Computex roundup

The doors have closed on another instalment of the annual IT extravaganza known as Computex, and as anyone who has spent any time observing the Taiwanese this year has found, it was both more of the same and more of the completely

The doors have closed on another instalment of the annual IT extravaganza known as Computex, and as anyone who has spent any time observing the Taiwanese this year has found, it was both more of the same and more of the completely out-of-left-field.

Intel made up for lost ground from last year by shoving its signage everywhere; AMD was trying to outdo Intel with its announcement of the multiprocessor chipset; and VIA gobsmacked everyone with its P4X266 chipset for the Pentium 4 - developed without Intel's knowledge.

The glitz at Computex as always is supplied by the booth babes. Yes, sex still sells in the Republic of China. Troops of females with the looks of Japanese game show hostesses yelled, jumped and gyrated their way on stages across the show floor. Ahhh, there's no mistaking it; Taiwan does what Taiwan does best. I saw more of the scanners, motherboards, graphics cards, modems, monitors, keyboards and mice that we've come to expect, but this year also saw a noticeable shift to interest in broadband technologies. Wireless devices, DSL hardware and the like were there in abundance.

For me one of the highlights was the SpeedO system exhibited by a company called Yuan with a motherboard and GeForce MX200 combination which literally blew other 2D graphics workstations off the map in redraw performance. The other individual highlights were a 3D scanner using a 3-camera arrangement, and a remarkable digital camera that came with a built-in dye-sub printer, the closest thing to a digital Polaroid in concept, but worlds away from the Polaroid in the actual quality of the reproduced image.
-David Lin, our man in Taiwan