Main iPhone Information Page

When consumers navigate to the main iPhone page, about ¾ of the page down you see a link that says, “iPhone 3GS or Iphone 3G: Compare”.

Compare iPhones Page

Click this and you go to a comparison page of the iPhone 3G versus iPhone 3GS.  About ¾ down the page, you see a battery life comparison:

These seems like intuitive figures to provide a consumer, yet Apple is already operating in rarefied air in providing this much consumer information.  But wait, what about the details on what was tested, you ask?  Apple iPhone delivers, again.  When you click on the disclaimer (3) you are brought down to a line that says, “3) All battery claims depend on network configuration and many other factors; actual results will vary. For more details of iPhone performance tests for talk time, standby time, Internet use over 3G, Internet use over Wi-Fi, video playback, and audio playback, see www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html.”

Full Battery Life Performance Testing Disclosure Page

Click on the link in the disclaimer above and you are brought to a page that contains more battery life procedure testing than I have ever seen before. These 1,173 words of technical bliss scream detail.  Sure, someone could chose to pick at the way the testing was done, but you cannot complain about the detailed disclosure.  The page meticulously goes through the tests performed, the hardware used, and how it was done.

Who Cares?

We have made it very public and clear that AMD is striving to guide the PC industry to deliver better notebook PC battery life information for consumers.  Nigel and I have articulated the challenges and provided suggestions to this.  We expect some in the industry to adopt these, but some will sit on the sidelines.  To those who choose to sit I ask, how do you feel about better battery life information being disclosed on a $99 iPhone than a $799 notebook PC?  Industry, we can do better than the cell phone industry.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I believe competition is the “secret sauce” that drives innovation. That’s true in any industry, and it’s also true in life. Would the U.S. have put a man on the moon if not for Sputnik? Maybe, but there’s no question that the Space Race and attending accelerated pace of innovationwas fueled by very high stakes competition between the US and the former Soviet Union.

Goliath with brass knuckles

At AMD we live to compete and innovate, and it starts by asking questions like “What will it take to deliver the next-generation computing experience?” And while innovation with impact is our calling card, it’s more than fair to say that AMD also loves a good fight. But hopefully the world now knows that we’ve fight an enormous opponent that rigs the game to ensure AMD can never fully win fair and square.

Like Nigel said, competition investigators have for a third time (Japan, Korea, European Union) collected evidence showing that especially when AMD opens commanding product leads on Intel and we take those innovations to the marketplace, Intel uses bribery and coercive tactics to block those innovations. Whole AMD customer segments and sales channels are effectively shutdown by Intel.That’s Don Corleone type stuff, folks. That’s David versus Goliath, with Goliath packing brass knuckles on one hand and a brick-filled sock in the other.

The AMD Critic: “AMD should innovate, not litigate”

I’ve heard the Intel apologists say: “AMD should innovate instead of litigate.” If you doubt we fear an innovation fight with Intel or that  we can truly compete with Intel, remember that we have proven that we can out-innovate or remain competitive against Intel, a company with about 10x the resources. We are champing at the bit to attack an open, competitive marketplace that is no longer artificially manipulated by Goliath.

You may be sitting there saying, “OK Pat – that’s your opinion, and a biased opinion at that!” Fair enough. If that was opinion, here are 10 facts that should do some of the talking for AMD in terms of theinnovation chops we have under our roof:

Fact #1

Billions of financial transactions are conducted quickly and efficiently every day by major stock exchanges around the world on AMD-based servers.

Fact #2

All 50 Million Wii gaming consoles shipped to date run on AMD technology (ATI Hollywood GPU).

Fact #3

7 of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD processors.

Fact #4

AMD processors were trusted to power crash safety test simulations for almost 2 million new cars that hit the road in the US in 2008.

Fact #5

Realistic special effects powered by AMD technology have helped Hollywood amass more than $5.4 billion in worldwide box office revenue.

Fact #6

AMD processors in the Top500 supercomputer list account for more than 4.029 petaflops of computing power (that’s more than four thousand trillion calculations per second).

Fact #7

50% of Internet DNS traffic is efficiently and quickly routed via AMD-powered servers.

Fact #8

Musicians and producers who have collectively won 70 Grammy awards currently rely on AMD technology for their cutting edge digital music production.

Fact #9

Every month nearly 23 million travelers find their ideal trip using online travel services powered by AMD-based hardware.

Fact #10

AMD graphics and slot machine are a winning combination.  More than 75% of new slot machines in Vegas use AMD graphics to power their visually stunning imagery, and more than half of those machines also use an AMD CPU.

So to borrow from our corporate philosophy, I’m more than happy to combine these facts with our employees’ passion for innovation. And I’ve never felt better about the future of innovation than I do today.  What do you think?

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Let me tell you about that.

I met up with AMD during my tenure at Compaq Computer Corp. starting in 1995. Back then, lots of PCs sold for as much as $2,000 and the idea of notebooks for consumers instead of just business people was new. AMD helped change the entire landscape on both those fronts and the market has never been the same.

