INQUIRER awards for 2001

EASY COME, EASY GO and another year has passed. The INQUIRER was born, the recession in IT was very bad, Intel "bought" Alpha, HP "bought" Compaq, September 11 changed the world, and Palomino and Nforce finally hit the market as well as the i845B.

Since we found ourselves in the nasty position of making our own place on the web, building new contacts and rebuilding both new and old, I decided to give some rewards and awards for com moves, gestures and of course products that companies which we find interesting introduced during the course of 2001.

This will be based on many things that we learned in the past year and it will be quite suggestive as well so we don't mind in the slightest if you disagree with us. You know how to get hold of me (us).

The awards are put together by the INQUIRER team, which is Fuad Abazovic, Paul Hales, Andrew Thomas and Mike Magee. The decision of the judges is final.

CPU of the Year
The year in the CPU market will remain forever known as the battle between the Pentium 4 versus Athlon. Both companies had a tough year since the competition wasn't dozing off. There has been more than one change in roadmaps, some CPUs were never even born and introduced and some were postponed in some other quarters.

Intel introduced the P4 at 2000 MHz and achieved the next milestone before AMD. This time, Intel was faster but AMD decided to play another card. The Palomino core of AMD's new chip found itself bedangled with SSE and a PR rating to boot.

At this bare moment AMD Palomino or Athlon XP 1900+ remains the fastest processor on the market which has support for MMX, 3Dnow and SSE multimedia instructions. The price of this product is really low and affordable that gives one more plus to this processor. Northwood may change this situation but that will occur... next year.

Therefore AMD wins The INQUIRER prize of fastest processor on earth.

Memory
This year was the year of the Dramurai. There were a lot of problems with production and survival in this market but one kind of memory will remain known as the memory of year 2001.

The "Best Memory Prize" goes to DDR 266 or PC2100 memory and all companies that make modules based on these chips. Congratulations O Ye Dramurai!

Marchitecture
Even though there are some possible problems with it [read PLL problems, Ed] we really liked one upcoming technology. The QBM alliance succeeded in getting together all chipset manufacturers and to make some new direction apart from the already well known DDR roadmaps.

Kentron Technologies worked hard on Quad Band Memory that will be introduced sometime in second part of 2002 but will be the most interesting technology of 2001.

Therefore we give Kentron technologies The INQUIRER prize of "Most Interesting Technology", for its QBM marchitecture.

Graphic Cards
My favourite subject will be separated into a few groups, the fastest card, the most feature rich card and the best mainstream card.

When we talk about speed, the situation hasn't really changed for quite a while. ATi is really close to Nvidia, Geforce 3 TI 500 still remains fastest card on the face of the earth - with the exception of 3Dmark 2001.

Therefore we give Nvidia The INQUIRER prize of "Fastest Graphic Card on Earth" for its Geforce 3 TI 500 cards.

With features, the situation is a bit different. ATi introduced its Radeon 8500 which has the most advanced features right now. With the TruForm Pixel shader 1.4, vertex shader, hydravision support will be remembered as the most advanced card so far. The card is not the fastest one but it is very competitive to Geforce 3 TI 500.

Therefore we give ATI this INQUIRER prize - most feature rich card on earth for the Radeon 8500 cards.

In the mainstream market we would like to honour one card in particular. It is called the Kyro 2 and offers good performance at competitive prices. The tile based rendering is really nice marchitecture and we like the company's attitude and marketing.

Therefore we award Imagination Technologies The INQUIRER prize of "Best Mainstream Card on Earth" for its Kyro 2 cards.

Graphics Marchitecture
We thought a bit about this and we decided to split this prize into three equal parts.

The first category is pixel and vertex shading and chip programmability -- likely to change the way games look in 2002.

The second marchitecture we would like to mention is the tile based rendering approach that could make relatively slow clocked Kyro 2 into really competitive cards. The technology is simple - do not draw the overdraws.

The third technology is certainly higher order surface implementations through N patches. This technology can make games look a bit better that on competitive cards. It's kind of like Truform, which will probably give you a clue.

Chipsets for P4 and Athlon
This segment will be presented through several categories. First we would like to talk about the Pentium 4 chipset - a hot topic in this year.

Bravest marketing move
No dilemmas here. This prize goes to Via Technologies and its non licensed P4X266 chipset that was presented back at Computex. Even without Intel's blessing [curse? Ed} Via introduced and had quite a success with this chipset.

Therefore we give Via The INQUIRER prize for the Bravest Chipset and Marketing Decision for its P4X266 and P4X266A chipsets.

The Biggest Comeback
You know that we reported more than once about little SiS. Even though we had a tough time with the Athlon chipset its P4 645 was more than accepted by the market. This is the first DDR 333 chipset for Intel's Pentium 4 and it remains the fastest of the year.

Therefore we give SIS The INQUIRER prize of fastest P4 chipset for its SIS 645 chipset

The Best Integrated Solution (Intel)
Via introduced its P4M266 sometimes in Q4 this year and since at this present time there are no affordable boards with any other solution than this chipset and the 650 from SiS will not have AGP we have a clear situation.

