Creating a Community is Hard

AMD is really tying to reach out to the enthusiast community with their news AMD Unprocessed website and forum, but so far, the going is pretty slow. It's always that way, because building a community takes time. The conversations are kind of forced at first, and no one knows quite what they can get away with, and when the community is somewhat exclusive (Unprocessed is primarily for tech bloggers) it takes even longer.

That said, the joint appears to be run by AMD and notable Windows blogger Robert McLaws. It looks like the idea is similar to what Microsoft is doing with The Hive (of which I am also a member), but focused on AMD products primarily.

I've got a bit of advice for AMD, and we'll see where it goes from here. First, they need to get more involved. Right now, a few of us are trying to get the ball rolling, but there has been very little involvement from AMD directly in the conversations. While it might not be Scott Carroll (who took over for Chris Aarons), some AMD people need to be there talking and assuring us the place is open for business. The only way bloggers will make a point to come there is if they have a direct conduit to information ... it's all about access. Otherwise, they can probably get better information from other third-party sources.

Second, with all due respect to Scott, get your welcome message off the home page. The idea of AMD "Unprocessed" flies against the idea of a PR guy providing us with information, so you may want to consider hiring an experienced Community Manager. Either that, or you've got to "open the kimono" right away and give bloggers access to information they couldn't get otherwise. Building trust takes time, but if you want to jump start a community, sometimes a grand gesture is required.

Lastly, if it's going to be a community, give people more places to talk about off-topic stuff, and maybe even about your competitors. Communities don't always stay on-topic, and sometimes it's the off-topic stuff that keeps people going in that difficult genesis period.

Anyway, it's an interesting experiment, and I hope it works. AMD has an opportunity to grab a little more mindshare from their competitors, and it's critical at a time where AMD is falling behind in the performance area, both in processors and graphics. Hopefully this will be great impetus for them.

ATI Starts an Interesting Conversation ... Unintentionally

The technology blogs have been buzzing for the past two days about what is perceived as a weak launch of ATI's new flagship graphics card, the HD 2900 XT. Less emphasis is being paid to the extremely cost-competitive offering (ATI's top of the line, while underperforming Nvidia's, is $200 less) than the fact that they expected ATI to beat Nvidia on performance. Part of this is due to a late launch, and the remainder is simply fanboy wishing. It's more fun to argue about who has the better card when the answer isn't so clear.

What's interesting to me is what the price difference offers in terms of value-added opportunities. Already, vendors are coming forth with ways to make these uninspiring cards more appealing. Namely, Sapphire has launched a custom liquid cooling package, offering overclocking for two cards in Crossfire mode, as well as cooling CPU and RAM as well. There's really no room in the market for this kind of option at Nvidia's high-end.

I haven't bought a high-end card in years, simply because the need for them quickly eroded as I transitioned away from PC gaming (all I was playing was WOW, and I quit that cold turkey) and moved back into the living toom for console gaming. What's very interesting to me is video processing and offloading of the UI onto the video card in Vista, and it looks like even ATI's low-end cards should do this very well (they even have one passively cooled).

One of my favorite ATI products is my HDTV Wonder. Without an HDTV, it's the only way I can catch some of my shows in HD. Surprisingly, ATI has no mention of the card on their website any more, and there doesn't appear to be an HD tuner option on any of the new cards. I wonder if they're holding back, or if they've written off the HD market. Doesn't seem like there's much reason to be able to process high-end video without the one way to get video into your machine that makes the most sense; not everyone has an HD camcorder yet.

Maybe I could talk one of my friends at AMD/ATI into sending one of the new cards my way. I've got a hankering to build that Media Center PC that I've been putting off for a while.

Chris Aarons Leaves AMD

I'm a little late to the going-away party, but suffice it to say that I was thrilled when I heard that Chris Aarons was leaving AMD. Chris and I haven't worked together much (the HP TX1000 I currently have on loan was orchestrated by Chris), but the few conversations I've had with him proved to me that Chris is a man that "gets it" (to borrow Andru's wording).