I also fondly recall loving the ATI Rage^TM Pro graphics card. In fact it was at that time that Compaq actually soldered the ATI Rage Pro engine onto the motherboard [it was in fact the first motherboard-resident AGP graphics chip]. Soldering anything on a mobo back in the day was a huge commitment and vote of confidence.

In late 2000, I joined AMD and have called it home ever since.

I admire AMD for a lot of things, but three things come top of mind:

1. Integrity, the highest levels.

2. Putting customers first, sometimes seemingly at its own peril.

3. Defying the pundits and “just doing it”

#1 and #2 are reasonably self-explanatory so I will drill down into #3.  I will provide the “dialogue” as people may have heard it play-out many times before:

• 1990 Pundit: “You have the 386 mask set, but not the microcode. No way can you make a 386.”

But AMD did it.

• 1992 Pundit: “You don’t have the 486 mask set or the microcode. No way can you make a 486.”

But AMD did it.

• 1997 Pundit: “You have relied on Intel’s infrastructure this whole time so no way you can make a 7^th generation CPU with an AMD-based motherboard infrastructure. You are dead.”

But AMD did it.

• 1999 Pundit: “New and proprietary instruction sets from massive companies are the way to go. You are nuts if you think you can drive a 64-bit instruction set by yourselves. You will be dead.”

But AMD did it.

• 2003 Pundit: “No way you can get into the datacenter. You are just a consumer desktop CPU company. Get back in your box.”

But AMD did it.

• 2007 Pundit: “You’ve lost graphics technology leadership and you won’t ever get it back. The competition is too tough.”

But AMD did it.

So I hope I refreshed your memory banks on what pundits may have said, how AMD said “we can” and how AMD “just did it”.  I want to highlight that we didn’t do anything on our own without the support of our customers, their customers, and technology and infrastructure partners.

I am excited about AMD, our employees, and our future.  I am excited about what we plan to bring to our customers on cloud server computing and media-rich consumer usage models. Pundits will take shots and that’s okay, as it tends to motivate us and enhance the sweetness of our successes in the end.

Pundits laughed when Kennedy set his challenge to send a man to the moon and return him safely by the end of the 1960s. We like our moon-shots at AMD, too, and surprising the pundits again and again.

AMD, happy 40^th and I promise I will keep promoting the “we can” attitude and we’ll just do it.

Note: Nigel Dessau, CMO and SVP at AMD is also providing his unique blog perspective on the 40th anniversary here.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

At CES 2009, AMD demonstrated playing through a smartphone web browser, EA’s latest Mercenaries 2: World in FlamesTM. We also demonstrated watching through a smartphone browser a Hancock Blu-ray movie with the full menuing system. Both of these were streamed by the AMD Fusion Render Cloud reference design. So the browser matters.

This makes me naturally quick to try the latest browser or major revision of one. I spent 24 hours with the Apple Safari 4 Beta and wanted to share my experiences. 24 hours on beta software isn’t the complete picture but I can get maybe 85% of my perspective in that time frame.

I want to do some level setting up front- this is a beta and therefore should have bugs, that’s natural and I thank Apple for doing a public beta. Secondly, browser choices are driven by personal needs and preferences like simplicity, speed, familiarity, add-on features, and even enterprise-mandated browser standards for full compatibility. But many people are oblivious and simply use the browser that was installed on their PC bought from a local retailer.

So these are MY views based on my history and usage patterns. I am primarily a PC user but also have two Macs. I primarily use Firefox but use Internet Explorer as the corporate front-end to SAP applications. I use Chrome also. I obviously use Safari on my iPod Touch (no choice) and prefer the integrated browser on my Bold, Storm, and G1 Android versus mobile Opera.

I did my 24 hours of testing on three systems:

• Hand-built desktop with Windows Vista Business Edition 32-bit, AMD Phenom TM 9850 processor, ATI Radeon TM HD 4870 graphics
• HP Pavilion dv5 with Windows Vista Premium 64-bit, AMD Turion TM ZM-80 processor, ATI Radeon TM HD 3200 graphics
• Fujitsu Lifebook 2110 with Windows XP Pro 32-bit, AMD Turion TM 64 X2 TL-58 processor, ATI Radeon TM Xpress 1150 graphics

Plusses

• Easy to install, no error messages. Apple must supercharge this download through a big-time caching service because it was FAST.
• Imported my Internet Explorer and Firefox bookmarks without issues into legible folders.
• Not a single lock up on 100’s of pages from many different sites.
• Full functionality on the many sites I visited with the exception of the two important sites listed below.

Too Early To Tell

• Meaningful speed. Reportedly faster than Chrome and that means real fast. I cannot tell the difference between the speed of Chrome and Safari 4, but folks I follow are citing tests that show it is. CNet UK says it is faster than Chrome while PC Magazine says that it still trailed Chrome on some key tests. But they both say it’s faster than Firefox but yet I cannot tell ANY real experiential difference.
• iTunes-like scroll bar (picture below). This is under Bookmarks. I may end up loving this but right now I just don’t know.

