In March Ati took another step forward by launching their Radeon 9800 Pro which proved to be just a tad bit faster than the previous king of the hill, the Radeon 9700 Pro. This further put Nvidia to shame as their GeForce FX 5800 Ultra was no match for the Radeon 9800 Pro. On top of that the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, although launched at Comdex in 2002, was still not available in retail stores and could only be pre-ordered.



Fig 5. A look inside exhibit hall 2 of the Hannover Messe at CeBIT 2003, Europe’s largest IT show.
AMD launches the Athlon XP with Barton core in March, featuring 512KB of cache memory, giving the Athlon XP a healthy performance boost as well as a whole range of Mobile Athlon XP processors. AMD also does a stealth introduction of their new 64-bit processor core as they first debut it as the Opteron processor, meant for servers and workstations and introduced at moderate clockspeeds of 1.8 and 2GHz. Intel quickly does a strategic countermove by introducing new Xeon processors at 3.0 and 3.06GHz.



Fig 2. Philips Blu-Ray technology facilitating 1GB of storage capacity on a coin-sized optical disk.
CeBIT, Europe’s largest IT show also kicks off in Hannover, Germany, spread across no less than 26 halls there’s plenty to see and report on. Unfortunately we did not see that many new of innovative products although some manufacturers launched new products during the show. Noteworthy was Philip’s Blu-Ray technology which enables 1GB of optical storage on a coin sized disk. One thing was obvious though during our visit to CeBIT; Canterwood and Springdale motherboards were there in abundance, so it is safe to say that every respectable motherboard manufacturer will have a board available at launch.