Comdex
2001 Coverage Part 2
Our second
Comdex report is finally here. I don’t know if you have been fallowing Comdex
updates from other sites, but I can tell you that this year’s Comdex is much
smaller to what we got used to last year, no more 1 hour taxi lines, no more
big crowds and much more free space around the event’s area. I don’t know
how well or bad this is, but I can tell that this year is somewhat of a different
experience, several major companies are not even available on the show floor,
and a lot of them simply reserved a room in a hotel and use it as a show room
for the media.
Intel
My first meeting of the day began with Intel. Their marketing manager provided
us with information on their upcoming Northwood P4 core, 845DDR and showed
us some interesting multimedia demo’s running on Pentium 4 systems. We unfortunately
cannot disclose any information on these points as it’s all under NDA. All
I can tell is that Intel has a 2.2GHz unit coming out in early 2002. Luckily
not everything was held from being published.
Intel had an interesting legacy free mainboard running the technologies that
Intel is supporting in today’s industry. The board had no IDE connectors;
everything was wired for serial ATA. The board featured a total of 11 internal
and external USB ports. They replaced the floppy drive with flash media/smart
media readers and used an external DVD-ROM USB drive (modified to fit in the
5 ½ Bay of the case). A riser card provided support for 802.11b transmitters
and some of the USB 2.0 ports.
SOYO
Our second meeting was with Soyo Corporation. Saeed Arash, Soyo’s technical
engineer gave us a look at 2 of their latest Pentium 4 solutions.
The first SY-P4I Fire Dragon based on the 845 D-STEP offering 2 x DDR DIMMs,
RAID support and a Cmedia 6 channel Sound card. The second was based on the
SIS 645 chipset and is the SY-P4S Dragon, offering DDR333 support, RAID and
a Cmedia 6 channel sound card. Things are looking strong for these two products.
They also showed
their barebones solutions. The first option comes with the mainboard, case
and power supply and option two includes all the extra peripherals labeled
with the soyo logo (Keyboard, mouse, speakers) in addition to the first one.
FIC
FIC had several motherboards on the display. Some of their newest include
the FA15T
based on the 694T chip for Intel PIII/Celeron processors, AZ11EA – based on
the KT133A for AMD processors, AN11 featuring the KT266A – for AMD processors
and spotting a Promise RAID controller and their Pentium 4 DDR solution VC15
based on the 845 chipset.
Alex Mei (Marketing Manager) and Eugene Chang (Product Marketing Manager)
Mainboards are not their only offerings. FIC displayed their ATI RADEON based
boards, SLIM P4 systems and Tablet PC’s.
Later I got the chance to talk to Gene Sheu, FIC’s Networking and Information
Group President about wireless technology and how important it is getting
these days. FIC had some very interesting Tablet PC solutions on the display
with wireless features.
FIC's Networking and Information President - Gene Sheu.
They have scheduled to release a 1GHz Transmeta Tablet PC in a short while.
Things are looking strong for FIC’s future in this market.
That’s it for our second report. Stay tuned for our third one in a short while.
Oleg Mitskaniouk
01/11/15