Therefore we award Via The INQUIRER prize of Best Integrated Chipset for its P4M266 chipset

When we talk about Athlon chipsets, the situation is a bit different.

This Autumn, the fastest chipset was the KT266A that speeded up its slower brother KT266. This gave Via a performance advantage under the newcomer Nforce which is just a bit slower that KT266A. The SiS 735, which was the performance leader in Summer was beaten in Autumn by Via. Still there will be a SIS 745 answer that waits us in 2002.

Therefore we give Via The INQUIRER prize of Fastest Athlon Chipset for its KT 266A chipset.

The Best Integrated Solution (Athlon) Nvidia was quite new in this chipset arena. It entered quite aggressively and made quite a good chipset especially as it was its first stab at this kind of thing. Nforce has a Geforce 2 MX, 64 3D voices Dolby digital surround card, a 100 Mbit network card and a modem built into the lot. This quite expensive pack still presents tge best integrated chipset at this time. The competition with SiS 740 offers slower performance and graphics and not so advanced audio with much better prices. The only big advantage of Nforce is the AGP slot.

Therefore we award Nvidia The INQUIRER prize of Fastest Integrated Chipset for its Nforce chipset.

Best Consumer Sound
Creative Labs presented one of its new products, called Audigy that won the hearts and ears of many consumers over the world. Especially if you talk about Audigy EX with external tray and remote controller you have one great and complete gaming and DVD experience.

Therefore we award Creative Labs The INQUIRER prize of best consumer audio card for its Audigy cards.

Best Semi Professional Card
When we talk about semi professional market and good home recording cards that are not so expensive we have one new card that has just hit the market. Terratec introduced recently the DMX 6 Fire 24/96 card with external tray similar to Audigy Platinum - and that is a great thing to have for home recording. This card has EAX 2.0 support and other good features.

Therefore we'd like to give Terratec The INQUIRER prize of Best Semi Professional Home Recording Audio card for the DMX 6 Fire 24/96 card.

The Best Speaker
Creative Labs introduced a really nice sound system. This speaker kit features great design, powerful with great sound, external Dolby digital amplifier 5.1 speakers with nice remote controller. You just need to watch one overpriced DVD on this kit and you will experience one new dimension of sound. This is the best system that I had opportunity to see. The best of speaker this year is the Inspire 5700 kit.

So Creative Labs wins The INQUIRER prize of Best Speakers for their Audigy cards.

Best of Storage
We liked several things that we were not able to try this year. The first were ATA 133 hard drives and RAID controllers. The second is USB 2.0 but there are not so many devices to be able to use this technology. hard drives bit 100 GB barrier and keep rotating on 7200 RPM.

When we talk about recording DVD R+W standard that was introduced in Cebit 2000 is the technology of future with 4.7GB on overpriced DVD mediums. You just cannot impress people with 32X CD recorders any more.

We learned that these companies are really miserly on samples so if you want to test some of these you need to go and buy some. That's why we haven't be able to take closer look on this technologies.

Maybe they might win prizes next year but they're all awarded the INQUIRER Miser of the Year prize for not hiring the right kind of PR people.

Best newcomer
There have been some interesting moves this year. ATi changed its business strategy, Nvidia started its new TV tuner business and introduced its new chipset Nforce.

Since Nforce was the first chipset in an unknown area for Nvidia, we feel the company deserves some credit. ATi decided to start this chipset business in Q1 2002 so we will need to wait for next year to see that. Nvidia's first chipset was a great performer with some minor problems that actually disappeared in the new revision of drivers that we tested.

Therefore we give Nvidia The INQUIRER prize for Best Newscomer in the Chipset Market.

Best New Gadget - special Fudo award
Some of you will remember my James Bond pen article. I got that, and will present it to you really soon. Mike reckoned that this thing wouldn't work and I must admit that I was surprised how well the thing worked. You have a dictionary with optionally several language can interact with computer, scan test in pen or into your PC send SMS thought your mobile. Thing works nice and C Pen is one nice gadget and small thing that you may consider to own if you like this teckie things. [I just use English Oxford Thesaurus on C pen to find out meaning of gadget- I was not sure about the meaning] Therefore we give the C-pen our special Fudo INQUIRER prize of Best New Gadget.

Two very important prizes will go to one company that use to ignore us for some time. Best PR of 2001
There were more than a few PR managers that sent us some information, used to answer our mails and some really rare ones used to call us from time to time, but at the end one company's attention beat the ass off the competition. Although ATi was close to getting this prize, Nvidia's own ex 3DFX Andrew Humber won it. We would like to express our gratitude for his attention and help with lots of things including hours of phone calls and dozens of emails.

Best Technical Support
When you review products, you like to go into details and ATi is doing better and better all the time, but can improve.

The second ex 3DFX person that I knew from Voodoo times where I gave him a few headaches was great in technical support with both TI 500 and especially my Nforce review.

I admire your dedication to your job Luciano Alibrandi and therefore would like to thank you for all your help and all your replies on my hard questions. He gets the prize. µ