Improvements I Would Like To See

• Add-ons. This is just more of an issue with Safari in general, not Safari 4. Safari has add-ons too, but in my opinion, don’t have the depth or breadth I want. Every cool tool I run across, it seems like Firefox has an add-on immediately.
• Multi-tab Startup. I want to pre-load 10 tabs whenever I open the browser. I use my browser for real work and pong from tab to tab like a day-trader, but I am trading information. I cannot figure out how to do that yet with Safari 4, maybe I cannot.

• Forced application close: On Windows 64 install, shut down Tweetdeck and other browsers without prompting.
• A few bugs: Hey it’s called beta for a reason, to ring out some of the last issues.  Blogger: comment validation error with perpetual “loading” message. WordPress: Perpetual loading of a few assets. Its a beta, live with it!

• Forward/Next page drop downs. This is truly personal and out of habit, but I want drop downs, not holding down the mouse button. See the difference below. I miss that.

Firefox

Internet Explorer

Safari

Conclusion

Safari 4 is an elegant and speedy browser and I am certain that Mac lovers will use it in droves — and maybe even a few iPhone/PC users if they see sufficient value in integration. I may fall in love with some of the more visual features at some point, but for right now, Firefox is fast enough for me, is easier for me to open my multiple tabbed workspace, and finally, for the kind of work I do, you can’t beat the Firefox add-ons.  What are your thoughts on Safari 4 Beta?

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I have believed for years that if someone with just minor technical understanding wants to watch their digital videos or photos on their big-screen TV, the PC is still the best choice. Question is, how close are we getting to the DMA (Digital media adapter) catching up to the PC?

After years of personal testing, sifting through mounds of secondary research and sitting through the research glass watching consumers, I have become very opinionated about the best DMA (Digital Media Adapter) to connect to a TV or flat panel for watching videos and pictures. Yes, I have tried a mountain of DMAs in my own home: D-Link DSM-520, Linksys DMA2200, Apple TV, Archos 605 WiFi, HP MediaSmart x280n, Roku SoundBridge, Xbox 360, Iomega ScreenPlay HD, iPhone, iPod, and Roku Netflix player (and a few I am sure I have forgotten). They all have their strengths and weaknesses on price, functionality, content, reliability, and ease of use, but again, the PC still reigns.

It’s not just any PC, though.  It needs to be optimized for a 10′ experience and comfortably fit into the living room.  A small form factor media center PC still “wins” could consist of a low-wattage, high performance CPU like a 65 watt AMD Phenom processor, efficient hardware HiDef video decode off the GPU like a “silent-edition” ATI Radeon HD 3650 or the motherboard-based ATI Radeon HD 3200 connected to the HDTV over HDMI, a Gyration keyboard and remote, and all the video “codec packs”, to run virtually any flavor of video. The chassis must be able to support the usage model technologically, ergonomically, and with style.  Trust me, when you have been married 18 years like me, the “style” thing becomes real important.  For me, the “PC over the DMA” argument comes down to compatibility, ease of use, flexibility, and price.

So when I do run into a DMA that impresses, I want to tell people about it. It’s funny how you hear about these new devices.  A few weeks ago I was at a reception in New York where I ran into Marco Chiappetta, managing editor of Hot Hardware. He told me about a review he did for CPU Magazine of a device called a “TViX”. So I had to check it out for myself over the weekend…  Below you can see the front and offset shots of the TViX sitting on top of a Yamaha receiver.

Here are the basics from the DViCO website on the TViX 6500a:

• · Video formats: .mkv, .iso, .mpg, .iso, .vob, .mp4, .asf, .tp, .trp, .ts, .m2ts, .mov
• · Video codecs: MPEG 1/2/4, AVI, XVID, WMV9, H.264, AVC HD, VC-1
• · Video resolutions: Up to 1920×1080P
• · Storage connectivity: Internal SATA hard drive, 2 external USB drives, and RJ45 networked.

For me, the TViX handled almost all the video I threw at it at 1080 and 720 projecting on a 120” screen with the exception of a few highly encoded .MOV, .AVI, .MKV files, and surprisingly, with videos from a new and inexpensive HD camcorder I just purchased. It also had some issues with a 720P .MOV file off an older digital camera.  It rebooted on a few videos, but again still chewed through most of the formats I threw at it.  It will hopefully be addressed with future firmware updates, but there are never any guarantees with video. These same files I had issues with on the TViX worked fine on my PC using CyberLink, QuickTime or VLC.  Finally, The upscaling of the standard def video to higher def video was impressive as well.

Below you can see the remote (left) and the on screen display when you first power-on (right).

The most impressive thing to me about the TViX was the local storage capability. A bit strange, I know, being impressed by that for a networkable device, but I will tell you more on that later. I added a 1TB SATA drive and two external USB2 hard drives to give me a total of 2.2TB of local storage! Local playback was incredibly fast and my hunch is that some of its on-board memory is coming into play. I have used other DMAs with local storage and it was incredibly slow, so this was a welcomed change.  Below see the open bay for the hard drive (left) and a shot of the back with all the ports (right) which I am sure you recognize.

