Luv2Roam
DIS Legend
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2000
- Messages
- 15,479
People To Watch
The Week Ahead: May 12-16, 2003
Forbes.com staff, 05.09.03, 5:00 PM ET
There's a lot riding on a little fish named Nemo at animation studio Pixar (nasdaq: PIXR - news - people ). After reporting a 47% drop in its quarterly net on May 7, the computer animation outfit, long known for its teaming with The Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ) on films like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., is riding out its own cliffhanger.
CEO Steve Jobs says the company is expecting most of its revenue for the year on the forthcoming feature Finding Nemo , which tells the story of a fish looking for his lost son in the waters off Australia, and opens May 30.
As always, there's a subplot surrounding Pixar's plans to renew--or not--its film distribution deal with Disney, which expires in 2005. Jobs says the studio will either renew with Disney or sign with another studio sometime in the coming year.
The last big hit, Monsters, Inc. , which hit theaters in 2001, went on to gross more than $255 million.
And speaking of Steve Jobs, rumors are starting to build that Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) is closer than previously thought to releasing a computer with a new chip produced by IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), which we first reported here in October 2002. The chip in question is the IBM Power PC 970, and while IBM wouldn't come right out and say so, it has been clear for some time that the chip is being aimed squarely at making Apple a big customer of IBM chips.
Among other things, the chips support an instruction set, for handling graphics, known as Altivec, but which Apple prefers to call the Velocity Engine. It's also a 64-bit chip, meaning it can work with vastly larger amounts of memory, speeding up its ability to cut through huge volumes of data in a shorter time. When IBM first presented information on the chip at an engineering conference in October, it suggested the chip would be ready for volume production by mid-2003.
Meanwhile, Apple announced May 8 that Jobs will give a big keynote speech at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 23. Naturally, expectations are focused on the potential that new Apple machines could figure prominently in his remarks. To date, Apple has said nothing about using the chip in future systems, but it would be crazy not to consider it.
The Week Ahead: May 12-16, 2003
Forbes.com staff, 05.09.03, 5:00 PM ET
There's a lot riding on a little fish named Nemo at animation studio Pixar (nasdaq: PIXR - news - people ). After reporting a 47% drop in its quarterly net on May 7, the computer animation outfit, long known for its teaming with The Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ) on films like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., is riding out its own cliffhanger.
CEO Steve Jobs says the company is expecting most of its revenue for the year on the forthcoming feature Finding Nemo , which tells the story of a fish looking for his lost son in the waters off Australia, and opens May 30.
As always, there's a subplot surrounding Pixar's plans to renew--or not--its film distribution deal with Disney, which expires in 2005. Jobs says the studio will either renew with Disney or sign with another studio sometime in the coming year.
The last big hit, Monsters, Inc. , which hit theaters in 2001, went on to gross more than $255 million.
And speaking of Steve Jobs, rumors are starting to build that Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) is closer than previously thought to releasing a computer with a new chip produced by IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), which we first reported here in October 2002. The chip in question is the IBM Power PC 970, and while IBM wouldn't come right out and say so, it has been clear for some time that the chip is being aimed squarely at making Apple a big customer of IBM chips.
Among other things, the chips support an instruction set, for handling graphics, known as Altivec, but which Apple prefers to call the Velocity Engine. It's also a 64-bit chip, meaning it can work with vastly larger amounts of memory, speeding up its ability to cut through huge volumes of data in a shorter time. When IBM first presented information on the chip at an engineering conference in October, it suggested the chip would be ready for volume production by mid-2003.
Meanwhile, Apple announced May 8 that Jobs will give a big keynote speech at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 23. Naturally, expectations are focused on the potential that new Apple machines could figure prominently in his remarks. To date, Apple has said nothing about using the chip in future systems, but it would be crazy not to consider it.
