f1r3fly: the backstory and birth of a concept

Since we unveiled the concept gaming notebook, the HP f1r3fly, at CES, many people have asked where the design came from, what were we thinking when we created it, and why aren’t we launching it. Even though it's widely considered taboo to discuss what goes on behind the scenes I thought this story was cool enough to share with everyone.  

Here’s a bit of its history.

Sometime in 2004 I took a Southwest flight to...somewhere. 

I don’t recall exactly where I was going, but I do distinctly recall the flight because I sat directly in front of some guy on the jump seat. I thought the jump seats were cool, because they face backwards instead of forwards – and sitting on one seemed like a good idea at the time. Having never flown on Southwest I had no idea that I’d be banging my knees against this guy the entire flight. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I chose the seat because I prefer sitting at the front of the plane and I wanted off as soon as possible.

Well, as fate would have it, the guy I was knocking knees with worked with Intel Capital, and his boss, who happened to be a director of Intel Capital, was sitting right behind him. I was amazed actually, coming from a small company, that these guys were flying Southwest. Apparently Craig Barrett only flew Southwest, too. I thought that was an interesting view of their company culture compared to AMD whose execs flew around on executive class or jets.

Anyway, we started to talk about Voodoo after my seatmate got a look at my laptop. We spoke about some of the cool things we were working on, including liquid cooling, silent systems, etc. One thing led to another and the director eventually gave me his card and told me that he wanted to meet with us when he came to Calgary. 

He followed through, and we went for dinner and spoke about a few ideas. Fast forward to some months later and a team of people from Intel visited our offices with a very cool concept notebook design. I don’t recall the code name of the product, but I do remember the slides, and being excited with the ideas. 

Little did I know that the gentleman who visited Calgary reported directly to a key figure at Intel.  This leader is known for creating the group that designed the Intel Centrino and without question helped save Intel. His Intel Concept Team is the same team who worked with us on Envy once we joined HP – but f1refly was the first product we started. The f1r3fly notebook was designed to be a juggernaut of gaming and performance – it featured dual screens, a really neat audio system, and a unique keyboard and touchpad layout. 

Once the acquisition of Voodoo happened, the Intel concept team visited our office in Cupertino and at my request they brought the designs with them again. 

From Intel’s perspective, they wanted to showcase their new quad core processors on an extreme behemoth of a portable PC. For HP Voodoo, the goal was to come up with a mobile version of Blackbird: one that would deliver killer performance with little sacrifice.

Even more interesting is the story about how we went from Nvidia SLI to AMD Crossfire graphics due to a last minute decision from one of our partner companies which changed the fundamental working design of this product.  

We had no choice but to invite AMD to the table to help come up with a competing graphics solution. Indeed it was an interesting collaboration, because AMD was tasked to come up with mobile ready drivers and hardware which would deliver the highest level of performance possible on a dual screen platform.  It was funny at time because the people on Intel's side refused to refer to the AMD team as "AMD".  Instead we all knew them as ATI.  We even designed a commemorative f1r3fly T-Shirt to mark the historic partnership.  

Yes, this partnership was historic and memorable.  It was run by our renegade program manager from Taiwan, Luca D (who never takes no for an answer), and along side this we created the Voodoo Envy.  Luca would hold weekly meetings, and everyone put their competitive differences aside in order to help us see this concept through. 

   

This leads us to today, with the f1r3fly concept – a total collaboration between Intel and HP, with additional help from AMD. It also leads us to the HP Firebird with Voodoo DNA, which shares many of the inherent concepts and innovations of the f1r3fly, including an energy efficient external power supply—what you see in the HP Firebird is a slightly modified version of what we originally created for the f1r3fly. In the future we may look at other concepts from the f1r3fly and bring them over to other products. 

So, why aren’t we launching the f1r3fly? There are many reasons: a combination of the economy, customer buying patterns, technology changes, and our goal to scale globally has changed the way we develop products. We also have access to tier 1 ODMs now, with their best lines, and we want to leverage the scale of HP while taking advantage of the Voodoo namesake and brand. We learned a great deal from this collaboration, and it certainly won’t be our last. 

So, that’s the story of f1r3fly in a nutshell. The f1r3fly platform means a great deal to a select few people who put their heart and soul into the development.  The teams from Intel and HP put a ton of work into this concept, and ATI (...er AMD) stepped in along the way to help as well.  I thought it would be a great idea to show it off at CES so their incredible efforts would be recognized. 

We also appreciate the feedback, good and bad, so keep it coming!