 3G at much lower clock rates than RISC microprocessors. This allows for lower power consumption while still offering compatibility with x86-based software.
Many Taiwanese notebook vendors, such as First International Computer and Compal PMCC also offered PDAs at Computex, based on Intel's 206MHz StrongArm RISC CPU. Most products are equiped with up to 32 Mbytes of Flash memory and a reflective TFT-LCD display. The main difference with Taiwanese PDAs is in the software they support. Compal uses Microsoft's Pocket PC OS, FIC Windows CE or Linux, and Acer has licensed Palm OS for its upcoming PDA products (Fig 2).
LCDs Get Bigger
Taiwan has long been the world's leaders in monitor production, with some 60% of the world's production. LCD monitors have been the main highlights in monitor products for the last few Computex shows, and this year was no exception. Apart from the large Taiwanese monitor makers, many small companies were offering standalone LCD monitors and LCD-PC products. LCD screen sizes of 17 inches were shown, with resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 pixels.
Putting a mainboard behind an LCD monitor is the design trick behind the current offering of Webpads and LCD-PCs. Webpads are vying for the still fuzzy convergence between PDAs and notebooks, while LCD-PCs are vying for thin client and kiosk PC markets.
Every Computex has one or two off-the-shelf products that usually aren't commercial successes but occasionally do become a niche hit. This year, Atoz Technology was displaying what it touted as the "world's smallest PC". At 950 grams and with dimensions of 157mm x 146mm x 45mm, the Ezgo is certainly small and highly portable. Inside is a mainboard that supports an Intel PII or Celeron CPU with a frontside bus speed of 133MHz. It is equipped with a 2.5-inch HDD and a DVD/CD-RW/CD-ROM drive, up to 256 Mbytes of SDRAM, a built-in 100Mbps Ethernet chip, 56kbps modem, and a hardware video accelerator supporting up to 1,280 x 1,024 pixels resolution. Its peripheral supports include both PAL and NTSC video output, USB, IrDA, serial, parallel, keyboard/mouse ports. At about US$300 for the box however, this product is typical of Taiwan's continued inventiveness when it comes to IT products.
by David Baldwin
Websites:
Acer: acer.com
Acer Laboratories: ali.com.tw
ASUSTeK Computer: asus.com.tw
Compal PMCC: palmaxtech.com
First International Computer: fic.com
Intel: intel.com
National Semiconductor: national.com
Rise Technology: rise.com
SIS: sis.com.tw
VIA: viatech.com
(August 2001 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia) |
