AMD Mobile CPU's:

The first thing on the seminar agenda was AMD's mobile CPU's. AMD told us how T-Bred was perfect for the mobile market since it draws less power and produces less heat (compared we assume to similarly paced Intel products). With the CPU core transition also came another name change. The mobile name has been changed from Athlon 4 (Palomino) to AthlonXP (T-Bred).

With the transition to the T-Bred core also comes a higher FSB. The Athlon 4 ran on a 200 MHz FSB while the AthlonXP's now run on a 266 MHz front side bus. This should give processors a healthy boost in performance.

AMD also told us that later this year, Barton (512KB L2 cache, 0.13 micron) will be released to the mobile market as well. Those who like the Hammer will also be pleased to find out that there should be a notebook based version as well.

VIA Tech:

During the presentation we found that VIA controls about 80% of all the AMD chipsets out there and sold about 40% of all the chipsets out there in 2001. VIA also told us that the KT400 will be out at the end of June/early July. The KT400 as most people will know supports up to DDR400 memory (there isn't any DDR400 JEDEC standard currently however), and will have 8x AGP support. Also new to the KT400 is VLink, the pipe which connects the Northbridge and Southbridge, with a bandwidth of 533 MB/s.

MSI Computer:

There wasn't really anything notable about MSI's presentation other then the up coming SiS 745 based motherboards. On a personal note, we were very pleased to see that our awards logo was used a couple times in their presentation (MSI GeForce 4 Ti4600 and KT3 Ultra for example each won Awards from us).

AMD Desktop CPU's:

AMD's market share ever since the Athlon was released back in 1999 has grown tremendously and now two out of every five desktops sold use AMD processors. Another break AMD was very proud of was the fact that they now own 7% of the market on large system servers even with no tier 1 OEM support (eg. Dell, HP, Compaq).

There was a bit of T-Bred information given out as well for prospective buyers of the processor. For instance you must have a PSU that can supply 45 amps to the CPU otherwise the processor will not work properly. The AMD desktop spokesman said the desktop version of the Hammer (Clawhammer) is on schedule for release at the end of the year.

nVidia:

nVidia had a really cool video at the beginning of their presentation showing off several of their own tech demos as well as benchmarking programs and games. It's well known (it should be anyway) that nVidia is the number one GPU manufacturer in the world. The rep also stated that they produce the fastest most feature rich graphic chipsets.

I agree with him about being the fastest, however ATI's Radeon 8500 actually has more features then the GeForce4 Ti line of cards. One very interesting thing the nVidia rep said as well is that the GeForce4 MX chipsets do not have vertex or pixel shaders and that they can't run the newer (DX8) games quite as well.

At around 7:30PM the attendies were treated to a dinner - AMD went all out with the food and there was a whole array of salads, meat and desert. It's a wonder why they closed it so soon though, I wasn't able to get seconds even though there was plenty of food left... There were a few other demonstrations from Phoenix, Net Integration and LSI Logic but unfortunately it is bit beyond the scope of this article as these are mainly board level components.