Seattle, May 4, 2004 – This year no surprises for me personally during the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). Actually they have not yet announced a winner of the WinHEC whitepaper award. The lineup of keynote speakers was impressive as always during a WinHEC conference. This year’s WinHEC is bigger than previous editions. It lasts one day longer and there will be 175 hours of technical content packed into four days. The conference started with a presentation by Jim Allchin, Group Vice President Windows Plaftorms.

Allchin started off by sharing his vision that the most successful companies will actually be those companies that understand the customer. Of course this is nothing new, but it is good that this thought is present within Microsoft. According to Allchin we have to start designing systems by understanding the user first. A good example is Cirque du Soleil. Their productions contain everything, images, music and show. Experiences like these are what we need on PC’s as well. Today we innovate through experiences. Allchin takes Starbucks as another example of a very successful experience. They make a fortune by selling a product that is worth only a few cents (a cup of coffee), but everything around it, including the possibility to have wireless Internet access makes Starbucks to more than a place to drink coffee. It is an experience and people are willing to pay more for that experience. A couple of dollars instead of a few cents per cup of coffee. Moving away from real life samples and towards personal computers, Allchin said that we have entered the area of “experience computing”. Not only because of the operating system (conveniently called Windows XP) but also because of what we are doing with the computer these days. Experience computing is all about sites + sounds, it is about delivering emotions into high tech devices. To be able to exploit this to the full extend the fundamentals have got to be right. Microsoft is working hard in getting the fundamentals right, with Windows XP only being the beginning. Allchin shared an important note, true for operating system vendors, but also for device driver developers. People who are in that line of business don’t get credits for their products if they work well, but they get a lot of abuse if they mess up a system. With the move towards media centered PC’s, which actually made up an important part of the devices during demonstrations, instant on is an important topic. It first appeared during WinHEC three or four years ago when Bill Gates made a comparison between switching on a light and turning on a computer. Media Centre is almost there, but it can not be achieved by cold boots. Instead systems are put into some sort of sleep, running at 30 % of normal power. Such a simple solution implies of lot of things though. To be able to put the system in sleep continuously when not using it, we demand very reliable and robust behavior of the operating system. It has become unacceptable having to reboot systems. It is also unacceptable to have a Media Centre generating fatal errors. We don’t have that experience from stereo and TV equipment, thus with the computer taking over as a Media Centre is should not show that behavior either. It turns out that Media Centre, but also Portable Media Centre are important topics during this WinHEC. Jim Allchin used one sentence we hear each and every year at WinHEC: “We have achieved a lot already, but we are just at the beginning”. One thing that Allchin hates, and hopefully all driver developers are listening, is the necessity of reboots. These are mainly caused by the fact that device drivers require reboots. As soon as device drivers would actually run in a sandbox, the entire operating system would not have to be rebooted each time a new driver is installed.

ATI’s President and Chief Operating Officer, Dave Orlon, showed some of the innovative work ATI is doing in the world of graphics processing. He introduced us to Rubi, an animated character, but acting, looking and moving almost like a real girl. Very innovative in the character is the skin. Light is actually partly penetration into the skin, making the appearance of skin softer than we are used of in most animations right now. The technique behind this is called subsurface scattering. The effect is subtle but has dramatic effects on realism when seeing the difference between using subsurface scattering or not. Rubi exists thanks to the Radion X800 VPU. The real driver of high quality visuals is the 3D gaming industry. With the transition from AGP and PCI standards towards PCI Express just around the corner we will get a simpler infrastructure with incredible performance that allows real-time High Definition Video Editing on PC’s instead of very expensive editing suites.

The last product that Orlon introduced was the Xilleon 225, a system on-chip with great graphic capabilities, targeted towards Digital TV products. In the picture you can see a reference board powered by Windows CE.NET running a popular game that could easily make its way to SmartPhone’s and PocketPC’s. Actually, powered by a chip like the Xilleon 225 it would probably be realistic to actually transfer cell phones into video camera’s with communication capabilities, TV’s or combinations of both.

The last keynote slot was reversed for Bill Gates. As often he first looked back to what we have achieved so far, defining a theme per decade. According to Gates, the most important trends over the last 3 decades were:

• 1980’s – Hardware
• 1990’s – Hardware connections (The Internet)
• Today – Software connections (XML Webservices)

Gates told the audience that the fact that there are so many different devices available today is creating more complexity. Lots of devices have different user scenario’s but all need to be connected, and hopefully in a uniform way towards the user. That puts a big demand on software. Another challenge is in the area of security. Not only to allow secure computing but also to take care of digital rights management. In the beginning years of the Internet there were no real thoughts about security and authentication, but right now we see these topics being added to all kinds of standards. With a proud sound in his voice, Gates compared Windows Server 2003 with Windows 2000 Server, one year after the introduction of the products. In the case of Windows 2000 Server, there had been 43 security updates, one year after the product had been released. In case of Windows Server 2003 this is reduced to only 13 security updates. A pretty impressive decrease of critical updates, but still not good enough according to Gates. He also notices a different trend in attacks on servers. It used to be all about publicity, hackers wanted to show the world what they are capable off. Right now systems are attacked more and more to actually steal information from them. During Bill Gates’ keynote a demonstration was given by Jim Gray of Microsoft Research and Professor Harvey Newman of CalTech on high speed networking. Just last night at 4.30 AM they set a new speed record with Internet2. Data transfers of 6.9 gigabits per second or 850 megabytes per second (actually more than one CD-ROM per second). The hardware used during this transfer consists of a Windows client containing 2 64 bit processors and a Windows server containing 4 AMD 64 bit processors. The demand for reliable high speed connections, especially in the academic world is high. The current speed record shows that networks are much faster than we think. Actually the PC needs to speed up fast not to become a bottleneck. This really justifies 64 bit computing. According to Gates the processor manufacturers are on the right track at this moment, and acceptation of 64 bit processors will be fast: “And so, between now and the end of 2005, we'll go from having very few 64-bit chips out there to virtually 100 percent what AMD ships, and the majority of what Intel ships within less than two years will be 64-bit capable chips”. On the software side Gates announced Windows XP Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems, a complete operating systems with only a few things missing right now. DOS 16-bit capabilities are still missing and not all the device drivers are available. One of the most important messages of both Bill Gates and Jim Allchin therefore had to be: “Let's make sure the device drivers are not a gating factor for people moving to 64-bit”.