Standing room-only event wows the locals
Intel, at one of the first major shindigs at its Santa Clara Headquarters since rolling out the original Pentium, wowed about a 1000 journalists, bloggers, analysts and valley wags with more gloating than I’ve seen in the valley for decades.
Executives such as Paul Otellini could only be described as beaming like an Alabama virgin who just discovered sex as everyone else was just short of nonstop high-fives and Homer Simpson Woo-hoos. It was quite a scene and yet another reason why I don’t like leaving the house. The giddyness makes me itch. Seriously, it does.
I was lucky enough to go to the breakfast for bloggers exercise done by the company with VP Don MacDonald who was pumping the small audience of bloggers with a repetitive use of the word “fabulous” in some effort to get them to use it to describe the chips. That said, and my cynicsim aside, MacDonald was quite candid and so were the rest of the Intel crew. And why not? They suddenly reappeared as, uh…well, Intel! These chips rock. Let the fun begin.
Two or three things emerged from the event that are worth reporting. The most interesting was told to me by one of the strategists at the company. These new chips have new instructions. This hasn’t been widely reported but the instructions will be rolled out probably in the next month under what I suspect will be a copyrighted moniker, “MEDIA BOOST.” And yes they are aimed at the consumer electronics side of things. I’m told that as fast as these new chips work with codecs, using the new instructions can increase the effectiveness by at least another 15-percent. I’m sure these new instructions will be documented by the hackers sooner than later.
The other thing that I found very interesting was the fact that Intel has finally relented on the over-clocking aspects of the chip. They will not condone it but will have zero roadblocks or “locks” to prevent or hamper the process. VP MacDonald made these comments in the morning about what he’s seen already. Apparently the chip overclocks nicely. Here’s the cam vid of MacDonald’s comments.
Finally, do not be surprised by a 4-core chip before the end of the year. At least one engineer I spoke with already plays with a Core 4 Quad or whatever they are going to call it. Intel obviously did not go to its “name consultants” for this round of products.
Two of the notorious Frag Dolls — a group of professional gamers — helped Intel show off the gaming capability of the chips. In the process they demonstrated how to destroy some horrid cyclops beast in hi-def coming close to making everyone in the audience sick as they were forced to watch the hi-res stabbing of a cyclops in the eyball. Yuk.
Wu Hoo!
It was one of Intel’s In-house gaming experts, Regina Wu, who hired the Frag Dolls for the rollout. When asked about how good these women are at playing video games Regina said they were good but she could take them, no problem.
I want one!. Not one of the chips, one of the frag dolls.
I wonder if the frag dolls fight at night in PJ’s with pillows to “simulate” their experiences. …wait…in my mind they do.
I nominate Regina Wu as the DU babe of the week! More pics please!
Some of the Mac folks are already talking about eight-core chips from Intel.
The Frag Dolls: Ugly women that even gamers find attractive.
Dont worry about it, MS will optimize there OS to work properly with it, and no one else will have ANYway to make it work….
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA….Bill gates on rampage.
“Ugly women that even gamers find attractive.”
You’re about half right. I think the red-head on the left is cute. The one on the right, however, looks like one of the monsters you’re supposed to kill in Doom3.
“MS will optimize there OS to work properly with it,”
Once they get around to finally optimizing their OS to work properly with the x86 chip, of course!
James Hill — Chick Magnet
8 Cores? Har.
The one on the right, however, looks like one of the monsters you’re supposed to kill in Doom3.
That’s not a forhead, that’s a five-head!
“Intel sources tell Think Secret that a quad-socket version of Woodcrest, which would pack eight processor cores into a single system, is slated for release in the fourth quarter of this year, around the same time Intel debuts its first quad-core processor, Kentsfield.”
A few other (non-Mac) IT sources carry the same story.
quad core???? Intel was talking about 32 or 64 cores already in it’s future plans…
C’mon… CORE is being marked as a buzzword, so it tends to be spoken heavily…
Just remember… 99% of you will see no speed increase having 2 or 4 cores. Y’all have to wait for 2007 or 2008 till all the code gets optimized for multithreading and even so, only some routines are going to get benefits.
Now, talk about virtualization…
just figure: OSX, Windows Vista, Xp and Linux at the same time on the same machine at full speed…It just knocks down OS barriers, suddently you don’t have to move to another platform because of some killer app. You can have everything right there.
#11 huh…. well isn’t Kentsfield supposed to be a dual woodcrest ?!?
I mean, Intel had planned this all along: as Woodcrest moves to 45nm intel plans to pack two of those in a PGA and call it Kentsfield…
Sorry, misread…Quad-socket IS different of QuadCore…
Joao — I imagine M$oft has to be in total panic over mention of the word “virtualization” — especially since Apple went MacIntel. There’s another chunk of talent added to the Linux crowd, now, who want their hardware to run what they want, when they want.
They can keep their favorite OS as system mainstream and cherrypick the rest.
I can see M$oft lawyers working 24/7 to come up with strategy, patent, look-and-feel, whatever — to put a halt to this cute little tsunami of a concept.
Hey James Hill,
The ladies aren’t what you call “perfect 10” material but they were not bad looking at all. They were actually a lot more attractive in person than the picture indicates and these were obviously not glamour shots. You do know that the ladies you see in those magazines don’t look nearly as good in person without all the makeup and perfect lighting right?
