Another year is over and again over 7000 different companies from the IT and telecommunications business made their way to Hannover's yearly CeBIT-event, the largest computer show world wide. Hardly anyone of the press people, visitors or exhibitors could believe their eyes when CeBIT started with a beautiful day, bright sunny sky and a pretty enjoyable temperature on Wednesday and Thursday last week. One day later everything went back to normal, the weather turned to what everybody knows and hates about Hannover, it became dull, rainy, horribly windy and ice cold. This was still not able to keep 303,000 people from freezing and soaking on the huge exhibition grounds in between the 26 different halls on the first three days of CeBIT 1999.

Besides MegaCar, which you know about for a week already, there was certainly a lot to be seen, but still a real highlight didn't show up. Thus I won't start and praise any particular product, but will list all the stuff I've come across one after the other instead.

CPU

If anyone expected to find any new and earth shattering information about AMD's K7, he was pretty disappointed. AMD showed a K7 running at 600 MHz again behind closed doors, and the presentation was pretty much the same I had already seen at Comdex last November. There was no performance comparison done, so that I can still not tell you how well it will perform against Intel's Pentium III processor. K7 is still supposed to start shipping sometimes in the second half of June 1999, and it will run on a platform based on AMD's own upcoming K7-chipset. We can still expect a very high performance and clock speeds of more than 600 MHz.

My meeting with Intel didn't produce any big news about their future CPUs, Coppermine is supposedly well on track for the second half of 1999 and until then we're supposed to enjoy the slower and less sophisticated Katmai-version of it, called Pentium III. The most important information was about their anti-overclocking strategy. Now since the new Pentium III CPUs are equipped with an information that can let you check the clock speed it's supposed to run at, there's no real reason for implementations that inhibit overclocking anymore. Remarking Pentium III processors is pretty much pointless, because a simple software from Intel is able to tell its real speed marking. In this context Intel explained that there aren't any plans to implement a clock speed locking into their CPUs for the next three months, they will hang on to their multiplier lock though. Let's hope that this is true, because it would leave the Celeron open for overclocking as well as Pentium II and Pentium III as soon as 133 MHz front side bus becomes reliably available.

I have not visited Rise or IDT yet, but I will supply you with information of their alternative x86-CPUs as soon as I spoke to them.