CES 2006 Wrap-up

OK, I'm here to tell you all about CES this year, so grab a chair, get comfortable, and gather round the monitor. This will be a long long long post. Seeing as this will be so huge, I'm going to skip the rest of the formalities and get straight to the wrap-up.

1. First off, we had a keynote from no other than Bill Gates himself. Gates usually does some big "World of Tomorrow" thing at his keynotes, and this year was no exception. He pushed how the Tablet PC will reign supreme, just as he has done every year for the past 3 or so. He also demo'd some cell phone techology that could possibly bridge the gap between Tablets and Phones. Most importantly, he pushed Vista. Tom's Hardware has a write-up, but there are many others out there too. One thing that I'm surprised of is how many of these technologies are allready working in Beta 2. Run over to the Vista pre-view from your's truly when it gets up in the forums. I'm almost ready to write it up, but I need to play with Vista and a Raptor to make a final decision.
2. Intel launched the new Intel "Leap Ahead" slogan and marketing change. This includes the new Intel logo: Personally I think it's probably a good idea. The Pentium 4 was such a bismal failure that Intel needs to rebadge themselves to get over the whole Netburst thing. The logo change ran concurently with the launch of the new Intel Centrino platforms: Intel Centrino Solo and Intel Centrino Duo. These encompass the newest mobile chipset from Intel and the latest Core processors. That's right, no more Pentium-M, it's Core now. These chips are based on the Yonah architecture, which isn't fantastic, but it's much better than the failing Pentium D. The real love will be when Core Solo and Core Duo are Merom-based, which should happen around Q3 of this year. Still, a dual-core Pentium M with a shared cache is pretty nice. Look for it in an iBook or Mac Mini near you!
3. The big D came out shortly thereafter. Michael Dell threw us a curve ball with the XPS 600 Renegade. You can read all about it in the Quad-SLI blog post. I'm honestly a little upset about the whole thing, but that's just me. Along with the Quad-SLI announcement came something every-one expected to see: The Dell 30" LCD. It's model number is 3007WFP and it looks like a winner. It's got a card-reader, 4 USB ports, and a better panel than the Apple one. On top of that, it's about $200 cheaper. It's missing the Firewire, but hey, what do you want? Nothing's perfect. Dell also had a Intel Core Duo laptop around, but only a 17" variety. Most manufacturers will use the new dual-cores only in big laptops because of pricing. Dell also had a new concept PC. Here's Anand's report. It's a cool idea, like a laptop that doesn't fit on your lap, but I think most everyone would rather just get the 17" DTR.
4. OK, now on to the good stuffs. I'm going to skip the links from here until the end, and just give you some "here it is and here's what it does" shorties. I'll post some reference links below if you don't trust me
5. MSI showed us a conceptual design of a single-slot SLI board, using MXM modules. For everyone a little behind the times, MXM is a slot that nVidia developed some time ago, with the hopes of it being like a PCIe slot for laptops. The idea was if you buy a laptop with an MXM slot, you'd be able to upgrade your graphics in the future. Cool idea right? Well it never really happened, but MSI found a use for them buy placing two MXM slots on a single 16x PCIe board. I guess I should link up a picture, because it's kinda hard to imagine. This could enable cheap Quad-SLI, with two upgradeable PCB's, all you need to buy is new MXM modules. You're still buying 4 of them, but what the hey.

What's really cool about this concept is what may come out of it. Now, MXM cards are basically mini-graphics boards. They still have memory and a GPU. We could possibly move forward to a socket and some RAM slots, like a motherboard has, and then truly have an upgradable GPU. Imagine just a little socket and some RAM banks on a card like the one above. You can switch out GPU's, or if you need more RAM just swap that out. It will come, you heard it first here.

On the SLI bandwagon, nVidia told us some more info about how multi-GPU setups will further enter our lives. We've got SLI, SLIx32, Quad-SLI, and soon, we'll have SLI in our laptops. Using MXM modules (yeah, right), nVidia hopes to have 2 MXM sockets allowing SLI operation in a laptop. This is the kind of thing you can only pray for, but I really believe all of the Laptop manufacturers will decide against it because of the heatsink. You don't want an extra .5lb in your laptop just so it can be upgraded in the future, just like you don't want to have to design a laptop around configurable heatsinks. I can see SLI coming to notebooks, but not in a user-upgradeable fashion.

nVidia also showed off H.264 decoding with the Purevideo decoder. I bought the Purevideo decoder about 3 weeks ago or so to use it with my TV and HDTV decoding. Believe it or not, just installing that package made VLC decode the MPEG-TS stream coming from my cable-box's Firewire port much smoother, and use much less CPU. It will be nice to also have H.264 decoding, although with 2.6ghz of Athlon 64 under the hood, it's not terribly necessary.

Last for nVidia, we've found out that the G71 will not be launched at the end of this month as most people had expected. The G71, although not having a product name yet, will likely be called a 7900GTX or something of the like. 8 more pixel pipelines and a 600-700mhz core, you get the idea. G72 and G73 (Big ?) should show up as 7300 and 7600 or something to that nature. The 6000-series will be dead by July more than likely.

