I kindly asked the PR team to provide me with some of the reviews and headlines, and it appears that many agree with our assessments.

Here are the highlights, and I recommend visiting the sites to get the full download.  I have separated the reviews into the following segments: Blu-ray experience, HD video capabilities, gaming experience, content creation capabilities, and AMD and HP’s new category creation:

Blu-ray Experience

ComputerShopper: HP Pavilion dv2-1030us, John Delaney

• “We were also impressed with the system’s video-handling prowess; the ATI graphics did a good job of delivering smooth playback of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on Blu-ray.”

SlashGear: HP dv2 and Blu-ray preview, Steven Grady

• “The dv2 is running Vista Home Premium, and plays Blu-ray movies beautifully on the display. The dv2 has an HDMI port for making it easy to use the dv2 as your home Blu-ray player with your HDMI television…”

CrunchGear: HP’s new external Blu-ray driver is sleek as hell, Devin Coldeway

• “The Blu-ray drive that will be coming with the HP dv2 “ultra-slim” notebook is looking really nice. It’s shiny, gorgeous, and incredibly thin. I thought I better get some pictures of this sexy accessory up so you guys know how HP rolls with this new stylish line of not-netbooks-but-not-notebooks.”

HD Video Capabilities

Notebookreview.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Review, Jerry Jackson

• “If you want to connect your laptop to your HDTV and watch 1080p video, the dv2 can handle it.”

JKOntherun.com: HP dv2 on a Road Trip: First Impressions, Kevin Tofel

• “I mentioned HD video playback before. I decided to download and view some 720p content before closing out this post. Hitting up the Microsoft WMV HD Content Showcase, I downloaded the “Super Speedway” video; something I wouldn’t even bother doing with a netbook. I expected playback to be superb and the dv2 didn’t disappoint. It was a joy to watch: I couldn’t detect any stutter or dropped frames.”

JKOntherun.com: HPdv2 Battery Tests Illustrate Compromise of Power vs. Performance, Kevin Tofel

• “Of course, the intent and design of this device is to do just that: you can’t effectively enjoy high quality video on a netbook. And while you can watch high-def media on other notebooks at this price, they’ll generally weigh more and/or have a bigger footprint.”

Gaming Experience

TGDaily: The netbook-killing HP dv2, Rob Enderle

• “The product feels high quality and the graphics performance exceeds anything else short of a gaming box that I’ve had in this year.”

Notebooks.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Unboxed, First Impressions, Xavier Lanier

• “the Pavilion dv2 is the first notebook that’s based on AMD’s Yukon platform, which combines an Athlon Neo processor with ATI Mobility Radeon HD3410 graphics. The result is a computer that can be used to watch high-definition video and handle some 3D games.”

SlashGear: HP dv2 and Blu-ray preview, Steven Grady

• “it has been promised to me that the dv2 will game with the best of them, thanks to the ATI graphics card. Fear 2, Call of Duty: World at War and others are said to run amazingly well on this tiny device, showing the capability of a good GPU paired with a less power-intensive processor.”

Notebooks.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Game Demo: Call of Duty World at War, Xavier Lanier

• “The HP Pavilion dv2 is an ultraportable notebook that’s affordable, but has enough graphics muscle that users can enjoy video games….”

Content Creation Capabilities

PC Magazine: HP Pavilion dv2 (1030us), Cisco Cheng

• “So how did the Neo processor fare against the Atom in actual testing? The dv2, with its Neo processor, showed its muscle in video encoding tests, outperforming the Atom-powered Asus 1000HE by 20 seconds and the Mini 12 by 1 minute, 18 seconds. It was the only one that completed Photoshop CS4 tests, finishing in 1 minute 49 seconds (the Dell 12 did not complete the test and the 1000HE’s resolution was too low to even run the test.”
• “In terms of raw horsepower, the Neo clearly has an advantage over Atom.”

Notebookreview.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Review, Jerry Jackson

• “If you want to edit high-resolution images in Photoshop while you’re on vacation, the dv2 can handle it.”

ComputerShopper: HP Pavilion dv2-1030us, John Delaney

• “Compared with other netbooks, the dv2 performed brilliantly, scoring a class-leading 1,261 on our Cinebench 10 benchmark, while the Atom-based Dell Inspiron Mini 12 and Asus N10Jc came in at 718 and 774, respectively.”

Creating the New Affordable Ultrathin Category

PC World: Netbook or Ultraportable: Which is Best for the Job?, James Martin

• “DV2 blurs the lines between netbook and ultraportable more than most portable computers. That’s just $120 more than a high-end HP Mini 2140 netbook, which can’t compare to the dv2’s more robust specs.”

TechNewsWorld: The Death and Rebirth of Silicon Valley, Rob Enderle

• “By creating a hybrid between a netbook and a notebook, the DV2 falls into an interesting product gap. It isn’t as small as a netbook, it is vastly less expensive than a small notebook, it has more performance than many notebooks have (let alone netbooks) and it still costs under US$750.”

JKOntherun.com: HP dv2 Runs the CrystalMark Benchmark Gauntlet, Kevin Tofel

• “The AMD Neo platform is squarely targeted between the netbook market and traditional notebooks. You can get traditional notebook performance in a near-netbook sized package: call it a more portable package than a standard notebook, but not as anemic as a netbook.”

ZDNet: HP Pavilion dv2: Netbook or Notebook?, Jennifer Bergen

• “If Goldilocks was in the market for a laptop, she might pick the new HP Pavilion dv2. It’s not too big, and not too small. It sits between the large and expensive notebooks, and the small-screened netbooks – it’s just right.”

TGDaily: The netbook-killing HP dv2, Rob Enderle

• “As it was designed to be, this is a product that falls within the price range of netbooks and provides capabilities that exceed many $2000 products.”

Notebookreview.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Review, Jerry Jackson

• “The HP Pavilion dv2 satisfies an important need that low-cost netbooks never could.”

