An open letter from Greg Vederman...

This is an open letter from Greg Vederman aka "The Vede"

-------------------------------------------------

My name is Greg Vederman. This past Friday I was running PC Gamer magazine as its Editor-in-Chief, and today I’m working at Voodoo/HP as a Business Development Manager. What in the world possessed me to make such a leap…and to not even take a single day off before the transition?!

In a word: Vision

HP has a bold, electrifying vision for the future of PC gaming that I couldn’t help but want to be a part of. Several months ago, Rahul asked me to come aboard and lend a helping hand, and though the decision to do so was not an easy one (choosing to leave a job you’ve poured your heart and soul into for nearly a decade is never easy), it was unequivocally the right one.

I can’t yet go into detail about what we’ve got planned, but suffice it to say, it’s big, and it’s exciting, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun for us, but more importantly, for you. Stay tuned!

-Vede

-------------------------------------------------

I have known Greg for many years, and somehow I always hoped we would end up working together. Well, the stars finally aligned - and Greg has joined our team working out of the Cupertino office.

On behalf of the entire team at HP Gaming, I would like to welcome Greg Vederman to our team -- Greg will be working on the marketing side reporting directly to Paul Campbell.

As Greg says, stay tuned, we do have many exciting things on the horizon.

Henri is leaving AMD....

So someone broke the "news" that Henri was leaving AMD ... Only a few people knew the date (and the fact that he was leaving), so it's ashame that someone would leak this news to the outside without considering the potential reaction from AMD employees, investors, and customers.

Is the fact that Henri is leaving AMD a bad thing? Well, change is always a good thing, and for Henri he will be moving to a very interesting opportunity I'm sure. I don't think he'll miss the cut-throat competition that AMD has faced from Intel. ..and no, there's "no chance in hell" that he'll wind up at Intel - I think he'd rather end up in prison Jack Bauer style. :)

That said, I'm certain that Henri will leave part of his heart at AMD, he loves the company deeply and only wishes well upon them. AMD continues to restructure while trying to build new and compelling products.

I am not going to comment further at this point, but I do wish both AMD and Henri Richard nothing but the best in the future. It's just too bad someone leaked this the way they did. ...and uh... I didn't do it.

Hector Ruiz sent this letter right after the leak:

TO: All Employees
FROM: Hector Ruiz, AMD Chairman and CEO - Dirk Meyer, AMD President and COO
SUBJECT: Henri Richard

We are sad to announce that Henri Richard has made the decision to leave AMD.

When Henri joined AMD in 2002, his primary mission was to establish a world-class global Sales and Marketing organization. It is safe to say that he has accomplished that mission, and he is now ready for a new challenge in his career. While we will certainly miss him, it’s a measure of his success that the organization he leaves behind is fully poised to succeed and capable of maintaining and building the momentum that we have built.

In the last five years, we have increased exponentially our global account footprint, acquiring customers of every caliber, including the top PC and server OEMs around the world. In fact, from Toshiba and Acer to Lenovo, Dell, Sun and HP, we have become a critical strategic partner to our customers and a key component of enterprise solutions and consumer products worldwide.

Commensurate with this growth in our business, and the strength of our corporate and product brands, we have a Sales and Marketing organization that can support and continue to grow our strategic importance to our customers. Nevertheless, we know this was a difficult decision for Henri, especially as we are poised to enjoy the successes of our acquisition of ATI, our upcoming quad-core Barcelona product and our strong product and technology roadmaps.

Henri’s official departure date is still pending, and we will communicate a leadership plan shortly.

Look for a Q&A with Henri to appear on AMD Online in the next day or two. Henri will discuss AMD’s accomplishments over the last five years, and our phenomenal opportunities moving forward.

Please join us in thanking Henri for his leadership and wishing him well in his post-AMD career.

Benchmarks are Wiggedy Wiggedy Whack...

I wrote this article for the latest edition of CPU Magazine. Remember, if you haven't had the opportunity to read this magazine you should go pick up a copy soon.

