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Asus
At Asus I had once more the opportunity to meet with almost all of the VPs as well as the CEO, Jonney Shih. I was able to discuss technology as well as their latest product strategy, which I always enjoy, because all the Asus officials are very knowledgeable and helpful.
Asus has started another new venture. After Asus has been successfully moving into the high-end 3D graphics market, after supplying notebooks, barebone servers, DVD/CDROMs/CD-RWs and communication devices like e.g. cable modems, I was not surprised to see that they will now start to go in the IA (information appliances) market as well.
Asus is considering to producing PDAs in several variations as well a web pad. Today Asus has become a brand that's well received in the whole world and the latest thing to have in one's portfolio is IAs. The products in the above picture will take a while until they are available and it might be that we won't ever see some of them, in case that there shouldn't be enough interest for those products.
You all know about Asus GeForce2 graphic card line, starting with the 'V7700 Pure' without any added features and ending with the 'V7700 Deluxe TV', sporting video-in and video-out, stereo glasses and a TV tuner module. HC Hung, the father of Asus 3D-cards is very proud of the development of software that enables MPEG2 time shifting on all V7700 cards that come with video-in/out. It enables you to record TV/video in DVD-quality, interrupt the playback while your recording and turning the playback back on, which then will continue where you stopped, while the recording continues in the background. We received a special test system in our Computex-Lab and are currently evaluating this nifty new feature.
In the motherboard area, the traditional core business of Asus, we could find the obligatory i815/Solano boards for Pentium III and KT133 boards for AMD's new Athlon/Thunderbird and Duron processors.
Here we see the 'A7V':
The A7V is Asus' Thunderbird/Duron motherboard with VIA's Apollo KT133 chipset. It comes with AGP-Pro slot, AC'97 compliant 3D audio and an additional UltraDMA/100 controller chip from Promise, which adds two ATA100 IDE channels to the two ATA66 IDE channels that come with the VIA 686 south bridge. We have received a sample in our Computex-lab and are currently testing it.
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