Posts tagged with LIVE!
Technology that “just works”
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 11:52 AM
Loading ...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 8th 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.
Day 3 @Computex: The Innovation Cycle Continues
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 8:45 AM
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.
Day 2 @Computex: Innovation Book-ends
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 3:27 AM
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.
Day 1 @Computex: In The Beginning….
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 1:17 PM
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 4th, 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.
Secret Find of the Family Network Administrator: HP MediaSmart Server
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 12:14 PM
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.
I’m a fan of benchmarks. I think they are very helpful in allowing consumers to make informed purchase decisions about products. But they generally have some flexibility built into them so you can focus on those elements you want. And this means you can use a benchmark to tell a number of stories – which means you can choose to tell the story you want.
For example, take a recent review by AnandTech entitled “Sixteen Cores, Four Sockets” published on June 17, 2008. This article featured Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor-based systems. One of the performance evaluations in this article was a SPECjbb2005 benchmark estimate. What is particularly interesting about this article is that the published estimates list the 4 socket server running AMD Opteron processors model 8356 as 25% faster than the competition while running at similar frequencies and 7% faster than the fastest competitive solution. These results vary widely from the official scores posted on the SPEC site. Now you might ask – how can that be? How can you run what is considered to be an industry standard benchmark and get a different set of numbers? That can’t be right!
Taking a closer look at the SPECjbb2005 benchmark helps to unravel this mystery. SPECjbb2005 is a memory-intensive benchmark that is intended to evaluate the performance of servers running typical Java business applications. Its results evaluate the interaction of the CPU, caches, memory hierarchy, JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler. SPECjbb2005 can be configured to run in a variety of ways, resulting in different performance outcomes. Different configuration = different story. For example, you can get different results based on the operating system used, the version of JVM used, the level of optimization of the JVM and JIT, JVM tuning options, and thread allocations.
The SPECjbb2005 scores published by SPEC tend to be achieved using very aggressive software tuning and processor settings. These settings help to achieve a “best possible score” but do not necessarily reflect how a system would be configured in a data center environment to provide the most stable and efficient performance. The scores published in the AnandTech article, according to the author, are more likely to reflect real world configurations with optimizations used consistent over the different processor architectures.
Indeed – if you do a survey around the internet you can find reference to other SPECjbb2005 scores and estimates that reflect a variety of configuration options and the resulting differences in the benchmark scores:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_fire_x4440_best_opteron
Blog featuring SPECjbb2005 results with the 4 socket Sun Fire x4440 running quad-core AMD Opteron processors with Solaris 10 and Sun JVM. Also highlights power consumption of featured systems – reminding us that in today’s economy of escalating energy costs raw performance has less meaning to data centers than performance/watt.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176/4
An article by TechReport featuring SPECjbb2005 estimates for 2 socket servers running quad-core processors with Windows Server 2003 x64 edition and the Sun JVM. The author states the goal of this performance evaluation was to test relative performance on equal footing.
Taking a closer look at the official SPECjbb2005 scores and the estimates published in the various articles, you can see how confusing a benchmark can be. This serves as a reminder to us that benchmarks are just an indicator of performance and that a benchmark like SPECjbb2005, which allows for a wide variety of configurations, can produce a wide variety of results. And remember – the story being told is not always the one that best reflects reality….
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.
(4.43 out of 5)