Event Coverage

Day One @ Taiwan

By Dr. Jimmy Tang - 7 Jun 2000

A Day Spent with AMD

Yo people!! It's only the first day in Taiwan and I've already started to miss home. It's not that Taipei is a bad place or anything, but I just miss the comfort of my own bed and the company of my friends back home. The people here are nice and friendly. The food is superb too.

Well, we moved around from places to places meeting local Taiwanese manufacturers. We didn't managed to step into the exhibition hall yet. Don't worry, we plan to visit the exhibition hall tomorrow. It's a holiday in Taiwan today, so there are actually a lot more people who could make time to visit Computex. We can see that the halls were filled with people, both locals and foreigners alike. I guess it was a good decision to skip the halls today. Anyway, I believe there will still be a large crowd around the exhibition halls tomorrow. Let's hope it's manageable.

Well, what did we do if we didn't go to the exhibition hall? Yes, you guessed it right, we met up with some folks from AMD and got a glimpse of some of AMD's latest technologies and products.

Even before we met up with AMD, we could guess that AMD was going to showcase their latest CPU, the Duron (formerly known as the Spitfire). When we met up with AMD at the Grand Hyatt, we saw a large collection of motherboards ready made for the Duron (Socket-A) processors. Famous brands like Microstar, Gigabyte, Soyo, FIC and Freetech were all showcased together with not so well-known brands (at least in Singapore) too. OK, I'll try not to bore you guys with too many words. Here are some cool pictures of the motherboards we saw at the meeting with AMD.

Freetech's Socket-A motherboard, the P6F121

The Socket-A (or Socket 462)

Oooh, there are some light overclocking features too. Heheh..

VIA's demo board for the AMD Socket-A CPUs

Soyo too have a Socket-A board.... SY-K7VZA

Gigabyte stole my attention with their blue PCB. Watch out for this sweet looking board. (GA-7ZX)

Well, guys, guess how many chipsets are there for the AMD Socket-A? Three altogether, and the engineering boards are already showcased here. We've heard a lot about VIA's KT133 chipset, but ALi and SIS have been working on similar chipsets too. Check out the pictures below!

The VIA VT8363 or better known as the KT133

The ALi M1647

The SIS 730s

How about the processor? When is AMD going to release the CPU? Well, according to AMD, they will soon make an announcement. The release of the Duron has been delayed, unfortunately. Anyway, here are some closeup pictures of the Duron.

The AMD Duron. Hmm... looks like it's not going to be easy to overclock. : )

The flip side of the Duron.

Well, we also caught a preview of what's to come out from AMD, the ACR (Advanced Communications Riser). It is a much better interface developed by AMD to provide a common architecture for analog modem, Ethernet, phoneline and wireless networking, DSL and audio functions. They are already on their way to integrate the ACR slot in the next generation of motherboard and they have pretty good support from some big names like 3Com, Motorola, nVidia, VIA and Lucent. It is like the AMR (Audio-Modem Riser), and what's more, it is backward compatible with existing AMR cards. Here are some pictures...

OK, I'll end off with a few more pictures of EasyNow PCs targeted for the consumer electronics market. It comes built with internet and multimedia capabilities (includes a DVD-ROM) and it could possibly replace your normal home entertainment system while providing internet surfing capabilities. I won't be surprised if you can find one of these off the shelf in Carrefour next time.

That's all for today's update. I'll try to update more when I get the chance.

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