Chris is starting his own "word of mouth" marketing company called "Buzz Corps". It sounds like a very exciting time for Chris, and he's going to be amazingly successful. I can't see how he won't. Companies need to understand that marketing changed into a collaborative process while they weren't looking, and no one can communicate that better than Chris. What's really funny is that it was one of Chris' "mistakes" (the free laptop debacle that was part of Vanishing Point) that proved both his own value and the message he was trying to send.

Congratulations, Chris, on the new adventure you're headed out on, and next time you're in Seattle, give me a ring!

What's AMD Up To? Barcelona.

So it's been driving me crazy for a while now. AMD took on a relatively high-profile when they partnered with Microsoft for the Windows Vista launch. Smart move, strategically, especially since Intel has their fingers in other pies on the Apple side of things. What was really confusing me was ... why? AMD really wasn't that big anymore when it comes to mindshare.

Talking with Chris Aarons, he said a bit about their 4x4 initiative, and how important it was to get the enthusiasts involved. This was in response to my very frank question about exactly what the heck AMD is doing. They used to be the kings in the processor space, lauded for their fantastic gaming performance, when Intel took back the crown in a bloody coup and never looked back.

In many ways, the AMD hardware is still superior, especially in how dual-cores are handled, but Intel just keeps beating the pants off of them performance-wise. So when Chris mentioned 4x4, the first thing that came to mind is, "That's all well and good, but I can't afford that!" Turns out, Chris was keeping his cards closer to his chest than I thought.

So what exactly is AMD up to? It's called Barcelona, and it's a brand-new chip design for AMD. See, part of the problem with trying to innovate in the processor space is that you're tied to the current applications and operating systems that people expect will just plain work. AMD took a long, hard look at the x86 architecture, and tried to figure out what they could reinvent while maintaining compatability. Barcelona is the answer.

Essentially a quad-core Opteron chip, Barcelona raises the bar by boosting the SSE unit (Streaming SIMD Extensions) to 128bits ... doubling them in size. And there's four of them, one per core. The SSE unit is important because they're floating-point math units, which is where AMD used to really shine. According to Infoworld, floating point performance is improved by 80 pecent over the previous Opteron. Per Core. I can hear the hardcore gamers out there salivating now.

One of the other things that's becoming a hot topic is virtualization. My other big complaint to Chris was that it's all well and good to have all of this computing power, but my trusty 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 and old ATI X800XT run everything I need just fine. I even get decent scores in Vista. Why on earth would I need to buy anything else? Well, virtualization is supposedly the answer. Virtualization is the ability to run something similar to copies of your operating system (or other operating systems) in protected memory space.

Now, that sounds kind of boring, but think of it this way ... have you ever wanted to try out some piece of software, or play around with something in your computer, but you were afraid it would break everything? That's where virtualization comes in. When you end a virtual session, it just goes away. Poof. When you load it back up again, it goes right back where it was before you started the first time. Or you can save the session if you like the results. This may not be something that the average home user would need, but as a gamer, the idea of having my main computer running all of my productivity and creation apps, and running my games in a fully-optimized virtual machine is kind of compelling. Of course, no gamer in their right mind would do this, because performance is everything. That's where Barcelona comes in ... AMD added something called nesting paging tables, and essentially, it allows you to flip between these protected virtual machines as quickly and easily as you might change the channel on your TV. As a gamer, this means that I can continue using Windows Vista as my main operating system, and when I want to play games, either fire up another copy of Vista, or load up an optimized Windows XP session. That's cool.

That's not all AMD has in its bag of tricks. Power savings is a big concern as well. The faster computers get, the more power they want, and it was kind of sickening to hear that a top-of-the-line gaming machine today needs around a 600-watt power supply to feed the video cards and main processor. Part of the reason is the archaic way processors currently save on power ... they simply throttle down the entire chip. In a dual-core machine, this doesn't work because even if you're only using one core, the other has to run at the same speed. Barcelona improves on that by slowing down only the cores that are running idle, and it does it a lot faster. But they didn't stop there ... they can also throttle individual parts of each core, so only what's currently being used is running at full-speed. That's really incredible.

