Wesley's Tool-Box

AMD held its second ever AMD Mania Day at the New Millennium Hall in Sungkyunkwan University. Last year, it was held at Ewha Womans University. That one was a bit hectic and stuff didn't go along as smoothly as planned, so I was looking forward to a more polished one this year.

People were told to come by 2PM, but there weren't that many people seemingly entering the hall. The inside was much more busy. The actual presentation would start a little later than 3PM.


The pre-registered guests like me could find their names on the list and immediately get the envelope with bunch of promotional flyers, one of which had the raffle number.


On one side, FarCry tournament was starting up. While I am a bit of a first-person shooter gamer, I've never played FarCry before. Still, there was an hour to kill, so I got myself on the waiting list. The stub I got was #17. Four people would do a deathmatch on a certain island map with a time limit of 5 minutes. Obviously I was on group 5. Eight groups were made, and winners from each group, total of eight, would go into finals played on stage.

By luck and a bit of strategic thinking I was able to find a relatively good spot to target other players. I made four kills, while other players made one or less, and I won the preliminaries. I was a finalist.


For the occassion, there was a modded PC contest prior to today's event and the finalists were being displayed next to the entrance to the hall. Interesting designs like motorcycle and sports car were chosen.


One of the Gold Sponsors of the event, Gigabyte had their new products prominently on display at the other side of the hall entrance.


As the presentation time neared, people started filling up the hall.


CEO of AMD's Korean branch, Park Yong-Jin, gave a keynote speech. It might be just me, but he looks a bit like AMD's current CEO, Hector Ruiz.


Lots of recent stuff were covered. The "Dual-Core Duel" ad campaign; new radio commercial put on Korean radio stations; recent opening of FAB36 at Dresden, Germany; increase in stock price that now rivals Intel's; further penetration of AMD CPUs into Korean OEM market; increase of AMD's retail market share (44% @ Q1 2005); strategic alliance with NCSoft, which is responsible for such hit games as Lineage, City of Heroes, and Guild War; and opening of Korea Technology Development Center slated for end of 2005.


Next up was a tech demo time. The focus was on how well the new dual-core Athlon 64 was performing compared to the single-core counterparts. As you can see, all sorts of tasks were thrown at both setups, and the performance was observed.


Evidently, the dual-core setup was doing stuff faster than the single-core one. Obviously expected, but still impressive. The next event was the FarCry finals and I had to leave my spot...