Networking was a totally different story. No UPnP, so you are kind of on your own to connect it to your networked PCs. I say “kind of” on your own because it did come with PC software to index the PC content, but I was forced to hard-code my PCs IP address into the TViX. I am no self-professed networking expert, and I am brilliantly showing that off as I write. When I did get the streaming to work, it worked well, shockingly well even for very highly-encoded video files.

Net-net for me, the TViX is a decent complement to the PC for videos, photos, and even music if you can figure out the networking and make it reliable, but it isn’t going to compete with the PC anytime soon. And starting at $399 without a hard drive, the TViX isn’t exactly a throw-away, either.  In my next few blogs, I will dig a little bit deeper into building an HTPC.

Note: AMD has no affiliation with DVICO.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

As I discussed in my first blog post, to do my job effectively, I need to stay very close and hands-on with technology. None of this ivory tower stuff for me…..well I keep it as limited as I can. Home technologies are one of my passions so it’s enjoyable as well. I am always amazed by those that “just work” and those that do not. I try to learn from those experiences and in addition to more formalized primary research programs, use this as information as guideposts to help improve AMD’s own solution offerings.

This weekend, I installed two new devices, a Linksys Gigabit wired/N wireless router (WRT310N) and Linksys’s newest Media Center Extender (DMA2200). It’s incredible how different my installation experiences were between these two products from the same company.

The router “just worked” and the media extender “just didn’t work”. Yes, I expect a router to be much simpler to install than a Windows media extender, but then again, I have a complex network…. I mix wired ethernet (Gb and 100Mb), wireless (B, G, and N), switches (Gb, 100Mb) connected to at least 15 different devices around the house. So when I replaced my 100Mb router with a Gb router and it just worked, I was amazed.

In contrast to this, I spent 8 hours on Saturday trying to get the media extender working correctly and reliably. It was regularly losing its connection to the PC with all my content, and as I’ve come to expect from a Windows media extender adapter, it had trouble with a number of codecs (I’ve discovered there are a number of codecs that Windows doesn’t like……. ironically most of the same ones that Apple likes….. or most of the open source ones. :>) I should know better, given that this is perhaps my 8^th extender I have tried out with a similar result. For the record, I recommend to anyone that asks, if you really want to connect a computing device to a TV, do it with an AMD Cool’n'Quiet™PC and not a media extender.

As Nigel wrote here, on the consumer side, through our OEM customers and channels partners, we are trying to make technology solutions that are more fun and easier to use – better for gaming and better for media. That is really the basis for AMD LIVE! ^TM and AMD GAME! ^TM. The concept is simple….. in our experience, consumers like to play games and like to play and work with their photos, videos, and music. To do that effectively and efficiently requires different combinations of the right hardware, software, and services. We supply to our OEM customers and channel partners with specific hardware and software configurations to accomplish different levels of gaming (AMD GAME!/ AMD GAME! Ultra) and media (AMD LIVE!). If our OEM customers and channels choose, they can also use the AMD LIVE! or AMD GAME! badging in their marketing programs to signify that they are meeting these specifications. We also provide training and promotional materials to these business partners for use by their salespeople to better educate their own customers. For gaming end users, we also provide a deep content web site for gamers, with forums, downloads, promotions and educational materials .

In the end, technology is still too difficult for most folks and here at AMD one of our goals is to do our part to help improve gaming and media experiences for our OEM customers, channel partners, and most importantly, our end users.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/07/02/technology-that-%e2%80%9cjust-works%e2%80%9d/feed/ 5 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/10/live-from-the-post-computex-social-media-decompression-chamber/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/10/live-from-the-post-computex-social-media-decompression-chamber/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:19:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/06/10/live-from-the-post-computex-social-media-decompression-chamber.aspx Back safely from Computex. Even though this was my tenth trip, this one will stand out for a long time for the high spirit of adventure it produced as a result of implementing many social media tools at once.

We picked a place thirteen time zones away to dive into the deep end of the social media pool. Metaphorically speaking, it felt like being in a tin can going to the moon. We were implementing lots of new capabilities at the same time that ultimately required lots of troubleshooting on the fly. It produced some early headaches and challenges but it turned out to be memorable, spirited, and a lot of fun.

Here’s the rundown on the experience, or should I say experiment, of all these activities.

First, the Nokia N95 phone, in my opinion, was a bust using it the way we wanted to use it. We wanted to be able to automatically capture, upload, and broadcast video with minimal delay. Amazing functionality, for sure, and I’m sure we’ll continue to use it in North America, but couldn’t get it to behave with the 3G networks in Taiwan. This made us dependent on unreliable Wi-Fi signals from the show floor and even back at our hotels. We resorted to using my Flip video camera, uploading that content into our YouTube account vis-à-vis the old reliable PC and using the help of the Flixwagon folks to back load the new content into our Flixwagon account. Two of our videos are still stuck in Flixwagon and won’t load into YouTube! (Check out “Pat Chats with Theo” & “Gigabyte’s Spider”).

