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CEE2003: A One-Vendor Trade Show
Billy Stephens writes "Few people knew about the CEE2003 event put on by Chaintech this year. They flew some of the top media analysts and resellers out to Spain to show off their new K8 motherboards and Nvidia Geforce FX based video cards. Unfortunately there was a lot of bad news to be had as well. AMD pushed back their Athlon 64 CPU until September so there were no motherboards based on it to show off, and Nvidia announced they would only release around 4,000 of their Geforce FX GPUs, primarily for preorders only. It looks like ATI has rattled Nvidia more than what people thought. Monkey Review has a great summary of this event with plenty of pictures. Overall I am impressed with the quality Chaintech has put into their products from an aesthetic point of view, it's a shame that both Nvidia and AMD are having product issues."
Again, this is driven by market demands - there simply isn't a strong need out there for a 64-bit operating system, so why would Microsoft invest the resources required? For the mass market, hardware capabilities have advanced well ahead of customer needs, hence the steep dropoff in PC sales we've seen for the last year or more.
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About the portion on "it's a shame that NVidia and AMD are having product issues". It just seems to be that Chaintech is unable to collaborate better with their vendors to make sure they don't release products that cannot be shipped in volume. I think the reason we don't see this from other manufacturers (think ATI/Intel...) because they have ways to collaborate and make sure these kind of snafu's don't happen.
I like the way Apple releases products. You hear NOTHING until every vendor is producing in volume and they are shipping or about to ship assembled units. This whole idea of announcing products 3-12 months before they can ship is just FUD trying to keep customers from buying right now.
During the anti-trust trial Bill was fond of pointing out that the computer business was entirely unlike most others.
As he put it, " Microsoft is just one good idea away from oblivion."
Which is to say that if someone *else* came up with just the right good idea Microsoft products could become worthless virtually overnight.
His awareness of this simple truth may go some way to explaining his absolute ruthlessness in piling up a nest egg. (I said explain. I didn't say excuse)
Some would say that day is now.
Nor is this fact actually unique to the computer business. It's a fact of life in any hot, new developing technology. Just look up the names of automobile companies formed between 1890 and 1910. A few of them, such as Daimler and Peugot are still around, but they're the exceptions.
KFG
Is it just me, or does it seem like the whole PC graphics market has gotten well ahead of their consumers and software (i.e. games)?
:) and let me tell you, it looks simply incredible. That having been said, it ground a GeForce 4 Ti to a halt. Yes, it's only a preview. The final release will be probably around 300% more efficient. But still, tomorrow's games will *definitely* need the newest hardware today.
Just wait 'til Doom III comes out. I, erm, might have, possibly, uh, "acquired" the E3 preview version
True, the graphics market might have gotten ahead in the race for now, but then again, how would Carmack be able to test how his game runs on what the rest of us will be running next year, unless he's got that technology this year?
I once laughed when I thought about the impossible power of a 1 GHz processor. Now, such a thing is entry-level, and any modern game will require at least that much horsepower.
Demand does not now exist for an insanely powerful graphics card, because games have not been written yet that take advantage of such hardware. But sooner or later, games will come out that require the latest GeForce or Radeon, and the hardware makers will set their sights on the next horizon, always one step ahead.