Tom’s Hardware: HP Launches Pavilion dv2 Notebook for $749, Jane McEntergart

• “At $749 it’s more expensive than a netbook and more in the range of an ultra portable; a great option for those who’ve realized that a netbook won’t cut it when it comes to anything more than classes, business trips, Facebook or browsing.”

The feedback wasn’t perfect, and that’s expected, as some raised points of question about the dv2’s battery life and fan.

So, all in all, a very good showing for the HP dv2 in regards to the Blu-ray experience, HD video capability, gaming experience, and content creation capabilities; all in a new category created by AMD and HP. The affordable ultrathin. And it’s nice to know that we weren’t the only ones extolling the virtues of the dv2.  The best part about it is that AMD’s ultrathin platform roadmap only begins here, and it even gets better, in the form of the “Congo” platform planned for release in 2H09.  I will see you then!

Note: Blu-ray is optional

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.

Low-priced, 720P HD pocket camcorders (palmcorders) are gaining market momentum and I believe consumers are drawn to the value proposition of low cost, high quality, portable, and convenient video capture and playback. As these devices proliferate, it leaves me contemplating how consumers will respond when they discover just how many of these notebooks or netbooks can’t effectively play back that content. Whether or not low end notebooks or netbooks were designed to do this isn’t relevant, as a recent NPD blog posting (citing new research) may suggest.

The Cameras

Let’s start with the cameras. I evaluated three different models, Flip MinoHD ($179), Kodak Zi6 ($148), and the Aiptek 1080 ($159). These cameras capture HD video at 720P resolution and 30-60 fps at around 10-12Mbps, which I consider mid-level HD video. Compare this to your typical Blu-ray movie peaking between 20 to 40 Mbps.

Compared to higher end HD camcorders priced into the $1,000s, many features have been removed like branded lenses, large magnification, optical image stabilization, night vision and auto-focus, just to name a few.  In comparing between HD pocket camcorders, the differences are found in battery life, image capture quality, external display size, memory upgradability, and physical size.

Pervasiveness

To quickly gauge pervasiveness in the U.S., I sometimes use Best Buy shelving as a proxy indicator. In my last trip to my local Best Buy, these new class of cameras had 7 slots of shelf space, which is significant. Some models that use the lowest-cost clamshell packaging are even sold at Wal-Mart and Target next to $20 JPEG picture key chains and USB flash drives. In addition, many influential bloggers are picking up on these new HD cameras, which is sometimes a good indicator of future popularity. Amazon.com is an “OK” indicator and these new HD palmcorders are relatively high in sales rank.

The Problem

As I see it, the problem is simple…. videos from these new cheap cameras won’t play well on many of the new inexpensive net/notebooks. If new research from the NPD blog is a future indicator, most consumers won’t know the capability tradeoffs between netbooks, low end notebooks and full capability (HD capable) notebooks. This could spell some real disappointment for users who may expect decent playback. In my testing on a typical netbook or real low end notebook, I get around 7 fps – close to a slide show. Think of it this way – the HD palmcorder is smaller and cheaper than any netbook. Is it logical to assume the consumer will know that the video from the palmcorder can’t play on the bigger, more expensive netbook?

Different Solution Approaches

I suggest there are a few different ways that OEMs can solve these problems. They can:

1)    Provide greater CPU power to decode the 720P HD video.  This may also increase the heat, the fan noise and lower the battery life as well. (High end dual core CPU)

2)    Provide an effective graphics solution that efficiently decodes, filters, and color corrects the image. (i.e: AMD 780G, ATI Mobility Radeon™3000, and competing solutions)

3)    Provide a special decode chip that’s expensive and bounded to specific software. (i.e: discrete accelerator)

AMD’s Approach

Our approach is simple: apply the most efficient silicon to the challenge.  In this usage scenario, the most efficient way is to decode the HD video with the GPU. Inside the GPU are special silicon blocks and special quality filters that are optimized for this function. We call this our UVD or Unified Video Decoder. It accelerates decoding of VC-1, H.264, and MPEG2 video and offloads the CPU for other tasks. UVD also applies quality filters against the video to make it look better, when using a supported player like Cyberlink 8. The result is amazing.  Very low CPU utilization, keeping the system cool and very high quality image thanks to the filters provided by ATI Avivo™ technology.

Implications

If you accept that users will increase their consumption of HD video on their notebooks, disappointment for many will follow with low, ~7 fps HD experience or apply an appropriate GPU to execute the task. Another alternative is to invest resources educating consumers on the difference in capabilities between netbooks, low end notebooks, and fully capable notebooks. With the economy and budgets the way they are, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Real-World Efficiency in Action

I want to highlight my favorite example. The new HP dv2 notebook (based on AMD’s “Yukon” platform technology for ultrathin notebooks) uses a superscalar AMD Athlon Neo ™ processor paired with ATI Radeon™ X1250 integrated graphics and optional ATI Radeon ™ HD 3410 discrete graphics to deliver not only full frame-rate HD video from these new HD palmcorders, but also higher end Blu-ray movies.

Conclusion

AMD has already anticipated the importance of HD video in multiple forms: low cost HD pocket camcorders discussed above, Blu-ray movie capabilities, and of course, some downloaded content.  And we have responded with technologies that are in-market today.  Big question remains: where does that leave netbook owners who expected their netbook to work with their even-smaller and less expensive HD palmcorder, even if that was “never the design intent”? It leaves them stranded on a non-HD island. Hopefully they have a second HD-capable PC at home, but if the NPD data is an indicator, they may not….