We had to implement the same kind of workarounds with the Flickr account using the Nokia N95 phone as well. Frankly, the early troubles with the video impacted the attention we gave to Flickr, which deserved more. But we Flickred, it works, and we’ll do it better next time.

The live Mogulus broadcast of our press event also had mixed results. We implemented an up-rezzing transcoding engine on the live feed from a company called Kulabyte – a very promising technology. Feedback from the audience was mixed – I am told many were amazed by the high quality video streaming through their computers from half a world away. Some experienced a jittery picture. Clearly looks dependent on the capabilities of the end user PC, their network, their WAN, and we will continue to work with these companies to provide a reliable solution for our audience. You can check it out for yourself as the recording on-demand feature is available now. It looks great.

Twitter is still kind of an enigma to me, but it I think it has its place, and I am intrigued. It was kind of a like cross-breed between a mass phone text, a mass IM, and the Truman Show. Like many first-time cross-breedings, it was ugly at times. The Twitter network was down a lot, users were habitually complaining, and there is even a Twitter blog on the issues and reasons for the outages. Even with all the issues, we are starting to build a following. Translating that capability into an on-going business practice will take time and more experimentation.

Next, I didn’t need to spend much time following our Facebook page because it already integrates content from YouTube, FlickR, and Twitter. It is growing by itself and we’re hearing from many long time AMD fans from around the world expressing their feelings about why they like us…..and what they think we need to fix.

Finally, none of this “rise of the machines” stuff above worked without awesome “humans” ;> . I particularly want to thank Scott Carroll, our social media manager and Matt Davis, our PR manager for making everything work when the tech didn’t.

Here are quick & easy summary links to much of this content:

• YouTube AMD@Computex 2008
• FlickR AMD@Computex 2008
• Flixwagon AMD@Computex 2008
• AMD Unprocessed Facebook Page
• Follow AMD on Twitter
• AMD on Mogulus

Community-inspired innovation is awesome. I’m looking forward to continuing the use and implementation of these tools but doing so while playing for the home team in the states for a while… at least a few weeks

This is AMD@Computex 2008, signing off!

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Day three at Computex comprised of more 1:1 regional press interviews and spending more time, maybe too much time, on the show floor given security booted us out of the facility.

Although I had spent a good part of time interviewing some of our technology partners, it was now our turn to give interviews. The first one was with Bloomberg, and while they would have liked to dig deep into AMD’s financial matters, we confined our discussion to AMD’s products and competitiveness. We also talked with IDG on a variety of corporate areas. I have been meeting with Sumner for years and it’s so nice to catch up with familiar faces.

We also hosted a Japanese press contingent that freelanced for publications including PC Watch and MYCOM Journal The discussion focused on our “Puma” platform, the rationalization behind our AMD GAME!™ and AMD LIVE! ™ programs, and the benefits we believe they provide to different sets of customers. I personally like to think of AMD LIVE! and AMD GAME! as guiding posts to deliver a superior technology platform for mainstream gamers and media mavens. Some may disagree and call it just a sticker program or marketing ploy, but if it can help simplify a confusing buying decision, it’s easy to see the benefit. Again, we in the PC industry tend to lose perspective on the ocean that separates enthusiasts and mainstream customers in how each of them approach a solid buying decision. AMD LIVE! and GAME! fill a void in information availability and help save time and effort for the consumer looking for a great all-around digital media and gaming PC.

The final interview was with Hardware Zone out of Singapore. We chatted a lot about the future, or in my opinion, the questionable future for UMPCs and a lot about the mini-notebook spin and hype at this year’s show. As you know, I spent 30 days at home with a lot of different mini-notebooks, comparing full sized notebooks at the same price point, and blogged about my results here. I just hope that consumers get full disclosure when deciding between a mini-notebook and full-sized notebook at the same price point.

After our 1:1 interviews we met up with GearLive for a chat. These guys are awesome in that they sift right through the spin (B.S.) to get to the heart of the technology and the benefit it provides the end user. I absolutely LOVE that approach and wish more folks would adopt this. You can check out our interview with GearLive here:

…as we discuss the next generation notebook platform.

Jake Ludington from GearLive has great insights on the entire Computex show and he shares these insights on his blog here.

Finally, we met up with AMD’s Jacky Wong to talk about ATI XGP™ technology. This is AMD’s new external PCI Express® (PCIe) 2.0 graphics platform, designed to deliver enthusiast-class desktop graphic performance and true multimedia upgradeability to notebooks. The concept is real simple: If you have a notebook with an ATI XGP Technology external PCIe connector and you want some real incredible gaming performance, plug your notebook into an independently powered and cooled graphics “booster unit”, and you are on your way to gaming heaven. Jacky talks more about it here:

…and shows us a notebook connected to three additional monitors playing some cool games.

As we were giving our final GearLive interview of the show, the lights turned down and security entered our realm, a pretty good sign that it was time to leave. Matt Davis, my AMD compadre of the show, just flipped on the camera and we just started walking and talking, trying to summarize what we saw during the show. You can catch that conversation here.

