To summarize, Computex 2003 was well worth the visit, it has certainly broadened my perspective and given me new insights into the manufacturing side of the IT industry. The showfloors were as feature-packed as they could be with plenty of new products and with beautiful boothbabes promoting the various manufacturers or their products to boot. We’ve had a busy week covering this event and must express our gratitude to Cetra for taking such good care of us, as well as all of the manufacturers inviting us to their dinner parties, much appreciated. Just one thing we missed was the wireless 802.11x access throughout the showfloor which would’ve enabled us to do live coverage through streaming media directly to our website, but that’s just a minor inconvenience. One thing that was obvious though is that Taiwan means business when it comes to providing the IT industry with low-cost and high-quality products.
If we had to rate which products or technologies we were impressed by most we’d certainly give XGI’ new Volari graphics processor family top honors. What impressed us most was the fact that XGI managed to develop and manufacture their graphics processors with a budget of just half a billion dollars, both ATI and Nvidia invest more than that in R&D for their products. XGI secured this funding from SiS and TSMC with which they partnered up as XGI was naturally a spin-off of SiS’ graphics division. We’ve also enjoyed many of the presentations about products such as AMD’s Athlon 64 and Nvidia’s new products. By the looks of the number of motherboards and SFF system supporting AMD’s Athlon 64 it basically all comes down to whether AMD can ship enough volume of these processors to satisfy customer demand.
We’ve had a great time at Computex, the showfloor had plenty of interesting new products and the presentations were entertaining and usually informative. And I’ll have to be honest that the slump in the IT industry does not seem to have affected Taiwan too much, most of the engineers and their respective companies are certainly still willing to give it their best to design interesting and innovative products, or simply reduce cost. Overall a great conference and as you can see from our coverage one worth attending, we’re certainly planning on checking in again for Computex 2004 to monitor the then current state of technology.
Below you’ll find a summary of our coverage of Computex 2003, click the links to be forwarded to the article of your interest. Please take notice that all of these articles can also be found in our editorials section in the upper left menu.
Computex 2003 Taiwan, boothbabes gallery
Monday, September 29, 2003 08:30 AM EDT
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/daily_column/article/1662/
Computex 2003 Taiwan, XGI, eXtreme Graphics Innovation
Thursday, September 25, 2003 12:00 PM EDT
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1660/
Computex 2003 Taiwan, SFF systems, SiS chipsets
Tuesday, September 23, 2003 12:00 PM EDT
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1659/
Computex 2003 Taiwan, Athlon 64, DeltaChrome and Nvidia
Monday, September 22, 2003 12:00 PM EDT
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1658/
Computex 2003 Taiwan, 1200 exhibitors, 2500 booths
Sunday, September 21, 2003 10:00 AM EDT
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1657/
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Computex 2003 coverage, if you however have any questions, tips or suggestions, be sure to drop us an email and we’d be happy to answer your questions or requests.
Sander Sassen.
