Eating Your Own Dogfood Dept.: Intel released a document describing the apparent flip-flop attitude of AMD, regarding how AMD went from one metric to the other depending on whether it led the MHz or the performance-per-MHz race.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Intel argument is compelling, as it quotes various AMD sources waffling over this issue from year to year. The document was distributed as a PDF file, and as loyal reader Wilmark Johnatty discovered (by looking at the DOC info), the PDF file was apparently created by someone at Intel using a Macintosh! Unless the document was recompiled, which I doubt, this is pretty funny and not completely surprising. During his reign as Mr. Clean at Intel, Andy Grove was known for having an Apple computer that he used secretly. Meanwhile, Craig Barrett showed off a Pentium 4 graphics machine at the most recent Intel developers' conference. Perhaps the company could use such a machine internally, hmm?
I wonder how long someone would last at Microsoft if he or she insisted on using Lotus SmartSuite to get the work done. Not long is my guess. Hey, guys, products exist that can do these things on an Intel processor too! Sheesh.
Meanwhile, Intel is promoting its new XScale PDA-optimized microprocessor in an attempt to get in on the PDA actionwhat little action there is. Palm has already bailed out from under the slow-moving Motorola DragonBall chips so that it can adopt the Texas Instruments architecture. Intel wants the Pocket PC world to look at what it's doing with its new products. With more people playing with PDAs hooked up to those portable, collapsible keyboards, and with VGA output, there's no reason these little devices can't drive big monitors and become desktop replacements. Why not?
Thinking Big Dept.: Sharp Electronics, a major maker of LCD panels, is going into LCD TVs in a big way, with new factories. We're talking about HDTV-quality screens of 25, 30, and even 40 inches being manufactured at the rate of hundreds of thousands per month. Expect to have a flat-panel TV in your home by 2005.
While on the Subject of HDTV Dept.: For some odd reason, I feel disgusted and at the same time vindicated by the most recent fiasco regarding HDTV. I have been skeptical of this rollout and urging caution since it was first proposed as an analog system requiring expensive gallium arsenide circuits to work. It appears that the new copy-protection schemes being dreamed up by Hollywood will make every single HDTV set sold to date obsolete. And buyers of new sets are not being told about this situation in a dubious attempt to dump very expensive inventory. I'm sure those of you who spent $5,000 to $10,000 for what may become an albatross are going to love reading this.
What happened was that the Hollywood folks, who are just freaked over the possibility that we'll be copying HDTV movies, have promoted copy protection that requires the decode circuit to be built into the display, not into the set-top box. This requires the set-top box to send a signal to a connector that new HDTV sets will have. If you're thinking of buying an HDTV, don't, unless it has this connector and circuitwhenever they are finalized. I suspect that this copy protection mechanism will be used for certain broadcasts, too, since there has been a lot of talk about copy-protecting DSS and other transmissions.
The concept is that when copy protection is put within the circuitry of the display, you can't decode something with a set-top box and then grab the signal as it comes out of the box and before it gets to the screen.
Meanwhile, the HDTV-promoting Consumer Electronics Association is going to eat crow if all the current HDTV sets turn out to be white elephants. I see no evidence that this mess will be resolved without a lot of burned consumers. All the Hollywood studios are belatedly demanding the new system. I suppose an expensive retrofit could be developed, but it probably won't be. Nothing is designed nowadays for fixing or retrofitting.
And I'm guessing that those expensive set-top boxes will also have to be replaced. According to most sources, all the latest schemes allow copy-protected broadcasts and movies to be viewed on the old HDTV sets, but they will fall back to lower resolution. Welcome to the bleeding edge. Anyone even thinking of getting HDTV before this issue is completely resolved is just throwing money away. Funny how your local newspaper or TV station hasn't been covering this consumer issue, isn't it?