Last, but certainly not least, Barcelona gives each individual core it's own Level 2 cache (on-chip memory), while Intel is still spreading the cache across their cores. Right idea, but wrong place to do it. AMD figured that out, and added a Level 3 cache that does get spread across the cores, giving the chip a place to store information that any core can access quickly.

So OK, Chris ... you guys have got my attention again. If Barcelona performs as well as expected, it could open up a whole new world of software development, similar to how HyperThreading opened up the world to "content creation" applications like making movies, photo manipulation, and CD ripping by allowing you to do a lot of those tasks in the background.

This is going to be an interesting year.

How Do You Market to Enthusiasts?

In my conversations with Chris over at AMD, he's displayed a keen understanding of how you handle marketing to the enthusiast set. Traditional marketing techniques don't work when you're talking about a group that Malcolm Gladwell would call "Mavens". They're the people that HATE walking into retail stores, because they frequently know more about a product than the people selling them.

How do you market to groups that know more than you do? Simple ... you don't. You have to find different ways to get them involved, get them engaged. Most importantly, it's going to go against everything marketing students (like myself) learn in school. You can't plaster your brand all over it, or it'll be seen as cheesy and fake. The experience needs to be ultra-high-involvement in order to keep their attention. And it needs to get them talking to everyone about it, as Mavens are wont to do.

This was something he mentioned to me on the phone today, as he casually reminded me that I forgot to mention AMD's involvement in the game in my last post (which has since been rectified). One of the best ways a company can "manage" something like Vanishing Point is to simply get out of the way. If you're doing your job right and creating an immersive and engaging experience ... don't worry about it. They'll figure out you're behind it. They always do.

Speaking of Vanishing Point and AMD, my interview with Chris, and the rest of the video from GearLive is posted at The Bleeding Edge. Check it out!

By the way, you'll see some pretty cool ice sculptures in the video. Regardless of anything you might hear on the Internets ... I absolutely did NOT lick the ice Vista logo.

Vanishing Point, LOKI Revealed ...

Just got the final contact from L.O.K.I. I'll let you read it for yourself. But it doesn't look like AMD will be making a "SuperRob" Athlon any time soon. Pity.

Congratulations on a game well played, and thank you for helping us disappear.

You were not the first to guess our identity, but because you played our game, we want to tell you our secret.

There is no such person as Loki - or rather, she is four sisters who decided to be one extraordinary person.

Each of us has a unique talent:

Lorelei is our tinkerer. Clocks and counting, space and time: she is our genius.

Odessa is our performer, our actress and magician, the girl we send in to dazzle and charm. Odessa goes to meetings: Loki gets promoted. It's very convenient.

Kara is our reader. With a love of history and a photographic memory, she gives us access to any fact, figure, or event at a moment's notice.

Ivy is our spy. She's the girl you dont notice, the face you don't remember, and vanishing is what she does best. Ivy has gotten us out of more than one impossible situation.

Together, we have presented L.O.K.I. to the world. Our mask and super-hero, LOKI has allowed us each to be bigger than ourselves.

When we heard Microsoft and AMD were looking to give extraordinary prizes to exceptional people, we knew LOKI could never find a more perfect job. This, Odessa said, would be a trick we could never top. O, how we wanted this job! (And what clever, unfair, underhanded things we did to the other applicants to make sure we got it! But that's another story.) And once we got the job, we all agreed that Loki's greatest triumph would be her last.

We created the Vanishing Point to reward the smartest minds (and communities) on the planet - and still we underestimated you. We used our smarts and our guile, not to mention money and connections and countless hours of time - and still you humbled us. We knew the terrain and barely gave you a mapand that didn't stop you. We built puzzles that should have taken you days and you solved them in hours.

"Loki" is a genius: but you were far more brilliant. You were thought made fire. You were lightning.

Thank you for your work, your talent, and your dedication. It has been a privilege to witness: an honor and a delight.

For each of us to live, Loki had to die. Thank you, thank you beyond words for taking her to the Vanishing Point.

