CES 2020 Day 1 – The exhibitions

Vacuum allows Samsung chips to grab the limelight.

• The exhibit count is way down, and I suspect that the smaller, more interesting end of the spectrum has stayed at home.

The exhibits

• The smaller companies are going to struggle for visibility this year and I think that the vast majority of them have not turned up as the exhibitor count is down 60% YoY from over 4,400 in 2020.
• To be fair to CTA and Microsoft, the digital exhibitions perform pretty much exactly as they were designed but they are a pale reflection of their in-person variants and suffer from greatly reduced utility.
• The biggest issue is discovery.
• My standard technique when scouting the show is to walk from one and of the hall to the other looking left and right for interesting looking objects that one can then investigate further.
• This year there are 1,961 digital exhibits and the catalogue gives no information other than the company’s name and its logo.
• This means that scouting for interesting stuff becomes impossible and one has to know exactly what one is scouting for in order to find it.
• There is a chat function through which one asks questions, but responses are very slow, and there is no way to know whether an answer has been given without revisiting the digital stand.
• There are two small advantages of digital stands which are that travel time from one to the other is greatly reduced and one does not waste time dealing with the CTA’s haphazard stand numbering system.
• The net result is the discovery of cool new stuff is very difficult and I suspect that the cool new companies know it and have stayed away explaining the 60% decline in exhibits this year.
• Just like the speaker sessions, the exhibition is merely a placeholder for 2022.

Samsung silicon.

• The most relevant part of the new Galaxy S21 that will launch tomorrow will be what is under the hood as Samsung is claiming to have addressed the issues that have been raised with older versions of its Exynos processor.
• Discrepancies in performance between the different SKUs of the same version of Galaxy smartphone one with Qualcomm Snapdragon (US version) and one with Exynos (RoW) are nothing new.
• However, complaints with the s20 reached a new level which Samsung is attempting to address with its Exynos 2100 platform that it hopes will rival the performance of the A14 Bionic and the Snapdragon 888.
• These are all based on either TSMC’s 5nm (A14) or Samsung’s 5nm process and so the comparisons are very relevant.
• The initial Geekbench scores reveal very similar scores on single-core but a 15% improvement of Samsung over Qualcomm on the multi-core test.
• This could be due to the Exynos 2100 running at a faster clock speed but the real test will come when they are put into devices and let loose on the users.
• Qualcomm has typically outperformed Exynos in devices but perhaps in the S21 it will be different and, if so, this will represent a big step forward for Samsung’s in-house silicon design.
• Both have some work to do to challenge the new Apple M1 processor that has surprised everyone in their new laptops.