June 19, 1999

·        More goodies to give away from Microsoft this week, including a force-feedback joystick.

·        Lots of interesting chip news was happening this week. AMD may name its forthcoming K7 chip the Athlon in an attempt to create a brand name for the widely anticipated processor. The K7/Athlon is expected to be the first Intel competitor to actually beat Intel at its own game—reports I’ve seen suggest that the K7/Athlon may outperform the current generation of Pentium IIIs at similar processor speeds. The chip is expected to debut at speeds of 500, 550 and 600 MHz sometime next month and boasts both 256K of onchip L2 cache, as well as a 200 MHz bus connection between the processor and chipset (although not to memory). The bottom line is that this should be one fast chip. The news is even more interesting because Intel confirmed that the next generation PIII processor, which was originally scheduled for release in September, has slipped back to November. The new generation will have 256K of onboard L2 cache as well and will debut at speeds of 600 MHz. To help the company compete against the K7/Athlon, Intel will apparently now introduce a 600 MHz version of the current Pentium III design sometime this summer.

·        One set of chips Intel did release on time were its new 400 MHz Mobile Pentium II and Mobile Celeron processors. The only significant difference between the two chips—other than price—is that the 400 MHz mobile Pentium II has 256K of high-speed L2 cache and the 400 MHz Celeron has only 128K. As you would expect, along with the debut of the faster new chips were new notebooks based on the 400 MHz parts from all the major vendors, including IBM, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, and so on. A new Dell Latitude Cpi R400GT with a 14.1” display, 64MB of RAM, 4.8GB drive, and 400-MHz processor runs $2,499. Look for systems with both types of chips to be widely available.

·        Speaking of notebooks, IBM offered an interesting new entry this week with the ThinkPad 240, the company’s first take at the ultrathin, ultra-light notebook market. The $2,000 240 is less than an inch thick and weighs under three pounds, but still features a 300 MHz Pentium II processor, 12.1” screen, 64 MB of RAM and a 6.4 GB hard drive. Of course, like all notebooks of this size, the floppy and CD-ROM drive are external, which is unfortunate.

·        Several companies this past week debuted slick new all-in-one desktop PCs that incorporate flat-panel monitors. Gateway was first out the gate, so to speak, with their Profile line. Priced from just under $2,000, the Profile systems feature a 15” active matrix display, 400 MHz K6-2 processor, and 64 MB of memory and a 4 MB ATI Rage Pro 2D/3D accelerator. They also include a built-in 56K modem and 10/100 Mbit Ethernet connection. The only expansion, other than through your standard peripheral ports, is via two Type II PC Card slots, both of which support the CardBus and Zoomed Video standards. The $1,999 model features a 24X CD-ROM and 4.3 GB drive while the $2,299 model features a 2X DVD-ROM drive and hardware MPEG-2 decoder, and a 6.4 GB drive. Packard Bell NEC’s entry into this LCD PC market is the $2,499 Z1. The Z1 is powered by a 450 MHz PIII and includes a 15.1” display, 96 GB of RAM, an 8.4 GB hard drive and a DVD-ROM drive. It also features both a 56K modem and 10/100 Mbit Ethernet connection but includes an 8 MB Savage S4-based graphics accelerator. Look for even more of these integrated designs from other PC makers in the future.

·        One of the last holdouts in the low-cost PC business has finally dived in. Dell Computer this week announced their new Dimension L series, which will start at $899 including a 15” monitor when they ship in July. The systems will be based around 400 MHz Celeron processors and the new 810 chipset, which integrates a video accelerator directly onto the motherboard—thereby reducing the overall system’s cost. The systems are also expected to have 32 MB of memory and come with a basic software configuration.

·        Just to remind you that the Internet and popular web sites are far from being stable and always available, a couple of relatively large web sites suffered some big outages this past week. The most notorious was auction site Ebay, which saws its stock valuation drop over a billion dollars because of several major blackouts. In addition, a relatively new site that I talked about a while back called Jump.com has been down for several days now. While the site, which provides online calendaring, is still in its beta phase, it’s not a good sign. Frankly, it also shows that the web itself is not really reliable enough for really, really important information yet.

·        Speaking of things that are down and out, the technology known as DIVX breathed its last this past week. Originally touted as an alternative to DVD in which you viewed movies on a pay-per-view basis, DIVX never did very well in the marketplace and Circuit City—the company primarily behind the standard—has killed it. The good news is this should now ensure that DVD and DVD-ROM should take off because there won’t be any lingering doubts about competing formats.

·        IBM unveiled some impressive new hard drive technology on both ends of the size spectrum this week with the announcement of both a 340 MB Microdrive and a 37 GB desktop drive. Ironically, both drives will cost around $500 when they become available in early fall, although they’ll be used for widely varying applications. The little drive, which fits into a PC Card Type II slot with an adapter it’s so small, will be used in small handheld devices, such as PDAs, digital cameras and what have you. The 37 GB drive, on the other hand, will show up in high-end desktop PCs and servers.

·        Adobe made several announcements regarding their popular line of image editing applications. First of all, Photoshop 5.5, which retails for around $600 new, with upgrades to 5.0 users costing $129 and $199 for users of previous versions, combines all the capabilities of Photoshop 5.0 with the web image handling capabilities of Adobe’s ImageReady 2.0 bundled into the product. In fact, ImageReady will no longer exist as a standalone product. In addition, Adobe will be formally releasing a Photoshop LE 5.0 Version for $99 as a separate retail product. Previously, the only way to get this version—which includes all of the features of its sibling except for some high-end printing features—was bundled with a scanner or digital camera.