Today I was given the happy privilege of attending Corsair Micro's 2003 seminar, an informal chat and discussion between members of the UK press and Corsair's sales personnel and engineers. Such chats always yield some interesting nuggets of information and this one was no exception.
Hosted by the swanky K+K George Hotel in London, we were really quite spoiled for the day by the Corsair possy, who begrudgingly allowed me to take a "group" photo. By posting this photo I am probably denying OcPrices any further Corsair cooperation, but here it is anyway :)
From left to right, Paul Watkins, European Sales manager, Barbara Gascoigne-Pees, UK sales manager and on the far right the main man himself, Robert Pearce all the way from Fremont, CA. Robert is well known in the community as the (in)famous "RamGuy" from their own houseofhelp forums.
The seminar started with Robert giving us all the reasons Corsair is better than everyone else (a highly unbiased opinion of course :P ) but also gave a fascinating insight into how the memory business works. Corsair operates from a 40,000 square feet facility in Fremont, CA, and employ over 120 staff involved in sales, testing and verification. After memory is pressed together onto Corsair's PCBs they are tested in real boards to make sure they are all 100% working correctly. Naturally an OS is not used, so Corsair use a PCI-based "os in a box" which runs a test similar, though much more stressing, to Memtest86. This results in a memory defect rate 1/10th of the industry average (0.2% returns vs. 2% returns). This limits Corsair's production run to around 6000 modules a day, as each memory module can take up to 4 minutes to test before the "OK" is stamped, the heat spreaders attached and the modules shipped out.
After that followed a general chit chat about the industry as a whole, with the following nuggets of information being highly interesting:
-PC4250 will be the next product aimed at Pentium 4 platforms, and is expected in Q1 2004.
-PC3200 Registered will be the next big AMD product released, naturally for the Athlon 64 platform, expected in Q4 2003
-There was a general lack of confidence in AMD's decision to go with Registered DIMMs.
-If Corsairs latest board samples are anything to go by, AMD's Athlon 64 is not ready for release.
-DDR-II will start on servers (especially HP servers) before filtering down to desktops. Intel will be pushing the item very hard however, although reasonable pricing will take a long time.
- Corsair will have something "special" in the memory field within a month, I will be harassing Barbara constanly for more info on this ;)
- The Hydrocool, although an excellent product in its own right, is scheduled for a series of enhancements in the run up to xmas, with the Hydrocool "2" being its eventual successor
- Delphi are apparently the limiting factor in this, used to 3 year product cycles, the industry standard 3-6 months has been a "learning experience" for them.
- Heat spreaders make no difference to RAM performance, with an "absolute best case scenario" yielding 2-3MHz gain.
- 1GB is rapidly replacing 512MB as the new "standard" for enthusiast's PCs
- 70% of Corsairs business is XMS, 20% server, and 10% value series
- ATi will have some exciting new chipsets in the pipeline
That’s all my mind managed to retain from the presentation, with me being the least organised person there, but it was great to meet up with some of the other guys in the UK press. A big "word" to the main man Spode from SpodesAbode, and Wil from Bit-Tech.net, who should really treat himself to a "proper" laptop instead of anything made by Apple. ;-)
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