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AMD Tech Tour 2003

       The AMD Tech Tour took place in Braintree, MA, just like last year. This tech tour, of course was to introduce the AMD Opteron processor and some of the Athlon 64 for the desktop. Many resellers, in the white box, and OEM market were there. These people make up a large percentage of the AMD's desktop processor sales. Here is how the day played out:

Entrance to the AMD Tech Tour 2003

           Everyone had to get there by car. This was not the same as the AMD Reality Check back in the fall of 2002, we were lucky there as we only had to walk for 10 minutes.

          At 4:00pm, the sponsors, had tables set up to display their latest and greatest. Looking around, I was going to expect to see more manufacturers, but not many had tables set up. For instance, NVIDIA, one of AMD's largest partners didn't have a table set up, last year they were showing Aquanox on a Geforce4 Ti4600.

The stands of the tech tour, with the presentation "room" on the background.

         The presentations and stands were at the same room. At 5:00 pm, the presentations began. The event started out with a couple of jokes, mostly about Athlon 64 specs. Then some sponsors had the floor, CRN, AMD's largest sponsor for the show gave a lengthy presentation on the white box market and OEM's comparing AMD's strengths and weaknesses, which would help all the resellers that were invited.

The presentation room, at a break.

         The first presentations looked like a talk show on tv, except the cameras were missing. At the break, dinner was served and people walked around to see what was new at the booths.

AMD displayed the AMD Solo 2board, we could not take off the foxconn heatsink to take a look at the processor.

      AMD had a single motherboard at a table, it's a beta sample of the Athlon 64 desktop motherboards. This is a newer version than the one that Toms Hardware had a sneak preview. The Intel jingle was removed, which was next to a couple of stickers next to the AMD 8151 northbridge. This motherboard, maintaining legacy ports, has 3 USB 2.0, 2 PS/2 ports, 1 serial port, a parallel port, and integrated audio.

  The Stands were placed in a small space, and some manufacturers didn't display or present their lineup at all. So, let's begin with Gigabyte.

Three AMD based Gigabyte boards. The one on the left is an old KT266a board, the one in the center is a KT400a board the GA-7VAXP Ultra, and the one on the right, which I didn't get a good photo is a Nforce2 Ultra 400 motherboard.

Gigabyte's AMD dual boards. On the left is the Opteron based board, and on the right is a AMD 761 Dual Athlon MP motherboard.

This is Gigabyte's GA-7N400-Pro board. This board's main difference from the rest are the 4 DDR slots.

     The Gigabyte GA-7N400-Pro motherboard was interesting, because of the 4 DDR slots, but remember that Dual DDR works best when using 2 DDR modules, it was not specified for 4 slots to be used.  Gigabyte didn't even introduce an nforce2 motherboard until the Ultra 400 revision chips were out. Gigabyte was smart, since these version 1 boards had very buggy BIOS.

Aopen displayed KT400/KT333 boards and a mid-ATX case, but nothing new.

Biostar, on the left showed their new micro-ATX nforce2 motherboard, on the left/center, there is a KT400 based board, on the center/right, is a KT266 micro-ATX (SDRAM/DDR) board and a KT333 board on the right.

MSI showed their Dual Opteron Board.

      This is the second Opteron board, and the new layout is interesting to see. The memory hub is built in the processor, therefore the northbridge isn't needed in between both the Memory and the CPU. The northbridge is just below the PCI (66 MHz) slot. The southbridge, like the northbridge is at a 45 degree tilt. This is a newer infrastructure. This Opteron supports Single DDR 333 MHz and soon it will have DDR 400 certification for the Opterons.

Newisys had their 1U Opteron Server to show us, and it was loud. Even during the presentations, you could hear it being 30 meters away.

The newisys Opteron Server.

        The cooling system is very good, 4 50mm fans, they look like deltas running at 8000+ rpm. The server utilizes a SCSI raid system. This Opteron board is huge, it covers the whole plate, the power supply is on the far right end, while still being a 1U system.

This notebook displayed the Newisys server specs. It's an unlabeled 2400+ notebook.

     HP was at the event, unfortunately, they didn't show any new AMD desktop/notebook products. They showed some printers and had some handouts, they even gave out some pens with a high intensity LED.

D&H distributing

      D&H distributes computers to resellers and OEM's, to which many of the people that were in the tech tour do. They had many papers and documents on the table.

     After the break, we came back to more presentations. Here, AMD showed some benchmarks and compared it to Pentium 4 HT processors and Dual Xeons, making them look less powerful. AMD wants to be more than the best bang for the buck processor, maybe the Opteron and Athlon 64 will bring more competition on the market.

Conclusion: 

      This Tech tour was smaller than last year, even though it was at the same location, less manufacturers and AMD partners were there. I was expecting many manufacturers, because of the Opteron launch. Overall, it was informative and helpful to be there. I expect the AMD Tech Tour 2004 to have more companies and partners support AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron technologies. Now we wait for the AMD Extreme Reality Check in the fall.

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