Other significant announcements expected next week include the following.
- Advanced Micro Devices plans to use the show to tout a large corporate contract with a Fortune 500 customer. AMD chief executive Hector Ruiz is expected to announce in a Tuesday morning keynote that the company will use Hewlett-Packard's new Compaq D315 business desktop, which is powered by AMD's Athlon XP processor.
- Microsoft is expected to announce more manufacturers for its Windows XP Media Center Edition, currently found in the US only on one line of PCs, from HP. Additionally, Microsoft will show off a new application that will become part of the Office bundle, according to sources.
- On the handheld front, Dell Computer will launch its Axim x5 line, while HP will unveil two new iPaqs. With Dell's entry into the handheld market, Microsoft has 30 licensees of its Pocket PC OS. But rival PalmSource, a separate subsidiary of Palm, which oversees the Palm operating system, will be announcing a new licensee of its OS at the show.
- Dell may also clarify whether it will use Intel's Itanium 2 chip or AMD's Hammer chip in high-end servers. The company has said it is evaluating both chips and will make its path more clear by the end of the year. Despite their earlier criticism of Itanium, Dell executives have recently voiced a softening attitude toward the chip.
- The debate over standards in the DVD burning market will continue as consumer-electronics maker Samsung joins the battle with its first DVD-RW drive. For the most part, the formats a company supports generally depends on whether the company is in the consumer-electronics or the PC market. Those in the consumer-electronics market, such as Panasonic and Pioneer (the exception being Apple), tend to side with the DVD Forum and its DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM formats. The major members of the DVD+RW Alliance tend to be PC companies, such as Dell and HP. Both sides are trying to establish their respective formats as the dominant ones in the industry. The rival trade groups for the two main formats will have separate press events touting new specifications and advancements in drive speeds.
- Graphics chipmaker Nvidia will announce when its NV30 processor, which will be sold as the GeForce 5, will hit the market. Nvidia was expected to have the chip available in October, but problems having to do with shifting to a new chipmaking process bumped it back.
- In the area of high-end computers, NEC will show off its TX7 server, a machine with 32 Itanium 2 processors. Broadcom, whose ServerWorks subsidiary makes the crucial chipsets that join server processors to the rest of a computer, will tout its latest products for thin "blade" servers. And Intel will describe new server chipsets of its own that boost the "system bus" that speeds the processor connection to the chipset from 400MHz to 533MHz.
For full Comdex coverage see ZDNet UK's Comdex 2002 News Focus.
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