There has been a lot of speculation about AMD’s new Phenom processor, and up until now the chip’s performance benchmark scores vs. the competition’s were predicted to be somewhat underwhelming. I’d like to address that this month, as well as the validity of benchmarking as it pertains to the customer experience in general.

I like performance benchmarks, but I’m starting to think people are putting too much weight on them and not enough on the overall customer experience. This is roughly as silly as directly equating one’s physical strength to how much he can bench, or comparing drag racing to Formula One racing—there are some profound differences here.

When you really boil it down, no one cares about benchmarks when they are playing a game, churning out a report, or reading a medical image. Let’s face it, on the high end 300 points in 3DMark06 isn’t going to affect gameplay even at the highest resolution with maximum detail. Gamers care that their PCs display the best possible image while delivering the most compelling and most stable gaming experience. Users care that when they turn on their PC it boots reasonably quickly and works with all of their devices. If one of their components fails, they are looking for a simple way of replacing the component with the best access to customer support. Thus there are undeniable differences between overall experience and performance benchmarks. I like to refer to this internally as the “experience benchmark,” and it’s a tough one to measure because it’s so subjective.

Yes, there was a point when gamers thought the only things that mattered were frame rates, but I think that the tide is shifting. Ask any pro gamer to compare two similarly equipped PCs side by side running same game at the same resolution, and I guarantee you that he will have no clue which delivers the highest frame rate. He’ll most likely be inclined to choose the one that he thinks delivers the best image quality.

These changes are occurring because current hardware delivers incredibly high levels of performance and the software has not quite caught up yet, although some games are starting to deliver, like MS Flight Simulator X, Company of Heroes, and upcoming titles such as Hellgate London. Vista introduced new levels of complexity and experience to gamers and enthusiasts alike. Overall the initial experience of Vista sucked, but it has turned a corner and things are beginning to look up thanks to DirectX 10.

So again, I believe that performance benchmarks are not the true measure of a compelling experience. There are many more factors to consider when building and/or buying your next PC. You’ll want to consider operating noise, image quality, ease of access, ease of upgradeability, ease of replacing components, how “quick” it feels when you’re booting it up, storage space, stability, operating system usability, style and design, and, if you are a gamer, how well it delivers in the area of gameplay.

So, AMD decided to unveil Phenom running at 3.0GHz without showing actual benchmarks. What it showed was a game running smoothly with all details enabled, which makes perfect sense to me. And for the record, if you were to benchmark Phenom at 3GHz you would see that it kicks the living crap out of any current AMD or Intel processor—it is a stone cold killer (at 3GHz, now imagine how it would perform if they could squeek some more juice out of it?).

I’m guessing that AMD will be able to launch some parts at higher clocks than it is currently showing in its roadmaps, and if the company can get these chips on shelves in a timely fashion, I think it could be a major coup and could even be the impetus for the turnaround the company so desperately needs. Of course, Intel probably won’t get caught flat-footed, but AMD has to start somewhere.

It’s interesting to note that AMD isn’t showing benchmarks on a part that delivers the goods—perhaps it too is seeing that performance benchmarks are only a small piece of the overall experience puzzle. That said, I suspect there will be some more shaking up at AMD before the sun starts to shine green again.

...is Vista starting to kick ass?

I just heard that Microsoft dropped two patch Vista Fix Packs in order to solve some of the issues we have been seeing in Vista. As a matter of fact, I recently blogged about the issues I was experiencing in Microsoft Flight Sim X, among other games - and what do you know, I get an email in my inbox this morning asking me to download these patches.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979

So I downloaded and installed them - and now I'm flying through Friday Harbor on a float plane - at 2560x1600 with maximum detail enabled. It's so real, I can't even begin to explain the look/feel of the game. As I look down over the water I see the white crests of the waves gurgling in the middle of the bay. I did some whale watching on another flight - and the scenery & sites couldn't be more immersive. Try taking a helicopter through Vegas at night and if you aren't blown away I'll eat my hat!