It probably doesn’t matter since you probably don’t get anywhere close to women with half the look of these ladies. Sorry to be blunt but don’t put the ladies and the gamers down next time.
I’m sure to the gamer crowd they’re hot stuff, but compared to the average woman on the street they’re average at best. It says a lot about the gaming community, which is about as much of a “community” as the terrorist community, that they’ll fawn over women who couldn’t get in Hustler and their sub-par gaming skills at conventions and trade shows.
Also gives you an insight as to why games haven’t actually improved, outside of graphics, over the last 15 years.
As for women, I’ll take my wife over five-head and her friends any day of the week.
George, next time, keep your mouth shut and stick to the shallow end of the Internet. This side’s a little to deep for “gamers”.
(Note to self: Flame George on his blog later.)
Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, besides; I’ve seen men ignore other women until their wife/girlfriend leaves and then they act like your average male; performing the Exorcist head twisting move whenever a woman with skimpy clothing.
A friend of mine had the guts to do that while his GF was next to him and ended up with ten deep gashes in his right forearm.
James, name some women you actually think are attractive. We all want to know what your standards are.
#17
Yes. To the gamer community they are hot stuff. Also, to any community that doesn’t have their neo-conservative head stuck up their mysogenistic ass, they are hot stuff.
You might consider that being mean isn’t the same thing as being witty.
(note to self: James Hill is something of a jerk)
#17 “Also gives you an insight as to why games haven’t actually improved, outside of graphics, over the last 15 years.”
Maybe after you’ve sobered up, James, you’ll explain how the attractiveness of these women to the gaming community has any relevant connection to your silly little assertion that games haven’t actually improved in 15 years, aside from graphics. The incoherency that passes for “insight” when you’re drunk would be more entertaining for the rest of us if it weren’t so mean spirited.
George gets a lot of things right.
More views of the ladies in question here.
http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2-6099940.html
Yes the girl on the right should probably change her hair style, but you’re being an absolute jerk about it James. Like I said the two girls aren’t drop dead gorgeous top-tiered models, but they’re well above average and they are attractive ladies. Your comments about gamers are equally ridiculous and you don’t seem to know much about the game world. So stop trolling.
Thanks for the mention in the blog! Though I think I’m a bit misrepresented – I don’t think I could take down the Frag Dolls no problem – it would depend on the game that we’re playing. 🙂 Thanks again!
“silly little assertion that games haven’t actually improved in 15 years”
Don’t argue with him Gary. James’ comment doesn’t even make any sense. What does it mean for an art form to “improve”?! Do movies get better every 15 years? Do TV shows get better?! Does music? Paintings? Sculpture? And what standard would anyone use to make the determination, considering art is purely subjective?!
James is just here to troll and get people riled up. There’s no point in adding fuel to the fire.
Regina, I was hoping to get a cat fight going. 🙂
Sorry to disappoint – us girls get along too well to get involved in a catfight. We’d rather team up against the boys… 🙂
24,
IMHO, games really havent advanced much since 1990-95..
Only thing thats changed is the graphics and how powerful of a machine we need to RUN those graphics.
Ever played a game called Frontier Elite or FFE…WONDERFUL shaded 3D vector graphics, open ended space RPG, with REAL space dynamics, and had over 1000 planets to look at with FULL planetary dynamics of rotation, and GRAVITY… It fit…on 2 floppy disks.. Want to see an Octal Sun system, with 2 sets of Binaries stars? IT HAD IT.
Look up shadow of the BEAST on the Amiga, the intel/MS version sucked. The Amiga version had 8 bit planes. thats like 8 planes in the backgound all moving in there own course to show the background.
There was also a RPG dragon game that was Splendid, with FULL 3D environments, BEFORE Doom, that fit on something like 4-5 disks (floppies).
Then how about Interstate 76 and 82, or Heavy gear, Tribes 2, and even Half life…these are less then 10 years old, but no LESS then 6+.
the games were HOT in their days, and FAST, and even BETTER NOW. I dont need all this POWER just to show me Fluttering leafs, when all I want is to SHOOT something.
#15 – Moss.
You’re right, it is a Tsunami concept. But I beg to differ on one issue: M$ isn’t frantic about it… it’s Apple that is. Think:
You can have an assortment of OSes running on you machine, and you’ll always need one OS to be in charge (ie. running the virtualization apps). So given the choice, would you still buy Apple hardware? or a cheaper, more performant one? And remember, M$ sells you the OS separate from hardware. In fact M$ is not in the business of PC hardware. Then take a look at Apple. Apple is mainly in the business of selling hardware. And it “forbids” you to run OSX out of their box already. So opting for a Mac hardware: you’ll buy a higher priced machine, and are forced to buy a M$ OS retail which is a lot more expensive than OEM.
You buy a (say…) Dell machine. It’s cheaper (arguably) while maintaining equal brand quality, and it comes with M$ already bundeled. Sure, you can’t run OSX legally…
So, IMHO this does nothing to enlarge Apple’s user base, since only Appleheads will buy Apple. While PC users will benefit with VM.
Of course, a lot of people will say – “no, sir, now I can buy Mac and still retain windows, so it’s better for me…” yeah, but these are individuals. The corporations are not seeing any advantage here. And these guys drive the numbers.
Dunno…my feel is that Apple is stuck on the same “chicken-n-egg” circle.
I think the hot geek chick on the right is nice. I’m single…
Don’t forget “appleheads” now include a significant percentage of iPod users. If they can convert that base, they have it made.