ATI also had some news from CES, although nVidia totally stole the stage. ATI launched the OCUR just before the CES party got rockin'. This little box plugs into a USB 2.0 port, and streams in Digital Cable. I recently came across a Fusion HDTV 5 Plus setup, and have been playing with non-encrypted QAM signals for the past week or so. I'll have a review up later. Let's just say the results were dissapointing to say the least. Thankfully, ATI will ship the OCUR next to Windows Vista, and it will be a Vista-only product, however it will use Cable-Cards to show all digital signals that you subscribe to. That includes 1080i HD and Dobly Digital. It should become part of the Avivo platform, which will mean excellent image quality and alot of the work being sent over to the GPU of a x1000 card. Good stuff, IMHO.

ATI also confirmed to several sources that the much-anticipated R580 will launch on-time towards the end of this month, with the name X1900XTX, or something. There will be 3 versions of it, just like the X1800, and this time ATI hopes to ship en masse on the day of the launch. nVidia responded by claiming a large shipment of 7800GTX 512mb cards will come to the States sometime in the next week or so, but the X1900 cores will slap the silly out of the old G70. G71 will be a closer match, but ATI will be the graphics champ for about a month or so, barring the Quad-SLI setups of course.

Probably the biggest news from CES this year is the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD race that got a burner put under it over the past week or so. If anyone is young enough to remember the BetaMax/VHS run, this will be very familiar. I'll try to summarize the differences, but I'm no expert here. At CES we saw both formats in PC drives, so the "Microsoft backs HD-DVD" thing should loose some steam. Blu-ray had some strong support, with atleast 5 vendors showing off Blu-Ray devices for TV, but of course, so did the HD-DVD family. Word is that Blu-Ray will hit the market first, but will be more expensive than HD-DVD. Blu-ray offers about 10gb more space per layer, and when you are looking at quad-layer disks, that becomes a serious factor. BD-ROM's will be able to hold about 100gbs of data before it dies out. HD-DVD will hold around 60gb. I think that's a serious game-breaker in the long run, and I officially put my money behind Blu-Ray at this point. Anyways, the HD Video race will officially start around April or so, so fasten your seatbelts.

Western Digital announced two different Raptors, one just before CES and one at the beginning of CES. The first is the WD1500ADFD which is my new system drive (just got it today, look for a review soon). 10,000 RPM, 16mb Cache, SATA NCQ support, and 75gb platters. I love mine! They also announced a Raptor X drive. While having the same mechanics, it is missing some of the more enterprise-level options. Nothing a home user needs to worry about, really. The Raptor X distinguishes itself with a window in the drive's shell. That's right, a window for your hard drive case. The idea is pretty cool, and when you look at what they had to do to make it work, it's really impressive. Is it worth $50? Probably, atleast to this market.

Wireless USB was all over the place too, with a bunch of totally impractical demonstrations. The WUSB harddrive is one particular weak showing. Not only did Seagate need massive antanae, but the hard drive also has to be plugged into the wall for power. How do they expect to transmit data from flash drives without power? I just don't see a battery-powered WUSB device gaining a ton of hold, but we'll just have to wait and see. Not a big deal, IMHO.

Speaking of Seagate, how about 160gb of data in your laptop? No, it's not a RAID-0 array, it's a single 2.5" harddrive that Seagate has announced. They've mastered the use of perpendicular recording to push laptop-drive capacity through the roof, a full 40gb higher than anyone else has available. The word on the street is that the current 500gb drives will be the last of the flat-recording mega-beasts, and that every drive maker should have a perpendicular drive line-up by the end of the year. We're talking 750gb on a single drive or 1.5TB of space on a RAID array. Maybe you'd like 4 in RAID-5 (2.25TB)? No problem. They should be pretty quick too, with platter densities hitting atronomical levels.

 Other big news, that made no headlines, is of course the Atom Chip Quantum Computer. Although everyone saw the killer laptop, only on person actually wrote about it. They were quite skeptical, however they did see it work. Everyone is still thinking it's a hoax though. Here's the most I've read about it yet. Honestly, I'm not sure about it yet. I'm still waiting for a hands-on review, but the guy is trying really hard!

 Gosh there's so much more. Liquid-cooling for the Xbox 360 to solve that heat problem MS seems to have. WiMAX has started showing up in notebooks. 802.11n is getting closer to being solidified. I could go on all night, honestly. Here's the only really important thing I left out though, still no news on PS3. We may have to wait a little while to get our hands on one of those.

OK, here's my favorite links about the CES show. Yes, there are a ton of them, but this is the biggest thing besides CeBIT. 

AnandTech Day 1, 2, 3.

Tom's Hardware Coverage.

arstechnica has a few stories spread over their site.

TechwareLabs Day 1, 2, 3, 4.

Bitech.net has a little wrap-up.

Futurelooks took a little different approach.

Gizmondo has a really extensive list here.

And that's about it folks. I think I covered most of the important stuff. Now if I can just get through MacWorld this week, I'll be crusin' until the R580 hits the street in a couple weeks. Wow! It's going to be a great year!