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/2009/01/22/the-significance-of-hd-palmcorders-to-netbook-and-notebook-design/feed/ 4 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/12/29/archos-7-the-best-portable-media-player-youve-never-heard-of/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/12/29/archos-7-the-best-portable-media-player-youve-never-heard-of/#comments Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:09:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/12/29/archos-7-review-touch.aspx

One great thing about blogs is that it is anyone and everyone’s chance to express their opinions, and I definitely have opinions. :> However, attacking one’s personal experiences is a bit like questioning free speech or democracy, but that’s exactly what makes Web 2.0 so exciting, everyone does it. So even when I get misquoted (never called it “useless”) in news stories based on what I said in a video concerning netbooks (should be hard to get wrong, I know), it generates discussion on the pros, cons, and on-the-road experiences of various netbook and mini-notebook designs. And after talking with various sources, it has already impacted future thinking, which is ultimately good for consumers, channels, OEMs, and ODM’s.

After testing seven netbooks (1) over the last five months, I now know what I want to see in future designs. This may not be the same for all 6,699,999,999 people on earth, but perhaps for a handful or two of likeminded people.

One caveat: I don’t expect a single mini-notebook design to be able to meet both my usage models:

• One inside the home focused on entertainment
• One outside the home focused on portability

My ideal at-home mini-notebook

I would like to carry my mini-notebook from room-to-room, plugging it in via HDMI to the next best available flat panel TV in the home. It would also be great to wirelessly stream 1080i video content off the web or my home server, which would benefit from HD graphics decode capability, wireless-N, and the capability to externally project at 1920×1080i resolutions. A simple, Gyration-style wireless remote should come standard to easily navigate content from 10’.

For web surfing, I would like the peace of mind that my system could support the next-generation of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight technology, so it doesn’t become a paperweight in 6 months. This means the processor and native panel screen size must be up to par. Kids’ sites like Webkinz, the “World of Warcraft for kids,” today requires at least 1024×768 (tomorrow, maybe 1280×1024) internal panel sizes, and I need at least enough CPU performance to prevent pauses in the action. Try running Hulu HD, an Apple HD trailer, or iTunes HD TV shows on a netbook and you will know what I am talking about. A 13” panel would really optimize the viewing experience when not connected to an external display.

Battery life isn’t that important at home, but a couple hours would be reasonable, along with a retractable power cord. Weight isn’t as important unless you have difficulty carrying a few pounds room to room. If that’s the case, I would recommend a lifetime membership to Gold’s Gym. Hard drive size isn’t as important because I can leverage the hard drive space on my home server, but I still want at least 160GB for applications or DRM-based content loads in case I need to take it on a family trip.

On games, While I don’t expect to play Crysis on highest quality settings, I would expect to be able to play a game like Spore and the Sims 2 at 30 fps (frames per second) and decent quality settings.

My ideal away-from-home mini-notebook

Outside the home is all about portability features and much less about entertainment. Battery life, size and weight become absolutely paramount in defining an “acceptable” bar level of performance.

Like the “at home” netbook, I still want my version to be able to effectively run today’s and at least one future generation of web applications at resolutions no less than 1024×768. I don’t think that is asking too much, is it? Also, I could live with less than a 10” display.

Eight to nine hours battery life (which we know really means five to six browsing hours) would be optimal, as I probably wouldn’t even need to bring a power cord for the day. If I don’t need to bring my power cord with me every time I go outside the house, then having a larger, possibly less expensive and faster charging power brick would be OK. This only makes sense if it saves money on the BOM cost because those tiny power adapters are cool.

As I said, if I’m going to need to lug this everywhere, weight is a huge factor and at 1.5 to 2 lbs, this seems plenty light enough. Also, the closed height cannot exceed ¾”, which would make it thicker than a Mac Air, but thinner than the Asus Eee PC Surf 4G, allowing for easy storage in a glove box or even in my bedroom drawer.

On the WAN communications side, I want to insert my SIM chip into my mini-notebook from my BlackBerry and get the same speedy, instant-on communications features I have had for years. Sure, I could tether, but if you are redesigning something, why settle for “good enough?” I don’t want to wait for 4G to do something useful or fun and could live with 3G or even, gasp, EDGE. Why should I have to pay for service twice? I know Pat, grow up, this is business… :>

Hard drive storage is a bit more important with this design because I wouldn’t have speedy access to large amounts of quick storage on my home server. Sure, I could use one of those “in-the-cloud” services, but until someone invents a more reliable synchronization tool, I will keep my documents and iTunes and Movielink content on my system, snugly fit on a 320GB hard drive. I have been keeping my “life” on MyYahoo for years, including my contacts, notes, calendar, and email, but documents and content are different.

As I would want to use this in my car, GPS and high bandwidth Bluetooth must be standard. The GPS is obvious, as I could use it as a mapping tool. I would like to use the higher bandwidth Bluetooth to gain access to my car speaker system and also pump audible navigational signals as well. Of course, if this thing serves as the nerve center for my car, I need some type of standard docking mechanism that delivers power with ease of attachment so I can take it in the house when I am home from work. I know, I am asking a lot.

So that is what I want in my mini-notebook. A bit different I know, but did you expect anything less? And if you are wondering why I didn’t call it a “netbook”, well I want to more than just the “net.”

With that, I would like to hear your thoughts on what your dream mini-notebook would look like.

1) Asus Eee PC 4G, Asus Eee PC 900, MSI U100, Dell Inspiron 910, HP 2133, Geode reference design, Asus Eee PC 1000H.

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/2008/11/03/my-perfect-mini-notebook/feed/ 6 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/10/27/unlocking-some-secrets-of-the-android-g1-video-capabilities/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/10/27/unlocking-some-secrets-of-the-android-g1-video-capabilities/#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/10/27/unlock-some-secret-of-the-android-g1-video-encode-decode.aspx

In my last blog, I covered my first experiences with T-Mobile’s G1 Android-based phone. I liked it, but could learn to love it if the promise of open-source software comes true. One of the drawbacks I saw on Day 1 was the lack of a video player to playback videos on the phone, and I would like to provide an update to that. I will provide the good news, the bad news, and then provide some suggestions on how to improve the situation.

The Good News

The good news is that on Day 2, one day after launch, a video player became available on Android Market, right off the phone. Android Market says “Video Player 1.0” comes from a chap named “Jeff Hamilton”, and states that, the “File should be MPEG4 or 3GPP with H.264 or H.263 video and MP3, AAC, or AMR audio. Videos need to be 480×352 or smaller to play back properly.” This is a good start, but not the whole equation.