What a Computex 2008 show…… Puma has been let off the leash and the industry’s cycle of innovation rules over anything else. It rules over spin and the giant blue hype machine… the truth always comes out in the end, or that’s what my grandfather the milkman and Christmas tree farmer told me when I was a mere four foot tall…….

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/06/day-3-computex-the-innovation-cycle-continues/feed/ 1 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends/#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:27:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends.aspx

Today was a huge day for AMD which was capped off with the launch of our next generation mobile platform, formerly code-named “Puma”. For me, it was really a tale of book-ends ranging from checking out some of the coolest technology on the show floor to sharing AMD’s innovation vision with Taiwan’s top 100 tech companies.

With so much technology on the floor, I thought the best way to bring you some of the coolest AMD stuff was to shoot it on video and pics so you can see for yourself. There were a ton of our next generation notebook platforms on the show floor with varying configurations. Check out these videos of new notebooks from HP and Acer and MSI. I especially appreciate MSI’s HDMI port so a user can connect their new AMD-based laptop with a single cable to their TV and get great video and audio. On the desktop front, I thought Gigabyte had a very cool Spider platform that you can see here. Not only was it cool, it was water-cooled with an AMD Phenom™ X4 processor and dual ATI Radeon™ 3870 graphics cards in ATI CrossFireX™ mode.

There were also some unique desktop form-factors as well. Acer had a very cool Aspire L5100 SFF desktop, and at less than 1 liter, it was only slightly taller than my business card. I like SFF but I really love big cases, and Thermaltake had some wicked AMD LIVE!™ and AMD GAME!™ chassis on display. You can see all these below.

The highlight of the day was the launch event of our next generation mobile platform. We had over 400 in attendance and from the feedback I received, we hit the mark with our customers, partners, press and analysts. I caught up with In-Stat’s Jim McGregor and asked him his thoughts about the mobile market and AMD’s platform which you can find here:

Finally, if you missed the event live, you can view it on-demand at Mogulus.

My final event of the day was providing the keynote speech to Business Next’s 2008 Taiwan Info Tech100 Award Ceremony and Forum. The forum included high level executives from Taiwan’s top 100 industries and government officials from what was described to me as “The Executive Yuan”. The theme of the entire forum was “exploring the power of innovation “ and covered a variety of topics from strategy to research and development, operating and executive management……the main point being that innovation has been the key point of technology competition with distinguished companies. One of the biggest treats was the greeting from Taiwan’s Vice President, R.O.C., Mr. Vincent Siew. This certainly isn’t something that I experience every day. It was also an honor to speak alongside Mr. Johnny Shih, Chairman of AsusTek, Adam Judd, senior vice president of Asia Pacific at Juniper, and Mr. Charlie Lee, Tainan factory director of Corning. They really know how to do big events well in Taiwan and this was no exception. Here are some pics below…..

So there we have it, Computex day two, a day of mobile innovation, and certainly a day of innovation book-ends.

(1) From left to right speakers are Mr. Adam Judd, senior vice president of Asia Pacific at Juniper; Mr. Patrick Moorhead, vice president of Advanced marketing at AMD; Mr. Johnny Shih, Chairman of AsusTek; Mr. Charlie Lee, Tainan factory director of Corning.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends/feed/ 2 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/03/day-1-computex-in-the-beginning/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/03/day-1-computex-in-the-beginning/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/06/03/day-1computex.aspx As I said in my previous blog, we are planning to bring you some of the insights from Computex 2008. We wanted to bring it to you in a more multimedia fashion, and it’s just beginning now.

Day 1 was uneventful, with the exception that I somehow managed to lock myself into my bathroom. Some people may have said, “Someone doesn’t want me going to Computex” and stopped while they were ahead, but I am a man on a mission and cannot be deterred. I am no longer in the bathroom, in case you wondered. Thank goodness for bathroom phones. :>

The Computex show floor didn’t open until 9:30 am and Day 1 for me was mostly about show planning and press interviews. I met with Bloomberg, CNET Asia, Hong Kong Economic Journal, Ming Pao Daily News, and the Hong Kong Economic Times for about an hour each. We talked about a variety of items, but one item that we continually discussed was the present and future of mobility. There was a lot of interest in the AMD platform codename “Puma”, but since it isn’t scheduled to launch until June 4^th, I couldn’t divulge too much so we could save something for the grand announcement.

We talked about the concept of these expensive mini-notebooks a lot. It’s so interesting how, in my opinion, every trade show needs to have the “shiny new red wagon”. The irony is that many never gain market traction and either die or are reformed as something else. I was around for the first tablets released on Windows in the early 90’s and someone reminded me about diskless and wireless web tablets (Miro). For this show I am witnessing the feeding frenzy around inexpensive, low performing (versus full size) mini-notebooks. See my comments on those here. Last year at Computex, the big new thing was UMPCs…… and it was very hard for me to find many of them on the show floor this year.

So I did get the chance to walk the show floor for a few hours and it was interesting. It’s like system builder heaven…… chassis, motherboards, cooling solutions, memory, new storage…….. running out of breath just thinking about it.

