E3 Interior Lobby

E3 Exterior

AnandTech Takes on the Simpsons (we lost)

While E3 is a showcase of the latest and greatest, to some it would be a bit of a let-down. These days, the theme of shows like this is to hype what's coming out, but they constantly miss the mark on the delivery date. Personally, I like the approach that 3Drealms took with Duke Nukem Forever - it'll be ready when it's ready, and no, you can't see it, and we don't want to talk about it. This leaves the gamer in for a surprise, something that is uncommon in this industry.

New information was particularly hard to come by this year as most companies have released their product lines; and the ones coming soon, we can't talk about. But, this is good, since hype has killed some products.

AMD

Thursday morning, we met with AMD in the GOD (Gathering of Developers) parking lot. AMD updated their roadmap and strategy a little bit for E3, but nothing revolutionary. Giga what? These days, Gigahertz is the buzz word around the two CPU giants. AMD is also committed to providing processor solutions for ALL markets. This, of course, will include the higher-end server market, which will be a first for AMD. One of the main focuses during the AMD meeting was their branding. "Athlon is here to stay" is the impression that was delivered to us. Athlon's main competitors are the Pentium III and at some point this year, Willamette. Duron, AMD's new competition for the Celeron is going to be directed at the home and business value market. K6-2 is still there as well as other competitive solutions. Duron was another area of key focus. AMD is quite proud of this new entry into the CPU market. The Duron will feature the same 200 Mhz FSB as the Athlon, along with Full speed on chip cache. The plan for Duron is, of course, to eventually phase out the K6-2 processor at the lower clock speeds. Duron should be out in June sometime.

AMD's branding is still basically unchanged -- the server and workstation market will be the Athlon Ultra, and the high performance market will still be the Athlon. The value market is the Duron and K6-2.

Thunderbird was another area of focus. AMD had a machine running, utilizing the Thunderbird CPU. The Thunderbird represents AMD's next big step, On Die Cache. It's hard to judge a CPU's performance just by watching a few demos, but it was clear that the CPU is very key in AMD's roadmap.

Matrox
Not really a lot to say here. The G450, which should be out in June/July timeframe, was the main topic of discussion. Matrox also discussed with us the entertainment SKU for the G450 line, more information will follow on that shortly. There has been a lot of talk about the next generation of Matrox cards, but most of it is rumour. The focus of the G450 is not the gaming market, that much is clear. This video card is directed at the home/business user. Does this mean Matrox is not interested in competing with the gaming cards out now? No.

Matrox G450 Document: Document

Nvidia
Again, not much new here either. Nvidia has released their products, so most of E3 is centered around the Gforce 2. We did inquire about NV11 and the mobile version of the Gforce. Let's just say that this is not the primary focus right now for Nvidia. Since G-Force 2 is out, another logical question comes to mind: what about Quaddro 2? It will come, in time for Sigraph.

3Dfx
3Dfx managed to show us a Voodoo 6000 running in one of the booths. We watched as they played Quake 3 at 2056 -- smooth as butter. We had a look inside the case, at the monster full-length board, and almost tripped over the power supply :). If Windows 2000 is your bag, then you will be pleased that in about two weeks after Voodoo 6000 ships (June 15th), the Windows 2000 drivers will be out.

ATI
ATI picked us up on Friday and we headed over to their hotel. There, they had a Radeon demo machine running with some demos showing off the Charisma engine. The video quality was impressive, to say the least, and smooth. The facial demo of indexed skinning was quite realistic. ATI did let us know that there will be a Radeon MAXX part later this year. They also told us the driver developers are hard at work on Windows 2000 drivers. The Radeon will ship with Windows 2000 drivers included.

Creative Labs

Creative Labs had, as always, one of the biggest booths at the show. There were a few new items at the show, including their new Playstation 2 gear. Creative has two speaker offerings for the Playstation 2: one is the PlayWorks DTT2500, and the other is the PlayWorks PS2000. The DTT2500 is the same as the Desktop Theatre model, except it has an optical connector for the PSX 2. The PS2000 is a futuristic looking set of speakers that reminds me of the head of the robot in the movie Short Circuit. The PS2000 uses HRTF functions to simulate 5.1 surround sound out of a pair of speakers using dipole technology. They sounded very impressive for a two-speaker set.

Creative Labs' main focus was EAX and its use in more than just sound cards. Besides the PlayWorks gear, EAX is now in the Nomad Jukebox as well. With the touch of a button, EAX performs a very nice surround sound effect; great for that concert hall type of music. There weren't any tasty news of what's going to happen after the success of the Live! Series of cards; but there is going to be something else -- more will follow later this year.

Of course, another highlight was the upcoming Annihilator 2, which should be shipping in June. Creative does not currently have plans to release a 64MB version, but it sounds like they will test the waters and see what will happen with the market.

Conclusion
All in all, there wasn't much in the way of revolutionary news to report, only some small release date tidbits. Oh, and some very sore feet :). AMD and some others will have more news in the June timeframe, which we will, of course, report on. With that said, Comdex 2000 should be interesting. There is quite a bit happening in the industry around that timeframe.