June 4: D-Day – 1
Part 1
Nobody ever said that covering CES was easy. In fact, it has become
rather complicated.
Today being Press Day, the objective was intended for the media to
shuffle from one press conference to the next, every hour: Intel.
Audiovox. Sharp. Casio. Samsung. You get the idea.
But, nobody really gave much thought to the reality: some 5000 people
registered as press as of today.
The result? You stand in line for an hour or more to get into one
briefing; when it is over, you move to another line. Repeat. (This
means you can only see, at best, every other announcement.)
To make matters more confusing, some of these events have a
“pre-registered” line and an “overflow” line. You may be first in
line and still not get into the room.
Lunch? Served in the press conferences. Don’t get in, don’t eat for
eight hours. You can’t take a break from standing in line to hunt for
food, or you will miss the next event.
Just reporting is tough. There are exactly eight PCs for this crowd:
not likely you will get to use one. Instead, I brought my laptop, but
whoa! The Wi-Fi is so overloaded you can’t get out unless you use a
hard-wired connection in the press room (and these are limited, too.)
Obviously, though, I got an Ethernet connection, and am thus filing
this report.
Thus, you have one hungry reporter here who could not get into the
Intel meeting, although they say they will set up an interview later
in the week and gave me a news release.
What do they say their announcment was?
* A new processor architecture they are calling 2nd Generation Core.
* Video display adapter built in to the chip, with “quick sync video”
and “HD interfacing” (HDMI) built-in. The graphics accelerator is
powerful enough to run the top apps such as Call of Duty, and (since
it’s on the processor chip itself) is interfaced directly to the CPUs
at a very high speed.
* “Intel Quick Sync” said to convet four minutes of HD video to iPod
format in 16 seconds
* 20 new processors being announced.
From the info I saw on-line, they are moving to an even smaller sized
etching on the chip, while increasing capacity to four cores and eight
threads — and even encouraging overclocking. (Learning from AMD?)
They are also developing “WiDi” technology, to “beam” HD video from a
PC directly to an equipped monitor.
They’ve also extended the instruction set to promote more powerful
graphics processing and trasmitting 3D (so processed) to TVs..
They also announced partnerships with the likes of Fox, Warner,
Sonic/Roxio, and others to use this technology to deliver content to
the consumer. Is this going to become an effort to provide TV
directly over the Internet to TVs through people’s computers? Unclear
as of yet.
I hope for a much more detailed Q&A with them by the end of the week.
Stand by….
I also attended the Samsung press conference, shooting almost all of
it on video. Key announcements in my opinion are a larger-screen
Galaxy S platform (4.5″); a Galaxy Tab that (wonders of wonders!) has
a slide-out keyboard that turns it into a laptop/palmtop, practical
for typing, and a 10.5″ display; and a refrigerator with a built-in
screen and tablet-like functions.
Still to come: the Sony press conference, a couple of private-suite
demos, and the huge Digital Focus/Mobile Focus by Pepcom.
