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ShowStoppers

Probably the most exciting event during the entire CES was the ShowStoppers press eventl with most of the MIA companies from the computer scene having a small social booth / table where insider stories were traded. Kingston, VIA Technologies, Intel, Sony, everybody was there.

It would go too far to list every rumor that was circulating, the most interesting tidbits were VIA putting Kentron's QBM on the back burner and concentrating on DDR-II, AMD allegedly sticking with DDR-I for the foreseeable future and Intel playing it by ear. A different story about DDR-II was what we heard from the graphics vendors, by now the only ones that appear to endorse DDR-II on their roadmap appear XGI and they were a no-show anyway. ATI already has already canned DDR-II by turbocharging their FireGL topmodel through reverting back to DDR-I and skipping ahead to GDR-3 with a much higher data rate and some extra features used exclusively in graphics RAM --nVidia is likely to follow the same path.

Sony had some interesting audio and video-editing software in form of their Acid and MovieStudio software, a definite competition to the Adobe's and likes. Speaking of Sony, a follow up on their ever-popular Aibo robotic dog was shown in the form of QRIO ("Curio") originally named SDR-4X, the first humanoid robot to get through US Immigrations.

New Chipsets

New chipsets were actually absent from this year's CES, if they had been there, they would have been lost in the overall show. Interesting, however, were some implementations of the currently existing silicon, namely, the combination of the nForce3 150 chipset with Transmeta's latest and greatest efficéon CPU using the same HyperTransport interface as the AMD Athlon64 processor and also featuring its own integrated memory controller.

ATI Imageon

Probably the coolest display item was ATI's Imageon 2300 3DGaming platform in form of a videophone or PDA. ATI seems to be the first company to market with this µ3D platform; even though Bitboys announced a similar platform based on the acceleon processor, it appears as if ATI is taking a lead here, too. Unfortunately, my camera's batteries just ran out at the ATI booth and with only some 15 minutes left before heading out to the airport there was not much to be done about that.

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