Computer Systems
If you had a hard time deciding whether buying a PC was the most sensible or senseless thing you could do this year, you weren't alone.
Circumstances conspired to put new PCs on shelves at some of the most attractive price points consumers were ever likely to see, but that wasn't enough to prevent analysts predicting that PC sales growth would go into the negative for the first time in 15 years.
The late arrival of Windows XP, a growing preference among consumers for PC-substitute devices, problems faced by PC manufacturers and complacency among PC owners culminated in a serious decline in demand for PCs. With sales growth charts sloping in the wrong direction on the eve of a recession, Intel and AMD entered an aggressive price war -- the latter making a grab for a bigger share of chip market and the former cutting prices to retain it. As the price of CPUs fell, system builders passed the savings on. Just to keep things interesting the price of SDRAM fell to historically low levels, as paying less than AU$80 for 128M of PC100 or PC133 RAM became common place.
The weapons of choice
Intel's Pentium 4 faced serious challenges from AMD's the Athlon 4 (Thunderbird core) and a new version of the chip based on the Palomino core released in October, the Athlon XP. But it was just as much a war of words as it was silicon, as the two companies engaged in a campaign to define performance and speed.
Intel kept it simple for consumers: the bigger the numbers the better. However, AMD who had consistently out-performed Pentium 4 with slower processors, tried to woo consumers with a more sophisticated branding technique and message.
It was never more fully articulated than when they announced a campaign to establish an alternative performance metric at the launch of the Athlon XP series --the True Performance Initiativeâ€"which carried a new nomenclature intended to reflect performance rather than raw clock-speed.
Intel, on the other hand, launched its macroprocessing campaign and celebrated 20 years of personal computing by carrying it across the 2GHz barrier. Macroprocessing was the beginning of an aggressive campaign to promote consumer digital audio and video technologies that will boost demand for processing power. Does anyone remember Intel's NetBurst architecture and the Pentium III advertising campaign? Be on the look out for something very similar this Christmas.
Consumers had quietly been communicating their own message in their action, or, to be accurate, lack of it. It was no better summed up than by family man and engineering manager, Michael Black, who gave the following quote to The Wall Street Journal Online in August.
-For what we need right now, there's no killer [software] that's pushing us to buy that new PC."
On the home front
Analyst commentary on Intel's strategy with the Pentium 4 suggested that another facet of personal computing was crying out for performance improvements: the Internet.
Broadband Internet connections commenced in 1999 but only started to gain traction in the consumer market early in 2001. Widening the aperture that had prevented rich, data-heavy forms of Internet content such as digital audio and video from reaching home users, demand for storage increased end-to-end.
CD recording technology became affordable, higher capacity DVD recording started on its own path to the consumer market and IDE quietly made its first century.
Western Digital released the first 100G IDE hard drive and other familiar names in the storage space were showing off new innovations. Iomega released the 20G Peerless portable disk storage device after Imation challenged the company's ZIP disks as the removable drive technology du jour. HP tried to help indecisive consumers with a technology dilemma releasing a combination DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. CompactFlash finally managed to catch-up with IBM's Microdrive, and fend off competition from increasingly popular SD card storage solutions, becoming available in 1G capacity late August.
There was also a few unfamiliar names making strides in the area. A Singapore company created a handheld technology that could store 10G of multimedia files, the Terapin Mine.
RAMBUS: age will not weary it
The biggest casualty of the war was RDRAM (better known as RAMBUS memory). RDRAM is proprietary technology developed by RAMBUS in cooperation with Intel, which had options to purchase 10 million shares in RAMBUS at $US1 dollar each. Though it was technically superior to SDRAM and its higher performance successor DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM, the consumer market considered it too expensive and it became something of a legacy for Pentium 4 processors in the value end of the market. The processor was tied to the technology through chipsets that supported it exclusive of other RAM technologies.
Not wanting to dissuade the corporate market form upgrading to Pentium 4 nor shorten the Pentium III's lifecycle, Intel was placed between a rock and a hard place. Eventually the company loosened its commitment to RDRAM releasing the i845 chipset that supports cheaper SDRAM. However, to protect RAMBUS in the performance space, Intel increased the guard on its Pentium 4 chipset patent.
VIA Technologies invited Intel's wrath when it used Intel's chipset technology to manufacture a motherboard that allowed DDR SDRAM to be used in conjunction with the Pentium 4, giving Intel 850 RDRAM and i845 SDRAM motherboards a strong competitor. The two companies have been in a legal pie fight ever since; spurious law suits and counter-suits have been filed in an public stand-off that has escalated from Intel attempting to derail VIA's motherboard to VIA trying to put the brakes on the Pentium 4 production line altogether.
Are you being served?
Intel proved it was serious about entering the server space dominated by Unix-based solution providers Sun Microsystems, HP and IBM, releasing the 64-bit Itanium CPU to developers. Before merging with HP, Compaq announced that it would discontinue development of its Alpha chip, transferring the intellectual property behind it (staff mainly) to the Itanium development team. Thes quid pro quo has never fully been disclosed.
IBM and Sun Microsystem's released new versions of their own mainframe class servers: Sun released its Sun Fire 15K server and Big Blue released the p690 (codenamed Regatta) days later.
AMD produced its first dual processor chipset for the Workstation market, the MP760 and the Athlon MP processor but this is as far as the company is likely to try to penetrate into the corporate space in the near future.
Noteable mentions:
Athlon XP, Pioneer DVR-A03, HP 9000ci DVD/CD-RW combo drive, Iomega Peerless portable 20G disk drive, Terapin Mine, Lexmark C720 laser printer
Unmentionables:
RDRAM (or RAMBUS memory), Sony Memory Stick, LaCie DVD-RAM drive
Notebooks
Notebook manufacturers faced conflicting challenges this year; the three most distinct demands coming from the market were desktop replacement, portability and wireless.
This year the laptops that negotiated the line of best fit between these features most closely were the Toshiba Portege 4000, the HP OmniBook 6100 and IBM's ThinkPad T series notebooks. Each of these slim units weighed under 3kgs, and had combination of all or many of the following features: integrated WiFi capability, onboard optical storage technology -- be it CD-RW, DVD or CD-ROM-- and generous processing power.
The Apple iBook, which became the darling of the educational market for its bright colours and lively image, graduated to the corporate market this year. Re-launched under with a sober brushed metal look, a 500MHz processor and was one of the first to offer an optional CD-RW/DVD combo drive.
The year's biggest disappointment would have to be the Crusoe series of processors. Promising ultra-low power consumption Transmeta won orders for its Crusoe processor from almost every major portable manufacturer. However, as a result of the tech slow-down, the failure first examples of the technology deliver and problems with the Crusoe TM5800 manufacturers slowly loosened their commitment to Crusoe, scaling back plans for products based on the chip. Transmeta now appears to be looking to the intelligent appliance market for revenue and some have commented that the company is running out of development resources.
Intel has done its best to ensure that Transmeta is vying for the smallest portion of the portable technology pie as possible. Intel released it's own super-low power x86 chip technology; the Intel Pentium III processor-M (codenamed Tualatin) and the 830M mobile processing chipset. Toshiba and Dell applauded its appearance.
If you're to believe Toshiba, 2001 is the last year you're likely to find notebooks sold with serial ports and floppy drives. It appears that Microsoft has encouraged notebook manufacturers to make room for USB and portable memory technology is making the floppy look like a wasted spindle.
Notable mentions: Gateway Solo 3450, Apple PowerBook G4 Titanium, Gateway Solo 9550 Pentium III-M