The Bad News

The bad news is that if anyone has played around moving video onto mobile devices, there are a lot more variables you need to know to make the video play well. For example, video bit rate, profiles (ie baseline, simple), and frames per second are important. For the audio inside the video file, sample frequency, bit rate, and channels are key.

The Apple iPhone provides all this data. As an example, data from the iPhone’s technical specifications page clearly states:

“Video formats supported: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats .”

While to many, this sounds like gibberish, whoever wants to put their own content (not purchased from iTunes, like family videos) it gives you enough to work from.

The Android G1 didn’t have any of these detailed support statements, which provided a medium-sized challenge. :>

Some Suggestions

After some hunting on the internet and about 12 hours of my own testing this weekend, I found some interim solutions that I hope can help.

The first thing you need is a program out there that can convert video from one specification to another specification. For example, you want to take video from your digital camcorder and put it on your Android G1, you must change the format of the file and key specifications (listed above) inside the file. Software packages come in a wide range from consumer, to prosumer, and to professional versions, priced from free to $600, and everything in-between. I use Movavi Video Converter, Nero 8 Recoder/Vision, Pinnacle Studio, and sometimes Sony Vegas for tasks like this, but it’s your choice.

So below, please find what worked for me:

· Apple nano-optimized setting: If you have any videos already in iPod nano-optimized format, most of mine worked OK, but the quality wasn’t as good because the nano has a smaller 320×240 screen.

· IPod generic video down-scaled settings: Take that profile and reduce some of the quality settings: 426×240 pixels, progressive, MPEG4 L1, 350-600 Kbps, 30fps, AAC audio, 48 KHz.

· IPod Generation 5 video down-scaled settings: 426×240 pixels, progressive, MPEG4 L1, 300-900 kbps, 30fps, AAC audio 48 kHz.

· MPEG 4 home-made brew: .mp4 format, 480×320 pixels, MPEG 4 Simple profile, 384 kbps, 25 fps, AAC audio, 22050 sample frequency, 64 kbps bit rate.

· H.264 home-made brew: .mp4 format, 480×320 pixels, H.264 Baseline, 384 kbps, 25 fps, AAC audio, 22050 sample frequency, 64 kbps bit rate.

So there we have it, video on your Android G1. One thing I failed to mention here is that most of this video recoding requires a heavy-duty processor. Of all the packages I tried, all but one heavily taxed all four cores of my AMD Phenom ™ X4 9950 processor, some up to 100%. So don’t skimp on CPU performance, it matters on video encoding. Having moved from a dual core to quad core CPU configuration was one of the best upgrades I made at home.

I hope this is helpful and I would love to hear about your suggestions.

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.

Over the last 6 months, I have heard a lot of industry insiders vehemently defending the cheap mini notebook (aka netbook) as a great device to travel with given its cost, size weight and applicability to task. I don’t have anything against these new cheap mini notebooks, but I think it is VERY important that consumers are educated to their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and all I see talked about are the strengths, a disservice to consumers in my opinion. I have used five of the cheap mini-notebooks over the last 6 months and yes, there are strengths and more weaknesses compared to an inexpensive full-sized notebook at the same price. I had written a lot in previous blogs on my personal interaction with these inside the home, so I decided to put it to the test outside the home, a contrast to what I had done and written about in a previous blog.

I needed to travel to Florida last week to look for a new show horse for my wife. She is a “hunter/jumper” and competes at the local, state, and national level along with my two young girls. Buying a horse is a very personal activity, and you have very little time to ride and test many horses. It is important to videotape, take still images and be able to share the videos and pictures with the other horse professionals back home in Texas over on-line services like YouTube and Flickr.

I technologically armed myself with the following:

• Aiptek HD video camera ($179) for capturing 720P and 1080P high definition video to view high quality off-line videos
• FlipVideo camera ($159) for capturing lower-resolution, easy to upload to YouTube and will also convert to the new “watch in high quality mode”
• Kodak V1253 ($175) digital camera to capture high quality 12MP 16:9 stills
• MSI Wind U100 ($579) mini-notebook with no mods
• AT&T 3G USBConnect 881 ($149) modem to connect to the internet remotely

The daily regimen consisted of driving a half hour to the horse barn and trying out a bunch of horses by riding them, videotaping and photographing them while taking notes on the pros and cons. At about mid-day, we would load all the content onto the MSI Wind to view and/or upload the content while still at the horse barn. We would do this in the car and on the way home. That’s when some of the challenges started hitting.

1) Extremely Short Battery Life
I only would get 1.5 hours battery life per charge so I was either not able to load the content in the car, view the content I had loaded in the car or had to wait until I reached the hotel to load, view and upload. I suppose I could have bought another $25-50 car adapter, but hey, these are supposed to be cheap mini notebooks, not the expensive, full featured ones, right? Additionally, because I preferred not to upload 15 separate files and preferred one, I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together all the SD (standard-def) Flip videos, which of course wouldn’t last an entire charge and could only be done back at the hotel. Even basic usages like surfing the web at the pool was useless given the low battery life. By the time you would get to the pool, you might get an hour to read the news, get caught up on current events, etc. After that hour, its right back up to the hotel room to plug the unit back in. Forget it, easier to use the BlackBerry.

2) Choppy, Unplayable 720P Video Playback
I like slide shows, but not when myself, our trainer, and I are trying to evaluate a horses timing, skill, personality and potential problems with health and price. I estimate that the 720p video playback on the Wind was operating at 15 frames per second, a slide show. This was MOV files read from VLC player and of course QuickTime. Completely useless 720P video playback with the cheap mini-notebook. I didn’t even kid myself into thinking it was a good idea to stitch the HD files together. Encode would have been painful.

