This year we had no booth on the CeBIT and there were no important meetings for us there, so I just ran across the CeBIT yesterday with a couple of friends and I took a lot of photos. Here are my impressions from the CeBIT 2007, I hope you enjoy it.
Let's get started. This is the train ride to the west entrance. It will not be that empty on the way back.
The CeBIT fair ground (photo was taken a little bit later). There were about 25 filled halls with a lot of exhibitors and over 200 000 expected visitors.
The first booth we saw. Not really spectacular, but we started with some boring halls in the beginning and left the entertainment halls for the end.
RFID chips are used to track packages here. The sensors in the front are used to check if a package has left or entered a storage facility.
Heise.de had a booth too and we saw a couple of Linux penguins in that hall too. The usual get 2 CT editions for free abo could be ordered here too. They also had a Sony Play station 3 running Linux on the other side. The funniest thing was some other booth in that hall where some woman announced that you can win a "Sony Play 3 Station ". We laughed our asses off.
Some Chebaba dude or chick was handing out candy.
The big companies SAP and Microsoft almost filled the whole hall 5 together.
Microsoft did not have anything new to show because most of its products have been released in the past months. It will take another 2-3 years for the next cycle. There were only some smaller handheld devices with Windows XP (like the Origami from last year) that looked interesting and a lot about boring business and security. I would have liked to see some info about Longhorn Server.
An Asian woman wanted to take this Audio sport car with her.
This is the data storage server for the whole Microsoft booth. There are 2 rack servers in here and about 24 disk drives. Some guy from Microsoft came over and explained to us that the server got 4 TB data storage and runs several services, all Windows based. But we smiled a little thinking of our little server at home, which is just a normal PC running Windows 2003 x64 (you will need that for any drive bigger than 2 TB), but got 4 TB on a single RAID 5 already, with some other backup and boot drives too. And it is not as noisy as the servers we saw here at the CeBIT.
Some cool relaxing chairs near the AMD business booth. There were a lot of water fountains in hall 1 and 2.
Another server with about 64 disk drives running a Windows Cluster service and there were showing virtualization here and explained how cool it is to have multiple virtual servers, which can balance each other. I did not wanted to spoil them by telling them that using virtual servers will just throw away almost 50% of your performance away. Using it for performance critical applications did not make much sense to me. Again, just 6.1 TB on this data server, not much if you ask me. In a few years everyone will have more memory on their home computers ^^
A blue haired girl at the ASUS booth. I was not sure if she is really from ASUS as she was handing out something to win some Intel stuff. Later I found out all the blue haired girls were from Intel and they were at 8 different booths, which you had to visit to win something boring. I would guess the total number of people how did that was zero. BTW: Did I mentioned that my mainboard that stopped working last week when I came back from the GDC was from ASUS? :-(
A Porsche! There was a PC inside, but for some reason the car was more exciting (and expensive). You could even get a price if you ask, but you know, when you have to ask, you can't afford it anyways.
Racing games all over the place. Why does everyone going to a fair want to play racing games? And why does everyone just show racing games? Man, this is boring! Ups, I did a racing game too, maybe I should be more exciting about this ...
The Samsung booth in hall 1. Samsung is a cool company anyways with all their support for e-sports and their range of cool affordable products, but everyone at this booth was extremely friendly. Most other booth in hall 1 were just focused on business and did not even want to be asked about anything.
A new laptop, which got the new Nvidia GeForce 8000 Go card in it. Coming out in 1-2 months. Pretty exicting. Makes my new laptop with a GeForce 5900 GS look much less impressive.
Here are the specs. If even such a small laptop can have a GeForce 8000 and do DirectX 10 stuff, bigger laptops will have some cool graphic boards too in the future.
The new 30 inch screen from Samsung. It has a better image than the 30 inch Dell, but it is still very expensive and the Dell monitors are much more affordable (especially the 24 inch). The resolution on a 30 inch is great: 2560x1600 ^^
Some guy was zooming in on girls with this new camera, but I was watching the watcher.
Two girls from Intel (again and again, they were all over the place) checking out each other. Not really hot, but getting to it ..
A sphere of monitors at the very unfriendly IBM booth. They had some business people explain the marketing ideas of IBM in Second Live, but they had no idea about the application and their "sims" were empty like no ones else. But who cares, as long as people keep pumping money into "3D worlds and presentations" they will keep going. IMO the Second Life technology is not really perfect for virtual presentations. There is no easy way to login and most of the required technology is not even implemented yet (Second Live does not even have voice support).
This is how the sphere monitors are controlled by the way. Each one has a laptop on its back. I'm not sure this is the best way to do it, but we are still on the IBM booth, no reason to be clever here.
A little later we saw Commodore. Every year someone new buys the name and brings out a couple of shitty products, when will it ever stop? For example they got some "new" 4GB mp3 players with some simple display, which costs 250 bucks. By the way, other companies like Samsung and Creative had similar shitty mp3 players and marketed them as "new" too. The walkman was something new, but everything after that is pretty much the same. I just do not get the point when people start speaking about "taking your music anywhere with you". Are you freaking kidding me?
For that you get a Zune or iPod with 30GB and much better technology. I got a Zune from the GDC by the way and it does not work here in Germany yet. First of all you are not allowed to download or pay for anything when you are not in the US or Canada (the only countries where the Zune is released yet), and then you can't even install the Zune software on a German operating system. There are some hacks to get around some issues and having direct access to the Zune drive (very useful), but they only work on a English windows version or XP. Here is the link if you are in the same trouble.
