by Anton Shilov
03/21/2004 | 01:50 PM
There is a plethora of various trade-shows in the world: CES, IDF, Comdex, Computex and CeBIT to name a few. It is pretty hard to outline the most interesting one among them, but one thing we should point out is that the majority of the well-known exhibitions are held in the United States, while the rest of the world has much less of them. CeBIT and Computex Taipei are the two key technology trade-shows in Europe and Asia. In fact, CeBIT is probably the world’s largest fair dedicated to technology and that makes it extremely exciting.
<%BANNER[article]%>Today is the 18th of March, 2004, the day when CeBIT Hannover 2004 kicked off. The show will last till the 24th of March and promises to be extremely exciting. X-bit labs is going to cover the most important news, announcements and events that are going to happen during the show, so, stay tuned to find out more about leading hardware companies and their new products presented at the show.
Since astonishing masses of people are heading to CeBIT these days, I could only book an airplane tickets on the 18th of March to get to Hannover, Germany by mid-day. Fortunately, our friends from NVIDIA Corporation, Penny Lawrence and Luciano Alibrandi helped us with the accommodation that is located in the city of Hannover, which X-bit labs greatly appreciates. Hopefully, this will allow me to spend less time in transport and do somewhat better coverage of the show itself.
So, I left rainy Tallinn, Estonia very early in the morning to land in sunny Copenhagen, Denmark, as there were no direct flights. The journey was pretty nice and I even made a couple of pictures from the plane’s window. What is pretty nice about Copenhagen is that they have airport very close to their port. The airport of Copenhagen is pretty busy and to land our plane had to make a round above it which allowed me to take a look on that “transport node area”. Hannover, Germany, welcomed me with loads of clouds in fact, it was so cloudy in Germany that I could not see anything on the ground from the illuminator of the plane.
Unfortunately, due to some issues I spend a little bit more time than planned on finding accommodation, therefore, my presence at the show was not too long, but rather productive – I made a number of pictures and met some really nice people.
Chipsets, processors, platforms, mainboards – all the companies involved in their development excite us from year to year. I will certainly not make a mistake if I say that this year the key technologies of CeBIT are AMD64 from AMD and EM64T from Intel – the two compatible enhancements of x86 architecture with 64-bit capability. Advanced Micro Devices is a log time optimist regarding the x86-64 approach, whereas Intel is pretty cautious about the transition to 64-bit computers.
We will certainly talk to AMD and Intel about the transition to 64-bit central processing units, but today I decided to ask a couple of questions on the matter to a more or less neutral company – VIA Technologies. And not only on that matter, as VIA is showcasing loads of other developments!
VIA Technologies is also pretty conservative about 64-bit transition as well. The company’s spokesperson Richard Brown also believes that prior to massive transition to 64-bit computing there should be software that works with such hardware faster than it would work with 32-bit processors. Currently there are only high-performance AMD64 platforms, while the majority of AMD’s and Intel’s chips shipping are still 32-bit only.
VIA does not see any problems with supporting Intel’s 64-bit capability as well. The firm’s upcoming LGA775 core-logic components are most likely to support Intel’s EM64T feature. Nevertheless, VIA considers PCI Express bus and DDR2 memory to be the main platform-related technologies this year. Needless to say that VIA is going to fully support both, but still with retained flexibility – ability to handle “outdated” AGP and DDR.
In fact, unlike suggested, PCI Express x16 and AGP 8x implementation is not something that should affect performance, according to VIA. Richard Brown says that AGP performance of the forthcoming PT890 is on par with than that of the PT880. Currently the company has engineering versions of its PT890 and KT890 chipsets, their performance is probably considered as “lower than expected” because VIA does not want to benchmark them right now. Revamped version of the PT890 is expected to emerge in 2 to 3 weeks and that one will be tangibly better in terms of speed.
As you see from the pictures, VIA and its mainboard partners demonstrate prototypes of PT890, KT890 and KT880-based mainboards as well as plethora of solutions based on already available chipsets.
Apart from its chipset business VIA also has CPU business. The company calls both businesses with one name – “platform business”. While chipsets and central processing units are developing at a rather quick pace, one of the company’s intentions today is to offer its customer reference designs of products featuring VIA’s core-logic products, microprocessors, graphics chips and so on. The main idea of such approach is to become a company that develops solutions rather than proposes a pack of chips and waits for its partners to bring something to the market based on those pieces of silicon. The approach should allow VIA to boost its sales and also to solidify its positions in the consumer electronics field. Given that in the consumer electronics market one product may successfully be sold for 3 to 5 years, VIA’s investments in development of reference designs should be definitely returned.
