Introduction
CeBIT2000, the world’s largest computer show started on Thursday, February 24, 2000 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT means a threat to your feet, walking the huge exhibition grounds, it means ice cold weather, wind, rain and snow, it also stands for ‘private accommodations’, since only a very small minority manages to get into the few hotels in and around Hannover (around 9000 hotel beds in Hannover for about 700,000 CeBIT-visitors), in those accommodations you are sharing the bathroom and kitchen with the actual owners of the flat and you rarely have chances for an online-connection. CeBIT also stands for breakdowns. We experienced the breakdown of the mobile telephone net on Wednesday evening, when we arrived and a breakdown of the central taxi office, so that we couldn’t get a cab that evening as well. Thursday started with another breakdown, a computer-problem kept most trams from running, so that thousands of people were cramming the tram-stations and then overloading the few trams that went to the exhibition grounds. Your own car or a taxi was no real alternative, since traffic jams of 20-50 miles length built up all around CeBIT in no time. All in all it was business as usual and another time the rest of the world was cursing Hannover and the fact that one hadn’t found an excuse to stay away.
I will supply you with little reports of what I found was most interesting so far.
Late Victory for the Online-Press
The public pressure due to the article of The Register and Tom’s Hardware Guide about CeBIT’s online press ban forced CeBIT to a last-minute change of its policy. On Monday or Tuesday Dr. Roloff finally assigned Ms. Inga Buss specifically to register online press. Whoever tried to get a press registration in the last two days before CeBIT could finally receive his press badge.
On Thursday I was asked to for a meeting with Dr. Roloff, the person in charge of CeBIT’s press registration. He had a very hard time until he finally managed to apologize for the mistakes that were made (original comment “I did not say that we did not make mistakes“). There was still no major change in his opinion that the majority of online-press applicants did not really deserve a CeBIT press registration. He’s got a pretty funky plan for next year though. His department wants to ask every exhibitor of CeBIT2000 to produce a list of online-journalists or online-publications, which they consider as worthy to come to CeBIT. People who ain’t on the list ain’t gonna get a press registration next year as well. Thus I suggest that we all be very nice to the companies we write about, because a manufacturer that received a nasty review won’t do you the favor and put you on the list.
Shocking! Intel’s Booth Has Shrunk
I almost missed my appointment with Intel! Right after a meeting with Asus in CeBIT’s Hall 13 I was supposed to meet my Intel contacts. In the past 3 years Intel’s booth used to be opposite AMD’s booth in Hall 13 as well. It was Thursday morning, I didn’t have a press badge yet and thus no register to tell me where to find Intel’s booth. I finally found it in the ‘network-hall’ No. 11. What an awful sight! The booth turned out to be about a third of the size of AMD’s booth. The food that was offered, something that used to be excellent in all the previous years, had deteriorated down to some mayonnaise ham/salad sandwiches = no taste but ton’s of calories. I decided to stay hungry, keeping my senses sharp, hehe. However, there weren’t any particular news that wouldn’t have been known after reading Intel’s last roadmap and IDF-reports. Let’s hope that Intel will be able to afford a nicer booth next year again. It would be too sad to see them and their visitors suffer!
First Pictures of AMD’s Thunderbird
Right after Intel I ran back to hall 13 to AMD’s booth. Man, what a difference! Large booth, nice food, drinks and … information! Well, there was a minor problem getting upstairs though. The smart guy who was supposed to check everyone that went up the stairs to the top of the booth couldn’t find a press badge on my chest. As a matter of fact I hadn’t got any by that time. Thanks to Andreas Stiller I was allowed up though, he smiled and said “I’m vouching for this poor guy” and we disappeared to the ‘upper class level’.
I wasn’t quite sure how to feel amongst all the AMD-executives this time. My last article about the CPU-maker hadn’t been exactly flattering and I feared the worst. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Everybody was really nice and respectful, so that I almost felt bad about my nasty words from the past.
In a funky glass room AMD showed the air-cooled Athlon 1100 that some of the journalists already knew from AMD’s neighborhood-show to IDF. The system ran at exactly 1116 MHz and we took the chance of playing around with the system after the presenter had left the room for a few minutes. All software we could try and that was installed on the system ran without a problem. This time we had requested to look inside the case, to see what Thunderbird (Athlon with on-die L2-cache) actually looks like. I was very impressed to see everybody scramble and look for a screwdriver to fulfill my wish.
