Hardware alive and well at Comdex
By Robert Lemos
November 21, 1997 6:16 AM PST
ZDNN zdnet.com
LAS VEGAS -- Who says hardware is dead?
At Fall Comdex 97, it was hardware, not software, that was the hit of the show. The various pieces of tomorrow's personal computer came together at the world's largest computer show.
Flat-panel display were big ... or, rather, small -- just like the future PCs will be that employ the technology. Consumer electronics giants including Sharp Electronics Ltd. and LG Electronics Inc. showed off thin-film transistor displays ranging from 13.9 inches up to a 20.1-inch screen, which has more display area than a 21-inch CRT monitor.
A computer monitor built using the displays would be only two or three inches thick, but the savings in desktop real estate comes at a price premium. While the panels are cheaper, flat-panel monitors will still be 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 times the cost of a comparable CRT.
"We expect the panels to come down in price during 1998, as mass production ramps up," said a Sharp spokesperson. That's good news for business users who want more space, but the panels, said vendors, will still be absent from the consumer market for another three or four years.
Large flat-panel displays, disappointingly, have not progressed much from last year's Comdex. Plasma displays -- which use cells of charged gas (such as neon signs) for each pixel -- are still expensive and suffer from quality problems. Namely, dead pixels are scattered throughout the panels and resolution has barely topped 800-by-600.
On the other hand, DVD, or digital versatile disk, was alive and well at the show. You couldn't throw an Intel bunny suit doll without hitting some slack-jawed Comdex attendee staring at a theater-quality DVD movie with blaring Surround sound.
Panasonic Corp., Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd., and Philips Electronics N.V. showed off second-generation DVD-ROM drives. The drives -- which form the heart of several DVD add-on kits -- access DVD data twice as fast as the old drives, add CD-RW support, and act as 20x CD-ROM drives (rather than the 8x of the first-generation product).
Add-on kits look to be big for 1998. Several makers, including Creative Labs, Diamond Multimedia, Pacific Digital, and Hi-Val have announced kits based on the DVD drives. With analysts guessing that between 8 million and 12 million drives will be sold next year, the newest crop of products looks ready for prime time.
In a room at the back of the main convention center, 3Dfx Interactive was showing off its next-generation Voodoo 2 graphics chip. Boards based on the product are able to churn through 3 million triangles per second -- nearly trebling the performance of today's graphics boards. With the ability to link two boards together for greater performance, next year's games will amaze.
Yet rival chip maker Nvidia scoffed at 3Dfx's numbers. "We beat the Voodoo 1 board," said Mike Hara, director of marketing for Nvidia. "And by the time they release the Voodoo 2, we'll raise the bar another notch."
Idle talk? We'll see in the spring, when 3Dfx begins shipping its board, which should be backwards-compatible with all currently supported games.
Next-generation games may look a lot more real, if Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s newest processor technology takes off. The Austin, Texas, company showed its AMD-K6 3-D technology behind closed doors at Comdex.
The instructions add power to games that do real-time 3-D. A demo by DreamWorks Interactive showed the reaction to dropping objects in a pond; when a stick hit the surface, ripples appeared and the stick bobbed up and down with the waves. Sure beats the static water in Quake 2 and Turok -- two games that every maker of 3-D graphics cards were showing.
The processor -- expected out the first half of 1998 -- adds 24 new instructions to the x86 set to speed floating-point operations, typically used in consumer-level 3-D games, but valuable for other applications as well.
Intel Corp. had the boys and girls in the bunny suits dancing around its booth displaying the power of the Pentium II. The company showed off its Pentium-II-fits-all strategy with solutions for high-end graphics workstations down to lower-end consumer devices.
Rival Cyrix Corp. continued to focus on the low end. The Richardson, Texas, company's MediaCenter technology demo attracted almost as much attention as the cheerleaders on stage.
With a DVD drive, six-channel Surround sound, Windows compatibility, and FM radio all squished into a pizza-carton-sized box, the chip maker hoped to attract companies interested in turning the technology into a product. Retail price: about $1,300, if the product hits the market by mid-1998.
For Cyrix and others, tomorrow's PC will not necessarily look like today's. |
