Conclusions - Watch Your I/O

In Part I of our review of IDF, we said that IDF is going to be more interesting for what we read between the lines than, what is actually handed to us on a platter in various sessions and meetings. The impressions that we came away with lead us to believe a few things:

The flaws in Intel's desktop strategy with Pentium 4 is there, and Intel is just going to try and force things to go its way using its manufacturing muscle, and its brand name OEMs. The company probably doesn't think that the present state of the market is going to give much of an advantage to AMD. Intel's communications strategy, trying to be in the networking and communications chipset business, will probably start to have an impact on the PC by the end of this year. The first place it is going to start is, I/O. Basically, if Intel delivers the severs then, what if it can also deliver the clients configured, or optimized to work in an all Intel network. The 82544EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller Intel unveiled at IDF kind of sets the tone. The next stage is going to be a move away from I/O on the PCI bus. What that means is unclear, but you can bet that it will put more of the functions of the network on the Intel motherboard, or integrated into Intel chip real estate. Intel doesn't have a strong software partner to counterbalance Microsoft, and that is going to be make the company's adventures into mobile devices an uphill struggle. Not that Windows CE would help the company either. The Intel Web Tablet, which was being demonstrated at IDF, is not the answer, but it is a proof of concept, and Intel's StrongARM SA-1110 is, for want of a better word, a very handsome chipset for these types of devices. We are going to have spend some time researching this area of Intel's activities. There are ways to compare even handheld devices on the basis of performance and features. Just as there are ways of comparing portable MP3 players for quality of sound using audio metrics. The Extended PC for most of us is going to be a bunch of USB devices, and the odd PDA. Will they all co-exist happily? Will Windows never crash? P2P- buzzwords rule. WinHEC - The ball is firmly in Microsoft's court. Intel can try and own the network, but Microsoft owns the heart of the PC, and the demonstration of Windows XP at Craig Barrett's IDF keynote were anything to go by, it is going to be a heck of an interesting year for the hardware enthusiast.

This story ain't over for a few more months, yet.

Send link to this page by email :

Your email address *

Your name *

Recipient address *

Send

* The email addresses collected via this form are not recorded on our servers and are only used for the sending request