First Pictures of AMD’s Thunderbird, Continued
There you have it. That’s what ‘Thunderbird’ looks like. We also got a look inside the system as you can see above.
AMD is very confident that they can keep up with Intel in terms of processor performance and increase their market share even more. Most of you know about AMD’s upcoming dual-CPU chipset, the increase in front side bus speed from 200 MHz to 266 MHz, the upcoming quad-processor chipsets developed in cooperation with API and HotRail and finally the fact that the majority of Athlon platforms will very soon be using DDR-SDRAM to compete against Intel’s expensive RDRAM-solutions.
Ziff-Davis Party
What would a show report by Thomas Pabst be if there wasn’t at least one party for him to talk about? After my AMD-appointment I had to give an interview and after that I had the pleasure to meet with Dr. Roloff from the ‘Deutsche Messe AG’, the organizer of CeBIT. The next thing was finally our press registration and then there wasn’t enough time to see VIA anymore. Unfortunately my plan was to leave Hannover on Friday morning, so that all the other reports will have to come from the other editors of Tom’s Hardware who stayed in Hannover.
Fortunately Kai Schmerer from ZD’s German PC Professionell had invited almost all the important press people with the one exception of Mike Magee from The Register, who was sadly missed by most of us. I arrived there after an excellent meal that I had enjoyed at, in my humble opinion, the best restaurant of Hannover, a Spanish restaurant by the name ‘El Pais’. The ZD-party was in a rather funky place called ‘Capitol’ and in my eyes it was a full success.
From left to right: Andreas Stiller (c’t), Uwe Scheffel (Tom’s Hardware), Hermann Eiden (Tom’s Hardware), Kai Schmerer (PC-Professionell) and the one guy that’s hardly on the picture with the disgusting beer bottle in his hand is …. well, guess! Ed Henning had taken this picture and you can see that, with his long press-experience, he knows to handle a camera a lot better than Uwe Scheffel, who took the next one:
From left to right: Christian Ehmer (IBM), Andreas Stiller (c’t), Ed Henning (PC Magazine UK), Hermann Eiden (Tom’s), Kai Schmerer (PC Professionell).
A little later we were joined by half of Intel’s marketing and sales department and had a really good time taking the p**s of each other. The party finished at 2:30 AM, but most of us went to another place until 5 AM. Only Daniel (Chip-Magazine, Germany) and I ended up in another bar that we left around 7 AM. He decided to get ready for the next day of CeBIT and I had to catch my plane home.
VIA Is Feeling Strong
Uwe Scheffel gave me a brief report of what he had found out from his visit to VIA. The Taiwanese chipset and processor manufacturer is in very good spirits. The alternative Coppermine-platform by the name of ‘Apollo Pro 133’ is a full success and so is the recently released ‘Apollo KX133’ Athlon chipset. The Cyrix III processor had been launched only a few days ago and final silicon will be available in two weeks. We’ve already tested Apollo KX133 and are currently evaluating motherboards with this chipset. Apollo Pro 133 on a final Asus-motherboard is also showing excellent results in my lab and we will certainly supply you with our results from Cyrix III testing as soon as we can.
3dfx – Big Boobs instead of Fast Chips
The once-so-successful 3D-chip maker is hurting. Behind closed curtains they showed alpha-silicon of a VSA-100 chip on a Voodoo 5500 PCI-card running at only 100 MHz. Thus it’s no surprise that the performance was hardly worth talking about. You could enjoy motion blur and full scene anti-aliasing at 640×480, which may be nice, but not really interesting enough to crave for this chip, if 3dfx should survive until the final product will be released. NVIDIA’s NV15-silicon is already up and performing well for more than two months and its performance as well as features will most likely make a stillbirth out of all the funky Voodoo 400, 5000, 5500, … cards.
Source: Oliver Ketterer from www.com-online.de.
3dfx tried hard to get attention with a rather pathetic PR-gag. On Friday 3dfx produced a heavy commotion by presenting Lara Weller as Lara Croft on the upper level of its booth. Lara jumped around this level albeit without any sound. The effect was a big disappointment of all the spectators and a lot of anger of all the people who tried to walk around in the vicinity of the 3dfx-booth. The question if Lara is using a Voodoo 5500 card can probably be answered with a clear ‘No’, since none of the demo-units at 3dfx’s booth were actually running TombRaider. Thus none of the 3dfx-people could explain a sensible connection between Lara and 3dfx, and the spectators got a rather negative than positive image of 3dfx and their organization skills.