Currently VIA has its EPIA platforms as well as console reference designs to offer. The main idea of VIA’s console is its low-cost. In fact, ApexTreme gaming machine announced earlier this year will have so tiny price that its creators are going to earn money by simply selling hardware. Currently VIA proposes to sell gaming machines to some of its partners among PCB-based devices makers. One very well-known European company is seriously considering idea to start offering consoles similar to ApexTreme.
One of the main excitements of the show probably are the new graphics processors by the two leading graphics companies – Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA Corp. and Markham, Ontario-based ATI Technologies. While sources close to both companies indicated that we should not expect them to formally announce their new graphics chips at CeBIT, but show them to selected partners, analysts and press behind closed doors under non-disclosure agreements, we all are very excited to see what exactly ATI and NVIDIA are showcasing at the European main technology event.
After visiting a booth of a pretty loyal NVIDIA partner I managed to find out that graphics cards based on the highly-anticipated NV40 graphics processors will enter production in May 2004, an interesting piece of information to consider if you are planning to get a high-end graphics card shortly.
Another partner of NVIDIA – LeadTek – is demonstrating new PCI Express graphics cards based on GPUs from NVIDIA, dubbed GeForce PCX.
There are basically only a couple of PCI Express cards in Leadtek’s booth: already well-known GeForce FX 5200-based one and a totally new GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with PCI Express interface. In case LeadTek’s claims are right that what we see in the picture is the 5950, then NVIDIA’s high-end offering may become extremely inexpensive, just take a look on its PCB design!
Moreover, it looks like the GeForce PCX graphics cards are nearer than we think they are. According to a LeadTek spokesperson, NVIDIA GeForce PCX graphics cards are in production now and may be launched once there are PCI Express 16-enabled mainboards.
Club 3D is a company readers of X-bit labs are pretty familiar with. The firm is based in the Netherlands and is pretty well-known all around Europe. The guys are trying to promote their own brand-name and sustain their strategy to offer graphics cards and some other components, such as mainboards, based on chips from different developers, e.g. NVIDIA, ATI, S3.
Right now Club 3D seems to experience pretty promising growth. The company sells graphics cards in huge quantities and also manages to ship some mainboards to its partners. In addition to existing products Club 3D is going to offer an upgrade option for its graphics cards to praise enthusiasts – water-coolers for the RADEON 9600-, RADEON 9800-series as well as next-generation graphics cards.
Club 3D plans to guarantee that warranty will not be voided in case standard cooler is removed in order to substitute it with more advanced water-cooler. Almost certainly there will be a limited quantity of Club 3D high-end graphics cards with water-cooling, but the main idea is to sell such really not very conservative devices as an additional option for hardcore enthusiasts.
Right now Club 3D is demonstrating samples of the new products, therefore, I would suggest that final products may vary from pictured above. Additionally, they display ATI RV380 graphics card with PEG x16 interface – looks like this secret and unannounced solution is not secret and unannounced for anybody except ATI Technologies itself ;)
Despite of not very high performance delivered by S3 DeltaChrome S8 graphics cards, Club 3D has a serious intention to bring them into the market. The firm already have boxes ready, so, if you live in Europe and liked what the new graphics processors from S3 Graphics are capable of offering, then you should probably start watching for them in stores in a number of weeks time.
Right opposite to Club 3D booth there is XGI’s booth. While my meeting with XGI is scheduled for Friday, I could not miss the opportunity to picture XGI’s products. What I was certainly very impressed about are XGI-based graphics cards from ABIT and Chaintech. A man near the booth said that products from both are in volume production today.
Pay attention to pretty simplistic design of the dual-chip Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics card from ABIT compared to the reference. There are no plethora of capacitors and resistors and in general PCB is probably a not very tough one. We definitely should expect some more than competitive pricing from ABIT here.
Booth of ASUSTeK Computer is as usually filled with loads of people and contains dozens of hardware. The company does not expose really a lot of graphics cards, but showcases nearly the whole range of its up-to-date and new mainboards, including those for LGA775 and PGA939 microprocessors from Intel and AMD.
Be it Grantsdale-P (i915-P), Alderwood (i925X), PT890 (pay attention on availability of both PCI Express x16 and AGP 8x slots on this mainboard!) or nForce3 250Gb – ASUS seems to have a mainboard based on it.
In fact, ASUS did not restrict itself with just showing the mainboards, but put up a system based on i925X, LGA775 chip, DDR2 memory from Corsair and a PCI Express graphics cards from ATI Technologies. Unfortunately, no benchmarks were presented at this time.
One more funky thing showcased by ABIT was a system running a processor at 5GHz. The chip is 3.20GHz PGA478, but ASUS did not elaborate whether it is Northwood or Prescott. The computer features a P4C800 mainboard (probably a modded one) and a special cooling solution from nVENTIV.
