Lots, Part I

Lots to talk about, so let's not waste any time :)

Two big launches coming in the next two weeks; well one big one next week, and one not so big one the following week.

As Wes mentioned in his last Computex article, five of us went to Taiwan and every last one of us got sick. Surprisingly enough, Vinney was the only one that escaped unscathed, which helped a lot as she took care of me while I was popping pills in between meetings :) I had something like 20 meetings over the first weekend I was in Taiwan, so being sick that weekend didn't help much.

Despite the fact that Derek was back in the States, holding up the fort, while we were all gone - he managed to get sick too. He's still recovering from that (none of us went near him, it's not our fault!) while working on stuff for next week.

During his illness, Derek did manage to get his part of the Xbox 360 and PS3 piece to me last night - I'm working on incorporating it into the much larger article right now. At the same time, I've been talking to Tim Sweeney a bit to clear up some misconceptions about game development on Cell, and believe me, there are misconceptions out there. I still don't have a firm date for the piece, but I will have a good idea by tomorrow night. This article has been my focus for the past couple of weeks and I'm doing my best to make it as easy to understand and as complete as possible; I appreciate both your patience as well as your pressure on me to get it out, both help me move forward. As always, my biggest fear is of disappointing you all with the final product - hopefully I won't.

Computex was fun, as always. Even with five folks in Taiwan, there's no time for fun and we keep a strict ~8AM until 10 or 11PM schedule. But that in itself is fun, my only complaint is that we don't get to spend a lot of time together talking about all that we've seen. Most of the time we're lucky to chat with one another if we happen to be in the same meeting at the same time, but for the most part we play brief catch up between meetings.

WWDC was very interesting - it's like a mini IDF where everyone loves Intel. I've never heard so much cheering in a keynote before, and the keynote itself was pretty entertaining. I'd say Steve Jobs is capable of delivering a keynote just as well as the best at IDF, which end up being some of the more polished and well produced keynotes you'll see (there are unbelievably bad keynotes in this industry). I still can't believe the support the guy gets when he goes up there and makes an announcement like the Intel bit, truly amazing. I think Intel was a great move for Apple, especially given Intel's new roadmap for processors.

What about AMD? Well, it's always been said that market share is lost and gained during transitional periods; the CPU industry is very much in a transitional period right now, if AMD doesn't really start to boost their market share over these next two years, it's just not going to happen anytime soon. AMD does have the advantage of a head start over Intel when it comes to truly well designed multi-core architectures with an integrated memory controller, but I think Intel's team over in Israel should not be under estimated. Imagine if the power envelope were lifted off of the Yonah team. We have seen mass enthusiast migration to AMD these past couple of years, but I am curious to see what will happen at the end of 2006...

It also looks like AMD will be introducing a $350 Athlon 64 X2 part. A select few partners have been pressuring AMD and some are receiving positive reassurance on the delivery of such a part. Given that the current $550+ parts have just started shipping, I wouldn't expect a $350 X2 anytime soon but I will update you all as I get more info.

Behind the scenes, we have been working on a few interesting projects here at AT. The first one you'll see debuted will be the new comments system, which will get rid of issues like spoofed posting as well as introduce threading and ratings to posts. The new comments system will be applied to this blog, review comments and news comments - so those of you annoyed by the soviet russia and first post posts can simply rate those posts down and you won't have to worry about em any more :) The new comments system will be ready to go in the first part of July. I will talk in more detail about what else is to come next month.

More later, back to writing for me...