By: David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com), August 10, 2011 10:42 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Josh (josh@penstarsys.com) on 8/9/11 wrote:
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>Whoops, I was mistaken. i7 2600Ks were delivered in the 2nd half of December to
>reviewers. I remember Ryan being unhappy because he got it >pretty late, between
>Christmas and New Years, and he had CES to plan for.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
>Ryan did have hand's on with Ontario in September though, but Intel could have
>easily had test setups like that available to reviewers if they could. Both Intel
>and AMD had demonstrations of these chips at Computex >earlier that summer as well, iirc.
You've brought up another excellent and subtle distinction. A hands-on demonstration gives very limited additional information to showing a boot up and application running in a tech demo.
Sending out a review system means that the vendor is confident that it is stable and achieves production level performance and reliability.
A mere tech demo of booting and applications running means that the vendor is confident the system is stable under certain circumstances. The performance may be degraded to achieve this stability and long term reliability may be questionable.
Giving a reviewer a hands-on is really in between these two points and closer to the tech demo. Performance may still be less than production and stability may still be questionable since the firmware/software is unknown. The system is probably more stable and reliable than a tech demo, since you don't just stick to scripted tasks.
The other point relating to production is that partners obviously get early access to products before they are fully stable. That also is a relevant milestone along the timeline to release and volume production.
David
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>Whoops, I was mistaken. i7 2600Ks were delivered in the 2nd half of December to
>reviewers. I remember Ryan being unhappy because he got it >pretty late, between
>Christmas and New Years, and he had CES to plan for.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
>Ryan did have hand's on with Ontario in September though, but Intel could have
>easily had test setups like that available to reviewers if they could. Both Intel
>and AMD had demonstrations of these chips at Computex >earlier that summer as well, iirc.
You've brought up another excellent and subtle distinction. A hands-on demonstration gives very limited additional information to showing a boot up and application running in a tech demo.
Sending out a review system means that the vendor is confident that it is stable and achieves production level performance and reliability.
A mere tech demo of booting and applications running means that the vendor is confident the system is stable under certain circumstances. The performance may be degraded to achieve this stability and long term reliability may be questionable.
Giving a reviewer a hands-on is really in between these two points and closer to the tech demo. Performance may still be less than production and stability may still be questionable since the firmware/software is unknown. The system is probably more stable and reliable than a tech demo, since you don't just stick to scripted tasks.
The other point relating to production is that partners obviously get early access to products before they are fully stable. That also is a relevant milestone along the timeline to release and volume production.
David