At this year’s show, among many things, we are bringing out our new AMD LIVE!™ Home Cinema, which in simple words, is a cool reference design for a living room home theater PC. The specific configuration we’re demonstrating at Computex has a couple of cool features, specifically a digital audio amplifier from D2Audio (which hits what some would call audiophile specs) and a new liquid cooling solution we worked on with NoiseLimit Inc. We’re showing how the digital amp and a quad core AMD Phenom™ processor can all live like a happy family together in a VCR-sized chassis. Check out the interview here on the overall specs and benefits. We also were pleased to have NoiseLimit swing by the booth to tell us how they have innovated for the AMD LIVE! Home Cinema program. You can check that out here.

Finally, I took a look around another booth. I will leave it to your imagination as to who’s booth it was. What I saw there was a demo of Second Life and HD running on their new integrated chipset which was too jittery for me to enjoy. I was yearning for an AMD 780G chipset system with a quad or triple core AMD Phenom™ processor around that time. At my house at least I can run full Blu-ray movies with no hiccups at 1080P splendor and play some really good games like HL2 at decent frame rates.

Doing all this on a mobile platform could be even better…..and that’s what tomorrow is about…. i.e.: our next generation “Puma” platform. I will keep you posted…..and as I requested last time and you came through, let me know what you would like to see and I will try to get it on film.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/03/day-1-computex-in-the-beginning/feed/ 3 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/27/amdcomputex-2008-with-130000-of-my-closest-friends/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/27/amdcomputex-2008-with-130000-of-my-closest-friends/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 12:12:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/27/amdcomputex-2008-with-130000-of-my-closest-friends.aspx

It’s Computex time again in Taipei, Taiwan, and we are gearing up for an exciting show. It’s my tenth show personally, which by no means makes me a Computex veteran, given that the show has been going on since 1981. Click here if you want a little bit of background on the show.

I have always enjoyed Computex as it has been the best place to view the latest and greatest in “components” like the latest motherboards, add-in cards, new chassis system and peripheral designs, and thermal solutions. Every year, though, it gets even more sophisticated in that the level of technology increases and the amount of “metal bending” decreases. Any of you who have been in the industry a while know what I mean.

AMD@Computex 2008 this year, we’re stepping up our social media activities, including many things we’ve never tried before.

First, we’re broadcasting our June 4 press conference live over the Internet using a cool web application called Mogulus. We used Mogulus to broadcast our press conference at CeBIT in March and were impressed by the A/V quality and ease of use. You can chat live with other viewers as well as embed the live feed in your own url. The potential of the embed feature is enormous but hasn’t really caught on yet.

Our press event In Taipei starts at 12:30 a.m. ET. If you’re outside the region, we will record the broadcast which you can access available on-demand afterwards, another cool Mogulus feature.

Secondly, we’ve teed up an AMD Facebook Group that will act as the social media hub of our Computex activities. If people like it, we will likely keep it active for future AMD news and conversations. Feel free to check it out.

I’m most excited about my plans to roam the Computex show floor with the Nokia N95 smart phone on the lookout for cool new products and the subject matter experts behind them. The Nokia N95, if you’re not familiar, is a handheld device for the price of a laptop ($750). Among its many capabilities, it can stream live video over the Internet. I’ll be looking to provide brief clips on new technologies and products, not just from AMD but from our many partners as well. I’ll also be experimenting with my first video blogs, providing daily updates on Computex, what’s generating buzz and catching the eye. For kicks, I might shoot some video of the many unique sights and sounds of Taipei.

We’re using the Nokia N95 with another cool new web app we’re trying called Flixwagon. It will host all the short videos we create and will auto-upload all our new videos to our YouTube account which is embedded in our Facebook page. Currently, you can’t stream live video to YouTube and you can’t embed Flixwagon into Facebook, but you can get your videos onto Facebook automatically by going this route. You can also subscribe to our Flixwagon page and get automatic updates when we’ve posted new videos. We’ll also post photos on our FlickR account which will also be accessible on Facebook.

Some are calling Twitter the “killer app” of social media. I’m about to take my first dive into the deep end of the Twitter pool at Computex, but frankly, from the outside looking in, it looks more like the overkill app to me. Nonetheless, we’re going in, so if you’re on Twitter, you can follow us. I expect to be wowed by the viral effect and power of Twitter to some degree and I’ll share my thoughts on it later.

If there is any particular item from Computex you’d like to see covered, leave me a comment or a tweet and I’ll do my best to track it down and shoot you a video or take a picture.

See you at Computex!

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/27/amdcomputex-2008-with-130000-of-my-closest-friends/feed/ 5 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/04/22/secret-find-of-the-family-network-administrator-hp-mediasmart-server/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/04/22/secret-find-of-the-family-network-administrator-hp-mediasmart-server/#comments Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:14:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/04/22/secret-find-of-the-family-network-administrator-hp-mediasmart-server.aspx My name is Patrick Moorhead and I am vice president of advanced marketing at AMD. Most of what I focus on is the non-traditional marketing like developing the new strategies to change the ways we would like people to relate to AMD’s technologies, new ways to leverage our platforms into the marketplace and new ways to communicate them. I think a lot about why people think and behave the way they do and develop how AMD can meet the needs in the consumer and commercial space. On the consumer side, there is no better way to learn about consumer pain points than to “just do it,” and maybe even have a little fun along the way. I guess if that approach is good enough for Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, it has to be good enough for me. :>

I am a gadget guy, particularly on the home side, so I wanted to keep my first blog informative and light.  In future blogs, I will be highlighting some of the industry’s misnomers or hype that need some light shed on them.

