CeBIT review and Münchner Halle imagery

I finally found the time to sit down and think about all the stuff I saw in Hannover at CeBIT 2004 last week.

Having never been there before, I was told to expect nothing short of an overwhelming exhibition. Which is nothing short of an understatement.

The 6500 exhibitors cover an area of around 350,000 m² of exhibition ground in 25 different halls. Obviously, since we had only one day there (Thursday), we weren’t able to cover it all, but we did try!

Being invited as we were by Fujitsu-Siemens, we spent some time on their stand, checking out their new server systems and interesting gadgets, before we moved on to NVidia’s, ATi’s and Intel’s stands.

The immense amount of electronical gadgets made it very difficult to focus on specific items for very long, interesting as they may seem. Everywhere you looked, there were girls with flyers, keychains, invitations, more gadgets and anything else they could give you or show you to get you to visit their stand.

One item which did stupify us for quite some time was shown to us at Sony’s stand, though. Apparently, they’ve managed to design a Vaio laptop with a sloping profile that is 9.7mm at its thinnest and 21.9mm at its thickest point – and that’s when it’s folded! It comes with an optional cabon-fiber alloy casing material, the most advanced material ever utilized for notebooks. We were simply baffled by it’s sleek design and small form factor, and had trouble speaking afterwards

NVIDIA and ATI had very large areas in hall 23 with lots of machines ready for gaming, or running demos of one sort or another. What struck me, though, was that they all insisted on showing their capabilities off on TFT-monitors that weren’t capable of presenting the fluent 3D graphics very well.

At ATI’s stand we met a technician who showed us a test setup with two exposed machines that differed slightly in CPU power and RAM size. They both had a Radeon-9600 based graphics adapter, but the lesser machine was based on PCI Express, and was able to sport a higher framerate in a real-time video editing demo. Not really a showoff of ATI, as much as Intel’s new Grantsdale (925X) chipset, which will also allow desktop users to run wireless networks from their PC’s. Also, this chipset does NOT offer AGP support, so it seems PCI Express will definitely be the new standard when it comes to desktop 3D graphics. This was further supported by a demo of a new Fujitsu-Siemens’ desktop PC that we saw, which had an optional PCI Express slot on a riser card, thus supporting full-size PCI-E graphics adapters to be installed.

Apart from that, we participated in a so-called Expert Talk with Werner Steinschmidt, a senior manager from Fujitsu-Siemens, who enligthened us on the details and technical aspects of the Itanium² CPU and the Itanium Processor Family. It was extremely interesting (especially since I understood it all because I delt with the basics of that technology last semester at school), and we learnt about a new Xeon processor (he called it Xeon+) that will allow 64-bit operating systems and applications to be run on an existing Xeon architecture, thus enabling memory above 4 GB to be adressed as well.

All in all an interesting day, though it was too bad that we didn’t have time to spend in each hall.

The real treat, though, was dinner (and whatnot) at Münchner Halle later that same day. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves… brace yourself.