Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Vista Lab 2007: Day Two

Session 2: Windows Live
Bruce Kasrel kicked off the second session of the day with several members of the Windows Live team. 465 million people use a Windows Live services every month, so the service as a whole has a lot of traffic and interested users. Windows Live has so many components, it's sometimes a bit difficult to fully grasp all aspects of their online services. We were shown a cool demo of the Windows Live mapping/location search, all in 3D – the presenter was using an Xbox Live controller to fly around the city of Las Vegas and there were astonishingly accurate 3D recreations of the massive hotels on the strip.

Session 3: Windows Vista Ultimate (Mitch Gatchalian)
They explained that Vista Ultimate is aimed at prosumers: people that want to use their work laptops for some personal things, and their personal computers who want to do some business-specific tasks on them. I'm not sure how much I buy into that – don't all people do that now? They went into what most of us in the room were wondering about: Ultimate Extras. Ultimate Extras are software and services that are going to be exclusive only to systems running Vista Ultimate. He stressed that the Ultimate Extras are something that will be provided over time, not just at launch.

Windows Hold 'Em: This has already been leaked previous, but it's simply Texas Hold 'Em. There's no online or multiplayer play – it's you versus the computer. The graphics are nice enough, but I don't see anything else particularly special here – this looks like the kind of game you'd play on an airplane when you had nothing better to do. Which, if the people around me going to and from CES demonstrate, happens a lot.

Multi-User Interface Language Packs: This is one of those extras that will be completely useless for some people (such as myself), but incredibly useful for some people who live in a multi-language household. The demo was very simple – he logged out of the English language version, and logged back in as a user configured for Japanese. Features such as this either work or they don't – and this one did. For some users, this will be the "killer app" portion of Vista Ultimate.

Digital Publications: a collection of tips and tricks for getting the most out of Windows Vista Ultimate. They said it was a "backstage pass" to the world of Windows Ultimate Extras. This strikes me as being of dubious value – if you’re a hardcore geek shelling out extra bucks to get Vista Ultimate, do you really need digital publications offering you help?

Windows DreamScene: This is a new visualization experience, offering high-resolution (HD) video on your desktop. There's a new genre of videos that won't get in the way of productivity, which is certainly needed, as there are only certain types of videos that won't distract you from other things on your PC – Carmen Electra doing her striptease workout won't fall into that category. The example they showed was an extremely subtle video – it was essentially an animated version of one of the wallpapers that already comes with Vista. The animated version had some subtle motion effects, generated “gleams”, etc. DreamScene also smart enough to not run when the user is in full-screen mode, and one would hope that it's fully DirectX driven and will have minimal impact on the CPU. If your system can run Aero, it can run DreamScene – it thankfully doesn't require DirectX 10.

An additional Vista Ultimate feature not mentioned in our session, but unveiled in the Bill Gates keynote, is the Microsoft R&D photo compositing tool. It basically allows you to take part of one photo that you like, and put in another photo over-writing a part you don't like. The example they used was to take a photo of three children, and pick the best poses (eyes open, smiling) from each and make the photo you wished you would have gotten. It's some very interesting technology and makes Vista Ultimate more personally compelling on a personal level. How well will it work outside the R&D labs? We'll see.


Figure 5: The Windows Vista Ultimate Pitch-Man.

Ultimately I'm not completely sold on the added value of Vista Ultimate – I think there's potential there, especially if the Microsoft R&D labs continue to crank out cool software tools that are made available only to Vista Ultimate owners, but ultimately right out of the gate there's nothing I found overly compelling. Six months after launch, perhaps I'll feel different if more add-ons are available. They're launching a Windows Vista Ultimate Web site to keep people updated.

Session 4: AMD (Patrick Moorhead)
Patrick Moorhead, the VP of Advance Marketing, kicked off the fourth session of the day. Like pretty much other vendor, he said that AMD has the best Vista experience – which, he acknowledged to a laugh, all vendors claim. With their recent purchase of ATI, AMD has a powerful portfolio of technologies to leverage in building a great Windows Vista experience.


Figure 6: Patrick Moorehead from AMD.

He quoted an interesting task – over 85% of current PC users have at least six applications running all the time (anti-virus, email client, Web browser, instant messaging application, etc.). With that many applications running, multi-core CPUs become more necessary so as to not bog down the computing experience – which is definitely true. Moorhead noted that console gaming has accelerated multi-core development, which can only be good news for the rest of us. We have the multi-core hardware, but software is sadly lagging behind badly.


Figure 7: AMD's next-generation processor.

Moorehead talked about AMD's quad core processor – this is native quad-core with direct connect architecture, due out the middle of 2007. They're projecting a 40% performance increase, with a 60% improvement in per-watt processing. This processor will be thermal and socket compatibility with Socket F. Unlike Intel, AMD doesn't force vendors to use a bundled wireless chipset solution – they'll work with Aetheros, Broadcomm, and others. Moorhead trumpeted this as a big benefit, because there are pre-802.11n laptops on the market today with AMD CPUs, but none officially from the Intel Centrino platform (though you can certainly get non-Centrino-branded Intel-based laptops that use pre-802.11b chipsets). They hinted at the Windows Vista Digital Cable Tuner, but when several people in the room pointed out that it's all public and people like Robert are talking about it, they told us a bit more about it.

AMD saw the future of computing where video and images were paramount, which was a driving factor in their decision to purchase ATI. Their vision of the future is a product called Fusion: a product that combined CPU and GPU functionality in ways we haven't seen today. They want to take x86 software across all sorts of form factors: PCs, laptops, phones, PDAs. They believe the time is right for CPU/GPU silicon-level integration. You have to be a pretty hardcore geek to understand the impact this will have (I admit I can't fully grasp it myself), but it really boils down to the fact that today the CPU and GPU share no silicon. They can talk to each other, yes, but they can't share resources and instructions – this is going to change with Fusion. This is a long-term play for AMD – Moorehead said it will be a five to six year horizon.

I really hope AMD's quad-core processor lives up to the hype, because Intel's Core 2 Duo processors wipe the floor with AMD's best processors - at much less heat and power consumption. AMD has a lot to live up to!