Lorelei
Odessa
Kara
Ivy

I will say that I'm stunned at the level of detail woven into the game. In retrospect, everything makes sense. Even back to the very first video, the clues were there. The candy wrappers on the table that were assumed to be an homage to 4orty2wo Entertainment were actually a clue after all. Six total chocolates, but only four eaten, all of different flavors. I also love that the game had a great payoff, not in terms of the prizes, but a satisfying ending delivered in a personal manner. Something that even games you pay for frequently get wrong. You're asking someone to do more than pay for the privilege of playing your game ... you're asking them to devote time and attention to existing in your world for a time, and that's not something you should take lightly. Companies like EA don't get that. AMD, on the other hand ... does.

The website now hints at a "sequel", but much like their other efforts for Microsoft, I'd be willing to bet that it'll be a new game for another major launch, mostly likely for Halo 3.

Vanishing Point Goes Out With a Bang

Well, the live-blogging didn't go as I expected. It never works when I want it to. Oh well.

Microsoft threw what they told outsiders was a "Thank You, Seattle" event, and what the rest of us knew was the finale for Vanishing Point. They were easily some of the most spectacular fireworks I've ever seen, enhanced by the speculation of how the clues were imbedded in the display. After the show, Microsoft shuttled us off all Secret Squirrel-like (the busses had the windows covered in butcher paper) to Fremont Studios, where they had a relatively lavish party for the community. Plenty of laptops running Vista were on display, including one that not many people noticed ... a limited edition ASUS Tablet with a light-up Vista logo in the lid. Oh, it was a pretty, pretty machine, and I'd kill to get one.

While most of the party goers wandered the location convinced that there were more clues to be had, I took the opportunity to talk with some of the people involved with putting on the game. One of whom was Chris Aarons, the head of AMD's Community Relations department. We had a great conversation, and he's definitely someone what understands that technology buzz can be managed at a grass roots level. Eventually the conversation diverged into creating personalized experiences for consumers who are spending large sums of money on products. Why doesn't Porsche put a nameplate on the dash of their high-end cars that says that the car was designed specifically for the buyer? Why doesn't Dell do is on the high-end XPS products? It's low-cost and goes a long way towards building customer relationships as well as satisfaction and advocacy. Speaking of advocacy ... hey Chris, do you know where I can get one of those ASUS Tablets?! :)

Of course, before the in-depth marketing conversation with Chris, I was goaded by my buddy Andru into interviewing Chris on camera for The Bleeding Edge, where I asked Chris about Vanishing Point and the inscribed AMD chip prize. If I win, watch out for the special edition AMD Athlon 64 FX "SuperRob Edition" processor ... coming to a box near you!

When I got home, there were still puzzles to be solved, and the Neowin and Unfiction communities banded together again to break them down. Less than 24 hours later, we're headed down the road to immortality, but to get there, we have to figure out what Loki's name is. Didn't I already do that? Not exactly ... see, Loki isn't one person. She's FOUR distinct people, and you have to find the names of all of them. First person with the right answer wins.

What was my guess? Based on the clues given, I'm certain that the first three names are Lorelei, Odessa, and Kara. The last is somewhat murky, but I submitted Irene as my official answer sometime around 1PM Pacific. We'll see what happens. Regardless, I have over 1300 entries for the contest, so there's still the possibility that I'll be headed into space sometime in 2009. Either way, I'll have the distinction of being the first person to have figured out the prize, and that Loki was more than one person (though I thought she was twins).

My hat's off to the amazing and talented people at 4orty2wo that put together this fabulous contest for Microsoft. I can't wait to see what they do next.

Edit: Turns out that the final name was "Ivy", but I figured it out too late. Despite the website saying different, the winner was notified immediately. Also, they added clues after the fact, which I didn't know until it was too late. Somewhat unfair, really, but I'll live. :)

Loki Identified

Vanishing Point continues, and while most people have been satisfied to finish the puzzles for the first week with the help of the Internet, many have moved on to the "Meta Puzzle", the winner of which will be immortalized on a new processor by AMD.

Interestingly enough, in the course of following Loki's clues, we've managed to uncover her "real identity".

Lorelei Kitsune ... we're on to you. And we're completely hooked. However, it appears the trail has gone cold, and the wait begins for next week, for more puzzles, and more clues ...