3) Choppy NBCOlympics.com Internet Video and Compromised UI
During the downtime, we wanted to watch some of the events on NBCOlympics.com, you know, with the Microsoft SilverLight experience… I then discovered a new challenge with the netbook’s 1024×600 screen resolution and maybe even with the Silverlight performance on these new notebooks. This may seem like a nit, but a couple big issues surfaced. When I clicked on the left icon “Olympic Sports” many sports icons were cut off at the top. Not real useful or intuitive and not a big deal to everyone, but new netbook and new website, it should work.

On the “Most Watched” icon on the left rail, once clicked, you cannot read the white text at the top of the screen. Annoying.

The worst part was the “As Seen on TV”, where if clicked, you get a bunch of cool videos selected by day. The big problem was that the days were covered by the browsers at the top. See that yellow half moon at the top right? That’s supposed to be a day. You can theoretically pick previous days if you could actually see them……… but you can’t.

I can’t blame the browser, I need to blame the display and controller for not being able to display those vital 168 (768-600) missing pixels. When I could actually get the videos to play, they were hit and miss, most being choppy and pixilated, some very good. The CPU varied between 75-100% depending on the content.

Hopefully others can learn from my latest science experiment….. when in doubt in my opinion, if you want to do ANYTHING other than surfing basic, light websites AT HOME without the bells and whistles, go for the full-size notebook, not one of these cheap mini-notebooks. With any form of decent video playback or any video recoding, even with Microsoft , I wouldn’t, couldn’t recommend these cheap mini-notebooks in their current state and configuration.

I would love to hear your feedback on this or of your experiences have been any different.

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.

You may have seen recent blogs from me on the topic of social networks and their growth. I even subjected my Computex blogs to these media. Why do we spend time with this stuff – we don’t sell software! In the end, it’s because trends in our industry are important for AMD, and personally satisfying to me to stay up to date on these. The creative minds in our industry continue to find new ways to use technology and it’s a challenge just saying current. But what’s equally surprising is the speed that the “under 30” crowd adopts these new media/social networks. This new social model is one of the emerging Internet use scenarios that has come to be known as Web 2.0.

I find a great deal of satisfaction in this fast growing market especially in light of some recent announcements that AMD made regarding the AMD Opteron processor’s web performance. AMD recently announced that Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2356 and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8356 now hold the top x86 web performance records for both 2P and 4P servers, as measured by the SPECweb®2005 benchmark. This means that the AMD-based server architecture is able to process and manage more data over a period of time than competing solutions and therefore keep the media rich social networks operating at ever faster speeds. As I was writing this blog, I read a related blog from Nigel Dessau on the subject of workloads and balancing loads. We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort to enable and optimize these new networks but we did not stop there. I blogged recently on 2^nd generation notebooks and highlighted the new features that we have enabled through our ATI acquisition including our UVD (universal video decoder) which is optimized to consume rich media such as web video.

AMD continues to focus on solutions. Just to be clear, what this means to us is power and performance optimized silicon, platforms optimized with partners and customers to deliver real benefits. These benefits are provided on the server side as a web backbone and on the notebook and desktop as power/performance optimized clients. So AMD is again leading and enabling major transitions in the industry by leveraging our unique capabilities to create, process, serve up and consume this new-fangled thing called Web 2.0.

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 had the pleasure of watching the graphics team as they were developing it. What I saw was an incredible desire and passion to do what was right for the end user as it related to games and video and to do what was right for the customer, the OEMs and the AIB (Add-In-Board) partners. The intensity, drive and sheer will was amazing to watch. And, at the same time, a humble nature…… You just knew that something amazing was going to come out.

The other factor in “how” is history….. a long history of incredible feats in 3D graphics and video technologies. While you never want to rest on history, it is a factor or variable in repeating future success. I had worked with ATI Technologies since 1995 when I ran a consumer desktop product line at Compaq Computer during the “glory days.” I worked with guys like Phil Eisler and K.Y. Ho, ATI’s founder. I picked what I considered the “top 10” (O.K. 13, no discipline) feats I am talking about:

1987 – First graphics accelerator cards released (EGA Wonder & VGA Wonder)

1991 – First Windows accelerator released (Mach8)

1996 – First 3D graphics accelerator chip released (3D Rage)

1997 – First AGP products released and first graphics chip with motion compensation acceleration for DVD playback released (Rage Pro, Rage II+ DVD)

1999 – First AGP 4X products released from ATI

1999 – World’s first dual GPU card (Rage Fury Maxx)

2001 – First GPU supporting DirectX 8.1 programmable shader technology released (Radeon 8500)

2002 – First DirectX 9 GPU with 2x the performance of any existing product released (Radeon 9700 Pro)

2003 – First integrated graphics chipset with programmable shader support released (Radeon 9100 IGP)

2004 – First gaming GPU optimized for HD resolutions released (Radeon X800)

2005- ATI GPU is featured in Microsoft Xbox 360 with first unified shader

2006 – World’s first GPU accelerated physics demo with effects and particle physics

2007 – AMD breaks the teraFLOP performance barrier and first with DX 10.1 and 55nm (ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2)

Again, historical accomplishments are a factor of future success, but as we all know in high-tech, you better not rest on it or you will get your “lunch eaten.” This attitude was best exemplified by an answer to my question to one of the graphics executives, “what’s it like to be on top?” The answer was basically, “we only won one round in a 15 round fight and we aren’t even looking back for a second. It’s off to the next product.” Man, I love that….. anyone who has ever seen the movie “Rudy” has to love that……anyone who has an ounce of passion has to love that.

So there we have it….. having the “world’s fastest graphics card” means something for a day then it’s off to the next product. Maybe history does matter though, and in my opinion, when you hear a large CPU manufacturer talk about incredible claims in graphics and video technologies sometime in 2009 or 2010, you may want to ask them for their “Top 10” graphics and video list as well.

