It was time to give Las Vegas another try. We can't say that we were disappointed in the products we saw at Comdex this year, but we felt that many companies might have been holding off major product announcements until CES, due to the lack of crowds at Comdex this year.

CES is not like Comdex at all, so you are not only going to find computer products here, but tons of other consumer oriented stuff too. Just to warn you beforehand, in our reports from CES we are going to cover some things that we don't normally cover. If we see something that has a "WOW!" factor, you can expect to read about it and see it here. So, what we are saying is that it doesn't necessarily have to be computer-related to appear in our reports from CES.

All that matters is that it's cool and would turn an enthusiast's head.

So, we gathered up our quarters and any other extra money we had, and we headed back to "Sin City" to see what we would find. After all, any major city that has an adult products show going on at the same time as its consumer electronics show has got to offer a few surprises that you would like to know about, right?

ATI Announces Imageon 100

Our first stop of the day was a meeting with the folks at ATI. We talked with ATI at Comdex, and they suggested that they might have a surprise or two in store for us if we came to talk with them at CES. We didn't want to disappoint the boys from the "Great White North" of Canada!

The highlight of our meeting was news of Imageon 100 Advanced Graphics and Video Co-Processor for wireless handheld devices. The Imageon offers advanced 2D performance, leading-edge power management, MPEG-4/JPEG decoding, SDRAM interface with 384K embedded SRAM, and Color/Monochrome display support of up to 800x600x16. What is amazing about this platform agnostic video co-processor is that it will allow the CPU in your handheld device to offload as much as 50% of the video processor to the Imageon 100. This means that games and other high-resolution/high-performance applications are now possible on a variety of platforms. Of course, the Imageon 100 is still at the proof-of-concept stage, which means that ATI can't reveal yet who is using the technology, but using the varible rate graphics co-processor of the Imageon (which runs at a variable clock speed of between 14MHz to 80MHz) will really breathe life into your Palm or Windows CE platform device. ATI did tell us that game developers are excited, and so are we. Depending on the situation, we estimate from the data we saw from ATI that it should add less than $10 to the cost of the typical Palm or Windows CE device. Now, who would not be willing to fork over an extra $10 to significantly improve the graphics performance of their handheld device?

In this picture you see an example of the Imageon 100 test proof-of-concept. ATI is comparing the graphics performance of a typical Compaq iPaq vs. a Windows CE device using the Imageon 100. In this test a video trailer was played. The video played at a mere 12 FPS on the Compaq iPaq, but the Imageon 100 was able to hit an outstanding 30 FPS, which of course is unheard of in a hand-held device.

Here we got a look at the new Dell Inspirion 8100 featuring the new Mobile Radeon 7500 with 64MB of RAM. (Yes, this new notebook is now shipping with the Mobile Radeon 7500 in it!) This is only a sneak peek, because shortly you will be getting a very special story about the new Mobile Radeon 7500 platform.