Sucking From The Fire Hose

Las Vegas, Nevada. Sometime way past my bedtime

MONDAY'S COMDEX events started off with nVIDIA's product launch of the GeFORCE FX. The hot breakfast was at 8 AM, and the brainwashing started at 8:30 AM, lasting a rather painless two hours as nVIDIA president Jen-Hsun Huang lead a parade of nVIDIA employees and partners, including Electronic Arts and Sony Online.

No matter how you slice it, the GeForce FX is one big balls piece of hardware running at 500 MHz and with 125 million transistors done with copper.

Did I mention the 1GB worth of DDR2 RAM? About the only thing that set off alarm bells in my head is the cooling system on the board, a mixture of both active (fan) cooling and heat pipes. Air is sucked in from outside of the machine and blown across the processor. FX comes with a property called "Silent Running" -- if you don't need high-level 3-D graphics processing while plodding through a spreadsheet, the board (and the noise from the active cooling system) shuts down. Nobody talked about how much noise the board makes when in operation. Shipping in January '03, the price tag hasn't been set on this pup.

A dash across town and a couple of phone calls put me at Lunch@Piero's, an "independent, exclusive media luncheon and product showcase." Whatever. The food was good and VIA Technologies was showing off their VIA EPIA M-series mainboard used in several Media Center-esque PC designs.

The M-series is a square board with gobs of connectors, roughly the size of a Shuttle, I'd guess. One of the notational designs put a M-series board, power supply, and fan into a 1 litre rugged plastic jug. While Cobalt Networks started the trend of the Cube form factor, both VIA and Shuttle are going to pound it into the heads of OEM manufacturers.

At 1 PM, noted Cyber Villain Kevin Mitnick drew a large crowd of people in his interview with ZD-Net as he entertained the audience with social engineering tales. Ironically, Mitnick appeared in the LVCC nearly a decade after being thrown out same location at the DECUS trade show in the early '90s. (well, ok, they revoked his conference access, same difference). Mitnick said he is working on raising the money to shoot a security awareness training film.

Another dash in the car put me at the Hard Rock Hotel at 3 PM and meeting with the U.S. Robotics folks. USR is bullish on wireless and DSL boxes into the SOHO/consumer market, but they freely admit they have an uphill battle in the States. Overseas, both in Europe and South America, USR products are selling much better. They also are still trying to figure out a way to drive v.92 modem deployment.

Due to some last minute schedule changes and the royal pain of traveling between sites, I missed one reception over at the Four Seasons Hotel. A lot of my press brethren have complained about being dragged off the show floor for secret handshakes and product briefings in private company suites. I have to join their complaints. Vendors need to buy some real estate back near the LVCC rather than asking people to run all over town in exchange for a brownie and a briefing.

Tomorrow/today (Tuesday) is going to be ugly, with back-to-back meetings from 9:30 AM until the end of the day. I hope someone has a free foot massage service available as a perk, because I'll need it. µ