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/2008/08/14/how-on-earth-did-you-guys-deliver-the-worlds-fastest-graphics-card/feed/ 9 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/07/21/get-out-your-umbrella-it%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9creigning%e2%80%9d-pumas-and-%e2%80%9craining%e2%80%9d-dogs/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/07/21/get-out-your-umbrella-it%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9creigning%e2%80%9d-pumas-and-%e2%80%9craining%e2%80%9d-dogs/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:26:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/07/21/get-out-your-umbrella-it’s-“reigning”-pumas-and-“raining”-dogs.aspx

In my last blog, I talked about some top things to look for in a latest “2nd generation” notebook. Interestingly, no one debated my analysis of the situation. So I will take your silence as agreement with my position! On the other hand, I did get a lot of questions about availability of notebooks built on AMD’s next generation platform codenamed “Puma”, which we launched on June 4. There’s some real excitement about this ground-breaking platform, and so I took a little trip around my neighborhood of Austin, Texas to see what is already available at the local technology retailer. And remember, retail is a good test of availability, because it has the longest distribution chain.

Before I jump into the pics and SKUs, let me give a little background on the “back-to-school” selling season, which varies a bit by region. It’s been about 5 years since I ran the AMD channels group, so I needed a refresh on the BTS delivery dates. I spoke with some of my AMD biz-dev buddies and this is what they told me:

• In China and Taiwan, the “back-to-school” summer selling season starts the first week of June.
• The North America “back-to-school” season starts the last week of June or the first week of July. It starts when the ads start, like Thanksgiving right after Halloween :>.
• In Europe, the “back-to-school” season varies wildly, starting in July in the Nordics and progressively later as you move southward. In some countries, the new models don’t hit until late August or early September. I will attribute that to awesome vacations. : >

The key point here is that the “back-to-school” seasons vary by region and that “Puma” nailed them all. As this article indicates, our competitor was not quite as timely with some of its BTS deliveries…

I live in North Austin, TX, USA and it is literally the “land of retail.” I don’t live here to be or feel cool, I live here because it is a great place to bring up a family. To provide the proper care and feeding to the inhabitants, there are retail stores everywhere. So this weekend, I went on my own “Puma hunt” to really see what was going on. As I noted above, retail has the longest distribution chain and therefore is a good meter of availability. If you can get it at retail, then you can likely get it most anywhere else, like direct or on the web.

Within a few miles from my house, here is what I found. Now remember that these are the posted sticker prices I observed on actual notebooks available in Austin, Texas last weekend – taxes and additional options like extended warranties are not included. And as the retailers themselves point out, these notebooks can be subject to availability and change without notice. But they do tell a compelling story of “Puma” availability:

Best Buy

HP Pavillion TX2525NR at $1,049 a 12.1″ display tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 RM-70 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. As a tablet, you can use it as a standard notebook or flip the screen around and use it as a tablet with pen input. It also came with a remote to control your media from afar, bluetooth and a fingerprint reader. Cool!

HP Pavillion DV5-1004NR at $899 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Comes with 15.4″ display, HDMI output, an eSATA/USB combo port, webcam, 4GB RAM, cool new design (the trackpad looks like a mirror) and Microsoft Vista 64. The kitchen sink.:>

Toshiba Satellite M305D-S4830 at $849 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor ZM-80 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with 14.1″ display, 4GB RAM, 1394 port, Microsoft Vista 64, and webcam.

Toshiba U405-S2852 at $749 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Also comes with a 13.3″ display, 1394 port, and webcam.

Circuit City

HP Pavillion TX2510US at $1,049 a tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Comes with 12.1″ display and similar to the TX2525NR above.

Toshiba Satellite L305D-S5881 at $729 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 15.4″ display and webcam.

Fry’s

HP Pavillion TX2510US at $999 a 12.1″ display tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Similar to the TX2525NR above.

HP Pavillion DV5-1002US at $949 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Also comes with Microsoft Vista 64, 4GB RAM and a massive 320GB hard drive.

Toshiba Satellite M305D-S4828 at $849 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor ZM-80 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 14.1″ display and webcam.

Toshiba Satellite A305-S6849 at $749 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 15.4″ display and cool new design.

Toshiba Satellite U405-S2846 at $699 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 13.3″ display and cool new design.

Toshiba Satellite L305-S5873 at $649 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with 15.4″ display.

No, these are not typos. Twelve notebooks built on AMD’s next generation “Puma” platform. All available within a few miles from my house and in the longest leadtime channel, retail. That’s not to mention what is available over the web, if that’s the way you like to shop. And these aren’t the end of the SKUs, either. I expect to see more emerge every month.

So it really is “reigning” Pumas! But wait – I also said it was “raining” dogs. By that I mean that during my visits this weekend I saw a lot of “dog” systems out there as well. I won’t say which ones specifically, but to me a system is a “dog” if it has a difficult time playing HD video and games, come chock full of “generic” graphics and “generic” wireless and is poor value for your hard earned dollars. Basically, a notebook which is the opposite of those described in my last blog (and of course the opposite of the “Puma” notebooks listed above).

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/2008/07/21/get-out-your-umbrella-it%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9creigning%e2%80%9d-pumas-and-%e2%80%9craining%e2%80%9d-dogs/feed/ 12 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/07/11/top-capabilities-to-look-for-in-a-2nd-generation-notebook/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/07/11/top-capabilities-to-look-for-in-a-2nd-generation-notebook/#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:49:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/07/11/top-capabilities-to-look-for-in-a-2nd-generation-notebook.aspx

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 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/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 08:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/13/Thirty-days-with-a-small-amp-inexpensive-sub-notebook-the-minuses.aspx

In my last blog I wrote about my experiences with a $499 Asus Eee PC 8G mini-note and a $499 HP Compaq Presario F756NR full-note and showed some of the strengths the mini-note has versus the full-note at the same price.

