At CES 2010, AMD managed to leverage its floor presence significantly over its
competition in regards to mass crowd attraction and its emphasis on a hardware
performance simplification strategy for the mass consumer market.
Dubbed the “Vision Experience Center,” AMD’s booth in the Grand Lobby
was also significantly larger than the Nvidia cubicle right next to it
which featured a single demonstration of 3D Vision Surround.
Back in September, we wrote about the company’s introduction to a new
hardware buying guide program called Vision. In perspective, it is
basically the equivalent of Intel’s “star” rating program that the
company uses to differentiate performance levels between its Core
series products. AMD Vision gives mass consumers and non-enthusiasts a
broad oversimplification of the hardware differences between the
devices they see on display at the company’s booth.
On Tueday, January 5th, the company announced Vision Pro Technology, a
new commercial PC platform brand that delivers a “superior visual
computing experience” for business-oriented notebooks and desktops. It
supports Trusted Platform Module (TPM), AMD’s Enhanced Virus Protection
(EVP), AMD client virtualization technology (AMD-V) and well as out of
the box support for multi-monitor configurations. Several notebooks
were displayed carrying the Vision Pro logo as well as others with
Vision and Vision Premium logos.
AMD’s latest innovation in mobile graphics capabilities was also
demonstrated on two Acer Ferrari 10.1-inch notebooks. Since 2008, the
company has been silently showcasing a new external GPU technology for
notebooks, dubbed eXternal Graphics Platform, which allows notebooks
equipped with proprietary XGP connectors to harness the power of its
new Mobile Radeon HD 5000-series from a convenient, 50-watt box.
The company also had several large triple-monitor EyeFinity setups on
display running DiRT 2 in DirectX 11 greatness at very high
resolutions. Surprisingly, each setup was using only a single Radeon HD
5870 and the graphics quality was impressive to say the least.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s largest significant presence resided in the upper
level of the South Hall, where an occasional mass of journalists,
buyers and analysts would stop by to observe demonstrations of the
latest Tegra-powered multitouch slate devices.
All in all, both companies experienced much more floor demand than 2009
and we look forward to observing the resonating effects of each
company’s unique CES marketing campaigns in the upcoming months.