I should probably apologize to the guys at Nvidia for giving them such a hard time on this, it's good to see that they're getting it right. It will be nice when they do the same for our previous customers who purchased PCs last year and are looking to upgrade to Vista now.

It turns out that I'm still viewing this in DX9 - not even DX10 yet, so let's see the difference when DX10 for FSX arrives.

Intel's Third Nipple...

This article is an extended version of the one written for the latest issue of Custom PC Magazine in the U.K.

When Intel launched Viiv I recall the confusion it provided PC OEMs, System Builders, and Channel partners alike. Like a third nipple no one really understood the value of Viiv or what it was meant to add to the customer experience. If you ask me, Viiv was developed by marketing people to sell more Intel components – for no good reason. I even remember having a discussion with a CEO of another OEM about Viiv and we were laughing at how confusing it was. Although Intel would like to see differently, Viiv is/was a total failure, and in no way should be compared to Centrino.

It seems as if Centrino was developed by engineers in order to improve the experience of owning a notebook – and, luckily for Intel, it somehow got backed into a marketing strategy with a platform name.

Intel Centrino made sense because there was significant value add for the customer – although such value-add is starting to get lost in the shuffle of competition. Thus the difference between Viiv and Centrino is one offers actual benefit to the consumer while the other is just a sales pitch – and a seemingly useless one at that.

Equally disappointing as Viiv was AMD’s attempt to create their own Viiv, calling it LIVE! AMD claims to have developed LIVE! well before Viiv, regardless of when it was developed they still didn't do a good job of communicating what it meant to the consumer. Some at AMD believe that Live! positioned directly against Viiv actually helped AMD in retail. Although AMD has some interesting software offerings with Live! Regardless, I personally think both are crap implementations of pretty much nothing. Remember, this is just my opinion :)

In the ideal world no one should care what sticker is on the outside of the “box” as it pertains to processors. My mom could care less if she had an Intel processor with Viiv or an AMD processor with LIVE! She just wants a computer that’s easy to use. She wants to get on the internet, check her email, play a few games, and use MSN messenger.

As an enthusiast, I don’t care what sticker is on the outside (other than my brand of course) – in fact, we refuse to put AMD, Microsoft, Intel, or Nvidia stickers on the outside of our gaming systems. It’s not about them, and that’s the way it should be. It’s SHOULD be about you, the customer, and nothing more – right? ...In an ideal world perhaps.

...time for a rant.

This goes for Nvidia and ATI video cards – assuming the performance is similar, as long as your machine delivers the best possible experience for your particular application does it really matter which chip is in the machine? I think not. Every time someone from Nvidia sells us on the benefits of SLI over Crossfire, I feel like telling them “tell that to those customers who purchased QUAD SLI and can’t get it to work with Vista...!”

Nvidia Vista drivers are getting better (though not nearly perfect – I still can’t fly a plane from Calgary to Seattle in MS Flight Simulator X without my SLI based system barfing in Vista). Yes, perhaps their drivers for their 8800 series are getting better - but Nvidia still needs to go back and fix the thousand dollar graphics packages that they sold last year - and fast! Customers who spent $1,000 on a dual graphics configuration are asked to disable one in order to run many games – which effectively means they spent $500 on a heat generator that draws power. Though I have experienced issues with ATI, it’s just not nearly as bad. Perhaps it's time for people to stop blaming Microsoft for all of their problems and start fixing them.

Here’s hoping for a future where AMD, Nvidia, Intel and others start focussing on platforms that add value to the customer experience, rather than their bottom line, so we can build systems that make sense.

I suddenly feel like buying a Core 2 Duo!!

...er correction...I suddenly feel like BURNING a Core 2 Duo.

This goes out to the marketing folks at Intel: Perhaps it's time to re-evalutate your ad agency. I would fire them.

This ad sucks. I suddenly feel like throwing my Core 2 Duo out the window. Just what exactly are they trying to say here?