Those mini-note advantages come at a fairly major expense, which I will highlight in terms of few very basic usage areas:

• Basic web: The mini-note’s 7” screen size at 800×480 resolution scores high on portability, but unfortunately for basic web surfing, you don’t get a full web page and are forced to scroll to the “right” and “down” to see the relevant web content in most cases. Also, I encountered performance problems when I hit pages that were heavy with Flash, like Disney DXD, a big issue for my household. The full-note’s Flash web pages loaded much faster and the web video appeared a lot clearer. The Presario’s 15.4” wide-screen display at 1280×800 resolution fully displayed any web page I came across, no matter how wide. For comparison, I took some pictures of some popular web sites so you could get an idea of just how much more you can see on the full-note.

FoxNews.com

Disney.com

• Community web: Because many MySpace and FaceBook pages are so Flash-heavy, I didn’t have a good experience with the mini-note on “spaces” that were heavy with embedded videos. In my opinion, videos and responsiveness were sluggish when compared to the Presario.
• Media storage: With a “PC”, most users would expect to be able to save most of their photos, music, and videos. The Presario had approximately 100GB free while the mini-note had around 6GB free, a 16X difference. So what can one store with the additional 94 GB (96,256 MB)? This could store around 25 iTunes movies, 10,000 pictures, and 9,800 songs. (1)
• Basic Music: The Presario has a DVD-RW drive, which means you can rip and burn music CDs. The mini-note doesn’t have an optical drive. If you are an iTunes fan, you are out of luck with the mini-note. Because the mini-note runs Linux, it doesn’t run iTunes or its content-protected music you may have purchased from Apple. If you really wanted, you could buy Windows XP and an external USB DVD-ROM and load it onto the mini-note, but if you did, I would recommend buying more RAM and solid state storage. The Presario with Windows Vista obviously runs iTunes and Windows Media Player and plays it through integrated Altec Lansing speakers.
• Basic movies: Because the Presario has a DVD drive, it could obviously play DVD movies. If you are an iTunes fan, you can also use their download service and watch and store movies. Unfortunately, the mini-note can do neither. I could get some videos on a memory stick and get them to play, but wouldn’t expect a “mainstream” user to be able to figure that out.
• Basic photos: There were major storage challenges as I outlined above for the mini-note. I could basically view photos on both machines but it was much easier to edit on the Presario, like basic red-eye and brightness changes. If you want to look at pictures on a big and bright screen, the Presario wins, if you want to view pictures in an extremely cramped space on a smaller screen, the mini-note wins.
• Basic games: Both notebooks come with basic games like Solitaire, so would be fine for some of the most basic game players. The close comparison ends there. With the mini-note, I experienced jerkiness with kids Flash-based games available on sites like Nickjr.com, Lego.com, and Disney.com. The Presario rolled through the entire sites well. Moving up the gaming ladder, only the Presario can play mainstream Windows-based games like The Sims 2 because it has Windows and a DVD drive to load it.
• Home productivity: If you are comfortable doing your finances through web sites like Turbotax.com, the mini-note is fine. If you want to load Windows-based applications like Quicken and need a wide screen to be productive with multi-column spreadsheets, the Presario is probably better for you. Both mini-notes came with a productivity suite, the mini-note offering OpenOffice, the Presario providing Microsoft Works and a 60 day trial of Microsoft Office Student Edition. Finally, the full-sized Presario keyboard was much more comfortable than the mini-note’s mini-keyboard when writing anything over a page long.

As you can see, users have a lot to think about today when deciding how to spend their $499 on a mini-notebook like the Asus Eee PC 8G or on a full-sized notebook like the HP Compaq Presario F756NR. I believe the mini-note and full-note will both increase in functionality over time and the content will get richer, so this challenge won’t be going away anytime soon. Adding WWAN, a more powerful CPU, better graphics, and better battery life to the mini-note will make it much more compelling choice in the future, but for now the full-sized notebook sure is compelling. New models came out yesterday with larger screens and higher prices and I have a new one on order to kick the tires.

Let me know what you think.

(1) Assumptions: 2 MB per photo, 2.5 MB per song, 2 GB per iTunes movie..

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/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/feed/ 18 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 13:21:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform.aspx

In my last blog I talked about the importance of a balanced platform and what I believe consumers are doing with and aspiring to do with their systems. For this blog, I would like to discuss the required type of balance between the CPU and GPU required for some of the key usage models described below. I know I’m engaging in generalizations here, but the complete variation and dependency list is so large it could fill the Library of Congress. So please don’t hammer me for the brevity.

