The road goes on forever and
the party never ends
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The party never ends at Cebit. (Photo: JPR) |
I can’t stand too much more fun. That’s all this is,
y’know, fun, fun, fun, ’til daddy takes the T-bird away.
Getting dual-cored in San Francisco, hung-over in Hannover in the
snow, and San Jose for the games. The reality of it is you attend
conference meetings or press conferences all day, and then host
or be hosted by clients in the evening, and for us poor folks with
deadlines (I now understand the word dead better than ever),
we’re writing late into the night and/or too early in the
morning before repeating it all again.
But the stuff we see and learn about, damn, this is such a rush
it’s hard to describe. On Monday Intel tells us about the next generation
of dual-core processors that run cooler by almost half and deliver
better performance by almost half, and, thank you, Mr. Moore, cost
the same or less. Longhorn-Vista-Aero-Glass, whatever, will be here
soon to help soak up some of that power, and the GPU guys will take
care of the rest. The game developers are bringing new levels of
AI and physics to bear, and the interesting new applications that
are using shaders and multi-threaded processors from 3D video editing
to PowerPoint presentations that look like movies are increasing
every week.
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Getting tattooed for a mouse—Razr holds
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At Cebit we were amazed with tiny media players and giant screens
with 8.3 million pixels; not one, not two, but four GPUs in one
system; laptops with dual GPUs; PC cases designed by artists that
take your breath away; RFID on llamas; hi-res projectors that can
literally be stuck on a wall and almost disappear; tiny low-cost
yet amazingly powerful PCs for Third World countries; and 3D displays
as well as dual displays in one. Now if that’s not enough
to knock the socks off the biggest cynic, then there’s no
hope for that poor soul. Anyone who thinks this industry is standing
still, slowing down, or moribund just isn’t paying attention.
In fact it’s just the exact opposite and almost moving so
fast we can hardly keep track or keep up. Party on this, buster.
And just look at this issue. When we started TechWatch, we decided to pull back from the 50+ pages a week Peddie Report
model and offer instead a more attractive and concise 16- to 24-page
bi-weekly. Well, I think we hit the more attractive part, and
we pretty much have stuck to the bi-weekly part, but how the hell
we’re going to keep it to 16 to 24 pages is a real challenge.
It’s like drinking from a firehose, and the stream of information,
new developments, company changes, and trend predicting is growing
every quarter if not faster. We haven’t seen this level
of development since the late 90s.
And at the same time the graphics industry shrinks even more,
now down to five suppliers with 3Dlabs vaporizing and XGI getting
assimilated by SiS and ATI. If SiS comes back into the graphics
market then we’ll be back up to six suppliers. (I knew you’d
ask: SiS plus ATI, Intel, Matrox, Nvidia, and VIA/S3).
So we’ll sleep on the plane, and be ready to go at it again in
beautiful downtown San Jose at the Game Developer’s Conference,
which will overlap with the Nvidia analysts’ meeting, so you can
look forward to another rip-snorting interesting and fun issue in
a couple of weeks. And if you have time, do come by the hospital
and visit us.