Every year, the major OEMs get together and take a roadtrip around the country spreading the gospel of their new product lines out to the system builder channel. This roadshow is targeted at the mom-n-pop businesses that build custom systems. Surprisingly enough, this group makes up over 65% of the sales of PC’s in the world.
These shows tend to be fairly slick with lots of marketing slides, mini-trade shows, special offers, swag (t-shirts, giveaways, and other knick-knacks) and opportunities to network with major companies they would otherwise never get to talk to.
I was invited to attend and discovered a wealth of info on upcoming products. Read on and get the scoop on the roadmaps!
Event: AMD/Microsoft Tech Tour 2007
Author: Carlos Echenique
Category: Site News/Trade Show
Reviewed on: April 23, 2007
Spelling and Grammatical Editors: Jon Aubrey, Jason Hambly
The AMD/Microsoft Tech Tour 2007 kicked off on April 5, 2007 in Tampa, FL. I caught it at the second stop in Miami, FL a week later. Various OEMs were in attendance in the mini-trade show including (in no particular order): Tyan, Shuttle, Visiontek, Sapphire, Foxconn, Seagate, Durabook, Gigabyte, and of course AMD & Microsoft.
{mospagebreak title=AMD/ATI Roadmaps}
As the headliner of this little circus, AMD/ATI was rarin’ to go with a ton of slides regarding the newly released 690G chipset which is aimed squarely at the mid level channel. Here are three poingant ones:
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The first slide talks about all of the cool features the chipset includes and why you want to have Vista on top of that. The second slide crows about the solidity of the systems built on this new chipset (remember this show is targeted at system builders) and the third slide shows off some impressive multi-monitor capabilities with sub-$100 components. One thing to note on the second slide is the AMD AVS (AMD Validated System) Program. This program assists systems builders in assembling components certified by AMD to work well together and provides levels of service for the system builders based on their sales volume. Multi-year mainboard replacement warranties are only one of the features of this program. Intel has had a similar program for years.
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These next slides were direct shots at Intel’s i965 chipset. Benchmarks were shown to satisfy the measurebators (on the left) and then some gaming tests showing that this platform is more than adequate for the caual gamer (have no fear – they had goodies for the hardcore crowd as well) on the middle slide. The slide on the right is priceless as the info comes from Intel directly. It shows what games cannot be played on the i965 chipset.
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The four slides above address the new feaures found in the 690G chipset as well as the R600 based discrete graphics cards. Dubbed "Radeon HD", ATI has broken off the "X" naming convention that has been around since the Radeon X800. HDMI, HDCP (full resolution over dual-link DVI I might add) and a dedicated HD processing ASIC lend this new platform a lot of graphics muscle.
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Afterwards, AMD engineers conscripted for the event came out and spoke about Barcelona/Budapest processors, the Server/Workstation roadmap, and the upgradeability of Socket F boards sold today.
{mospagebreak title=Microsoft and Seagate}
The Microsoft rep came up and spoke about Vista needless to say as well as future directions with Longhorn and it’s derivatives. Of all the slides he showed only one really piqued my interest:
If you look closely, shortly after the Longhorn launch in 2008, MS will launch Small Business Server "Cougar" which we were told is 64-bit only (probably owing to Exchange 2007 being x64 only) and also a Mid Market Server codenamed "Centro" (which is highly likely to be x64 only as well). Loghorn R2 is due in 2009.
The Seagate guy (a rather dynamic fellow named Chaz), enlightened us to World According to Seagate. Get ready folks, 3.5" drives are going the way of the dodo, to be replaced by (wait for it…) 2.5" drives! Yes, the amazing power of perpendicular recording and SAS interconnectivity has allowed the world’s largest storage maker to shrink enterprise drives down to laptop sizes.
Why increase capacity when we can make’em smaller and stuff more of them into the RAID enclosure? Makes perfect sense to me. O_o
I see a large aftermarket in drive brackets.
Here are the shots supporting their mad theories…
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{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
In conclusion, AMD and MS did a fairly good job telling the channel (white box vendors) what to expect this year (and next) from them. Lots of T-shirts and swag were launched to keep the event from becoming Short Attention Span Theater and the attendees I spoke to came out with a better sense of what AMD is going to offer to counter Intel.
One interesting claim made by the AMD engineers was on thermals. They claimed that Intel’s reports of watts of heat expelled by Core2 are based on the idle state of the processor. While AMD’s reports are based on peak states and that, at idle, AMD procs will only emit 14W of heat. This claim bears investigation and we at PlanetX64 will endeavour to uncover the truth.
Stay tuned…