If you are also the Family Network Administrator (FNA), I want to let you in on a secret find I made over the the last few months: the HP MediaSmart Server. Normally I prefer to build my own rigs, so when I first heard about the MediaSmart server and its capabilities, I did a little bit of head-scratching. How wrong I was…….

I suppose “tech junkie” fully describes a household having 9 PCs, 3 DMAs (digital media adapter), 5 PMPs (portable media player), 4 DVRs (digital video recorder), 5TB storage, 3 switches, 1 router, an Xbox 360, 4 Nintendo DSs, a SlingBox and a 12Mbit internet connection. It is always a challenge to manage all of that technology and content, particularly keeping up with demands of the Moorhead User Group (MUG), already 4 members strong. MUG members include my wife and my three kids. The needs of MUG are far and wide, from crystal clear music to 15 years of pictures to the latest videos to 4 jitter-free game platform experiences to perfect internet connections …… all available 365 days a year, 24×7 in any room. Many of you can relate, I know, painfully, because you also need to manage all of that beautiful mess.

The HP MediaSmart Server simplifies and removes many of the mundane and often never implemented tasks like backups, network monitoring, and password and profile management. All of this stuff is automated and intuitive, unlike most consumer electronics and computer gear. The server also has some cool features like content sharing inside and outside of the house to your friends and family, and remote access to manage the network and PCs when the FNA is on a business trip. The HP MediaSmart server is powered by an AMD processor and is also part the AMD LIVE!™ family of products so you can really experience some AMD goodness, too!

Setup is easy. Attach the server to your wired network, load a CD on any PC you want connected, setup your passwords and you are on easy street. Now every PC and device in your house can share any of the same music, videos, movies, pictures and documents. Sounds easy and it is. It actually “works.”

It is kept safe and secure by password access control and with data replication. In other words, if you don’t want your 5 year old child to have rights to “delete” or “change” mom’s music files, you can restrict it. Complete or selective systems backups are done automagically without any effort but a mouse click. If data corruption is detected on the server, it will alert the FNA and because the data is replicated (written twice), it is safe and sound. The server will also alert the FNA if the backup was interrupted, anti-virus is out of date, malware detection is off, or if the firewall has been disabled.

The biggest benefit we experienced so far is the ability to have all of our music, video, and pictures in one place to “pull” from. Whether it’s one of the 5 iPods, Apple TV, Xbox 360, D-Link DSM-520, desktops, or laptops, they are all getting data from the same place, which means you are never hunting for that “one song that we downloaded on PC #5 that I can’t find anymore.” I am certain that when the first PC blows up and I can restore all of the data immediately, that will then be the next big feature I love. The other benefit is that the server can be left on all the time, and because it is very cool and quiet, it’s non-intrusive. Doing that on your main home PC is possible, but not optimal. The HP server hasn’t crashed once or turned off unexpectedly. It was built on Windows Server 2003 SP2, so you get years of real-world use before they sprung it on the consumer, as well as putting a happy face on it.  And, no, I havent encountered any of the data integrity challenges written about.

Remote access was a surprise hit. When I was in Las Vegas recently and the “PC broke and couldn’t play music,” I logged into the PC at home in Austin, reloaded a piece of software, and got MUG happy again. I hope that boosts my customer sat score this month. I doubt it.

In my opinion, you don’t need to worry about losing the investment you may have made in USB or eSATA external storage. They plug right into the server and it automagically becomes part of the server’s storage capacity. Also, don’t worry about running out of storage capacity any time soon. The HP MediaSmart server comes in two configurations, 500GB ($599) and 1TB ($749). It comes with 2 extra SATA hard drive bays so you can add two of the highest capacity SATA drives you can find when you need it. As it comes to storage, I recommend only buying it when you need it because the price per MB decreases so rapidly. When I checked today, I could buy 1TB SATA drive on Newegg for $199, so it seems to me that, when you need more next year, it could be half that price or at least much cheaper.

The next feature I want to test is the ability to invite friends and family to view and even post their pictures to the MUG server. Sort of my own protected Flickr. I am not sure exactly the incremental benefit that provides versus the photo posting services, but we will see. For the daring FNAs out there who want to build their own server, Microsoft sells Windows Home Server, the OS that HP has built their own server upon. Some of my compadres have built a beast of a server on this platform and it takes what HP has developed and extended the functionality to things like encoding video and audio content. HP has kept it simple, focused and didn’t overextend themselves in the spirit of maximizing the feature list. What it does, it does well.

I would love to hear from my fellow FNAs managing their home technology installations and how you deal with the complexity and management.