Did you notice that no booth chicks will look at me when I'm trying to take a picture? I will keep trying till the end of the day ^^ Please also note that we entered the entertainment halls and everything will look more like the Games Convention now.
An Asian RPG game, which has a really cool kill counter in the lower right. The game looked very manga like, but still had realistic graphics. I have to check back what this game was about later.
R2D2 was there too. Actually it was a pretty cool robot that is already available in Japan and it has cameras, can move around and it can blink and beep like the "real" one from the movies.
Hmm, this might look like a completely empty booth, but actually the very exciting dude there was showing invisible devices. Amazing, isn't it?
More cases and a lot of different displays on them. They all cost around 40 bucks, which is not much for computer cases anymore and the quality gets better and better.
The World Cyber Games 2007 Euro Championship was in hall 23 of the CeBIT. But it only was played from the 15. to the 18. March and it was all over when we were going into the hall.
Holy macaroni. This girl from Razer was throwing something at me while I was taking this picture. We could maybe count that as a girl looking at me while I'm taking a picture, but she was out to get me. This does not count, let's go on. And no, I did not catch the bandage.
AMD and ATI (also AMD) were in hall 23 too. Try to find the laptop facing in the wrong direction on this picture!
A cool Formula One racing car, which reminds me of the Speedy Racer Mod of the Racing Game. Ups, I already said too much ...
The ATI chick "Ruby" looks good as always.
And some cool water cooled gear with AMD stuff in it.
And finally some mainboards with AMD chipsets on a wall. Not sure if I would agree with AMD's new slogan "Smarter Choice" as they are currently very much behind the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs and the Nvidia 8800 GPUs are also much faster than their ATI counterparts!
At the XFX booth the famous Quake world champion "Fatality" was playing against random people. Those two police girls where protecting the gamer area. Some people even wanted be be arrested .. strange people these gamers.
And another picture of those two nice girls. They had to be alert all the time, so I'm ok with them not noticing me taking pictures.
And this is Fatality playing against some random guy. They were playing Quake 4. The announcer had a pretty boring job:
00:00: The match begins ..
00:06: 1 to 0 for Fatality already
00:10: 2 to 0 for Fatality
..
00:36: 8 to -1 for Fatality ..
etc.
Oh no, we are at the Games Convention, aren't we? Just for a t-shirt everyone is going crazy again!
Now that is a pretty cool mouse. Mine can not do anything like that, I'm happy when it even works at all.
More cases, much more cases!
Power supplies and cases, almost like in a computer shop, just the prices are missing.
In hall 24 we saw a lot of hardware vendors, mainly for mainboards, graphic cards, power supplies and coolers. Zalman has really grown big. They got so many new products.
They do not only have coolers, power supplies and water cooling systems, but also cases like this one: The Z-Machine!
G.Skill memory. DDR3 and faster memory with 900Mhz, 1000+ MHz and more coming soon.
A pretty cool looking server mainboard for 2 CPUs and 16 memory slots, uffa!
Something is missing here? A nicely build PC with corsair ram and LEDs on them is there. A keyboard is there too and even speakers, but where the hell does the gamer look at? At a white wall?
DDR3 memory is coming. No, it is nothing really new, graphic cards have that already, but now the big memory sticks for the mainboards are going to be faster too. Also notice the cool looking cooler and the 8800 GTX build in here. I guess it is a Core 2 Duo system too, probably the X6800, which is still very expensive. The prices will drop in April however. Exciting times to come.
More stuff from Gigabyte. The hall was filled with hardware vendors, but we were tired and had not much power left walking through every single booth. For a more complete view about the halls 23-25 check out Guru3D's review of the CeBIT 2007. They have a lot of cool pictures too and more technical details.
HAH! Another Intel chick and this time I got her just as she was quickly moving forwad. Not only did I get her sharply while the world around her blurs away, she is also looking at me and smiling. Mission accomplished for today.
Professor Intel explains why everyone needs a X6800 quad core CPU for games today, when over 95% of all games do not even care if you have two cores. But still, even a single core from a Intel Core 2 system is much faster than anyone else can give you.
More cases .. Wasn't Apogee the software publisher behind Commander Keen and older jump and run games? That logo does look quite different.
Some big piece of cooling equipment. Not sure if that even fits in a normal desktop. But it is all passive and while mainboards are cooled passively too and the power supplies are very silent the only noisy part in your PC will probably be the hard discs. Haven't seen silent ones of those in a long time.
More cases .. and what the heck. Another girl is looking? The day can end now. It was not all that bad, but most pictures I took where blurry and when I gone through the photos I have selected for this post, I saw that all the girls from the first half were looking away ^^
Oh no, this poor guy just wanted to take a closer look at these half naked chicks and now he is in real trouble. I better keep going.
And there is the reason to buy a 1000W power supply (e.g. the Galaxy one from Enermax). Ok, you need about 24 hard discs, 4 CPUs and 2 8800 GTX graphic cards to even get to 933W, but does not everyone have such a PC at home? The raid controller here is looking cool, just 6 ports which 4 sata cables coming out of it. I did not know the vendor (BMC or something), but other RAID controller suppliers like Highpoint had similar cards too.
That's it for me. Time to get some rest. Next big fair will be the Games Convention in Leipzig in August, but there are a few smaller conferences till then and I will keep shooting photos :-)