• Content encoding and creation: While years back the exclusive domain of the enthusiasts, video, audio and photo encoding have been embraced by the mainstream. They just may not know it yet. Both iTunes and Windows Media Player offer video, audio, and photo re-encoding. This is currently 100% the domain of the CPU. While somewhat codec dependent, the better the CPU (e.g. quad core AMD Phenom™ X4), the better the encoding experience. I believe this will change in the future as the software stacks improve on the GPU to enable the parallelization of these tasks, particularly on the video encode.
• Gaming: If you start with a high performance CPU like the Phenom X4, then many titles become more GPU-limited than CPU-limited. This means that they are aching for more graphics performance from the GPU (e.g. ATI Radeon™ HD 3870). The added GPU horsepower (which can be further optimized through the use of our proprietary ATI Hybrid Graphics) allows the user to play at improved frame rates, at higher resolutions, and with the eye candy turned on, ultimately translating into a more enjoyable gaming experience. (1) Try playing a decent game with a higher end CPU and the integrated graphics of our major competitor. Pain is the only thing that comes to my mind. This is well illustrated by an Arstechnica review here. See it in action in a video here. The only major relevant exception on the GPU and CPU rule I can think of are for Flash-based web games on sites like NickJr.com, Lego.com, and Disney.com. And these are scalable with the CPU, not the GPU.
• High-def video playback: In my opinion, the most important thing to have is a graphics card or graphics chipset with special circuitry specially designed to decode (playback) and enhance the quality of high-def video like BluRay movies. Examples of this are the ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series graphics cards and the AMD 780 chipset, which both take advantage of AMD’s proprietary Unified Video Decoder technology. These free the CPU to do other tasks while playing back HD video. Generally, the better the graphics card family, the higher the 1080P BluRay visual quality as measured by third party tools such as Silicon Optix’s HQV Benchmark. While the CPU can certainly decode high-def video, a more efficient way to do it is with the GPU. In a recent Arstechnica review here, it shows how an AMD GPU + CPU system walloped our competitor’s platform by a 2:1 ratio when playing a BluRay movie. Click on the video here to see this is action.
• Multi-tasking: Generally, scaling is based primarily on the software performance of the CPU like the Phenom X4. The more things you are running in the foreground or background simultaneously, the more CPU horsepower you will need. This is true for the single user model and gets even more complex for a family that shares a PC, even if the family members physically use it at different times. For example, my home CPU gets hammered when multiple family members remain logged in at the same time, and I find myself competing with Disney “ToonTown” cycles left on in another session. Take that even further when that same PC is being used as your home server to serve up content to all the other PCs or devices in the house. The big exception to this, of course, is if you are blending GPU-limited apps with CPU-limited apps, then it becomes a toss-up. For example, you need a solid CPU and GPU if you would want to watch a BluRay movie the same time you are doing something else in the background, such as content encoding. Same thing goes for game multitasking.
• Social networking: Sites like MySpace and FaceBook have really become content showpieces for personal video, photos, and music. These sites are based on Flash, so they scale with CPU performance. As addressed in content creation above, this is the domain of the CPU.
• Productivity: Like you, I sometimes have gotten my jollies debating “how fast can someone speed up word processing”, but in my opinion, productivity is still ripe for CPU and GPU enhancements. Presentations are turning into multimedia extravaganzas. I am a marketing guy, so I know. Just try and do a pitch without video, pictures, video, 3D text blocks, and 3D rendered backgrounds. A real snoozer, particularly in our fast-paced “give it to me now” society. Finally, it’s hard not to discuss multitasking when you are doing work. How many windows and programs do you have open right now? Are you using Windows Vista with Flip3D and all the GPU rendering tricks enabled? Do you have two or more monitors? Enough said. CPU and GPU both matter here.

I hope I have made the case that a balanced configuration with the right amount of CPU and GPU processing are critical to meet the needs of what users are doing or want to do in the near future. I think I have also shown the complexity as well, particularly for an end user to really know what they need. It’s true that in the majority of cases, end users get their PCs from AMD’s OEM’s and channel partners. I believe that AMD’s job is to better educate and train these OEM and channel partners so that they have the necessary insight to create balanced platforms, which can be configured for specific end user requirements. I will discuss a few of the ways we are doing this in future blogs.

1) http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQ3MCwzLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA

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/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform/feed/ 1 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/04/25/why-care-about-a-balanced-pc-configuration/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/04/25/why-care-about-a-balanced-pc-configuration/#comments Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/04/25/why-care-about-a-balanced-pc-configuration.aspx

There has been an incredible amount of discussion in the high-tech community talking about “balanced platforms” or “optimized systems”. The conversation or press coverage has interestingly enough been more about which component is more relevant versus the need for a balanced platform. Statements or misquotes like “the CPU is dead”, the “GPU is not needed anymore”, or “no one needs 4 CPU cores” have been thrown around loosely in the past few weeks.

In my opinion, this is the wrong conversation to be having.

The right conversation is how the industry can optimize, deliver, and educate on the right balance of CPU, GPU and chipset to effectively and efficiently address the workloads or applications about which the customer cares most. In this and future blogs, I will frame and highlight a few of the challenges and offer some solutions to help address the issue.

It all starts with what consumers want to do or are actually doing with their PCs. Let’s look at some research from AMD and other sources, which I like to joke is sometimes like “grasping at the obvious”, because when you stand back, it looks so evident.

• Digital media goes mainstream. Consumer client usage model growth is moving toward the heavy consumption, editing and sharing of digital media (1). That’s a broad statement, but the fact that this is now “mainstream” is incredible. The digital media wave started with music, moved to digital photos and now it is video. The popularity really makes sense given that digital media is also cutting horizontally across communities like MySpace and Facebook. My friend’s and family’s “spaces” are proudly adorned with their pictures, videos, and music which are entertaining (although some of their home-grown content can be a bit “scary” at times).
• PC gaming goes mainstream. Sure, I have heard the conjecture that PC gaming is dead. The facts paint a very different picture. An employee of one of our biggest technology partners has informally told me that up to 83% of all Windows users play PC games. Recent research from NPD says that 72% of the entire U.S. population played games in 2007 and 90% of those who played online in 2007 reported using a PC to do so. NPD also described the PC as “the driving force in online gaming.” One fun fact that really exemplifies the casual gaming phenomenon is the popular title “The Sims.” This game franchise has sold over 100M copies, so by their calculations, this means that one out of seven homes in Europe and one out of three homes in America are likely have this PC game title. (2). It’s not time to call my co-workers who get up at 6A.M. every Saturday and tell them to stop playing COV/COH together.
• Multitasking matters. Mainstream consumers understand the whole concept of doing many things at the same time and how it applies to their PC purchases (1). Enthusiasts I have talked with have embraced what we like to call megatasking or extreme multitasking, defined as running multiple, multi-threaded apps simultaneously.
• Other stuff is peripheral. Consumers are still doing things like doing word processing, but they believe every PC can do this well (1). Of course.

I believe that effectively and efficiently delivering on these usage models requires the right balance of CPU, GPU and chipset. Some of the use cases above require a heavy duty CPU, some require a heavy duty GPU, some require a heavy duty chipset and some require all three. The industry needs to figure it out. While AMD can’t solve it independently, we plan to shine a big light on the issue, work with others and do our own part in the industry to help solve the problem.

In my next blog, I will be double-clicking on a few key usage models and generalize on the required balances of CPU and GPU. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

(1) Proprietary AMD Research 2005, 2007.

(2) Electronic Arts Press Release: http://info.ea.com/news/pr/pr1052.pdf

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.

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