The PC’s future lies in hyped hardware, new types of tech, overhauled OSs, wireless and Moore’s Law. Let John Gillooly be your guide into the world of tomorrow.
Eighteen months is a long time in the PC industry. Not only is it the timeframe for 3D Realms to announce the next Duke Nukem Forever delay, it is the base unit of the Silicon Valley calendar; the scale of a little idea called Moore's Law.
It's amazing how one man's guesstimate can drive an industry, but the closest thing the semiconductor industry has to prophesy is Moore's Law -- the notion that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. What most people don't realise is that Gordon Moore's initial observation was based upon observed trends rather than any rigorous scientific shenanigans.
But the shift in the past few years of CPU development has been away from pure performance. This means the traditional extrapolation of Moore's Law to a doubling of performance every 18 months no longer holds true. In other areas of the industry, like 3D chip design, manufacturers have been moving at a much faster rate than Moore's law for several years now.
But as the industry has focused on faster chip performance, the rest of the PC has been left behind, riddled with legacy hardware that holds the system back from achieving the harmonious performance needed to get modern hardware running as it should. The modern PC is a mishmash of bottlenecked bandwidth and inefficient design, and over the next few years there are numerous ways in which legacy hardware is set to disappear, while more efficient versions of current technology are just around the corner.
The revamp of the PC has already begun, both in terms of new industry-wide standards like Serial ATA and HyperTransport and in the manufacturer driven popularity of smaller form-factor PCs. But change is occurring on every level of the PC, and for the most part, this will help our systems to run smoother and faster.
Microsoft at the reinsWindows has now become intrinsically linked with the home PC. Like it or not, it is Microsoft who has ultimately driven the direction of hardware development over the past 10 years, and it will continue to have such a role into the future.
Even though we are yet to see it in Australia, Microsoft has just rolled out the second version of Windows XP Media Center Edition. This is an OEM-only version of Windows XP designed for digital media consumption. The reason that it only comes with pre-built systems is that Microsoft has strict guidelines for system design in order to simplify the average user's experience.
Media Center Edition allows people to use their television to view digital media, with an easily viewable interface that is designed for navigation through a remote control. It also contains the software needed to use your PC to automatically record television shows as well as watch DVDs and videos, listen to MP3s or watch slideshows of family photos.
It's all very modern-American-dream, and already do-able for those with some tech savvy, but it has become a cornerstone of the development directions being taken by companies like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA.
But Media Center is only one part of the operating system puzzle. The big daddy of upcoming OSs is Microsoft's much anticipated Longhorn. Due sometime in 2005, Longhorn is a complete revamp of Windows from the kernel to the GUI, and will come with chunky system requirements and native support for a lot of the new hardware features that are due to appear in the next few years.
Longhorn's impact is already being felt. The new GUI, codenamed Aero, brings 3D to the desktop in a big way. At this early stage it looks like there will be a minimum requirement of at least DirectX 7 level video hardware with 64MB of RAM, with DirectX 9 level hardware needed for the most fandangled level of graphics goodness. This is the main reason why both NVIDIA and ATI are pushing for widespread DirectX 9 support in their product range and, like Windows XP, the industry is already salivating at the prospect of mass upgrades when Longhorn finally hits.
What the introduction of Longhorn brings to the market is an opportunity to revamp, and not just through minor speed or bandwidth upgrades. This is finally a chance to fix a lot of the fundamental components that have lingered since the birth of the PC, which means change is in the air for everything from the BIOS to the way we connect peripherals.
Making the switchSome of the most fundamental, and desperately needed, changes to the PC are happening on the motherboard. Sometime in the first half of next year, chipset makers will start releasing chipsets with support for PCI-Express, the long awaited replacement for the PCI bus. PCI-Express drastically improves available bandwidth, and, thanks to the use of a switching architecture, it eliminates the problems of noise and interference that have flooded the PCI bus for many years now.
PCI-Express will initially appear in two forms. The base PCI-Express architecture is scaleable, so more bandwidth-hungry technologies like 3D graphics will be able to upsize the connector to receive more bandwidth. In fact, the first widespread implementation will be as an AGP replacement, as ATI and NVIDIA both look to x16 PCI-Express as the solution to the restrictive bandwidth of AGP.
Most PCI-Express chipsets will also include a x1 PCI-Express connection for Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). Until now GbE has been an unsuccessful technology on the desktop, which has been mainly due to it being severely choked on the PCI bus. This has been the reason for Intel introducing its dedicated CSA link in the 875P and 865 series chipsets; once you take the GbE controller off the PCI bus you can get almost 2Gb throughput out of the controller.
Over time, more and more add-in cards will move onto x1 connectors on the PCI-Express bus, but expect to see legacy PCI slots hanging around for some time yet. When Atomic recently asked a group of top PCI-Express architects about the future for PCI they drew an analogy with the phase out of ISA slots on the motherboard: 'The perfect transition is that it [PCI] will go away and you won't notice.' So expect to see PCI slots lingering on mobos for a few years to come.
PCI-Express support in chipsets will be introduced alongside the new DDR2 memory standard. This will initially be used for high-end systems, and will slowly filter into the mainstream. Unlike the radical change that occurred during the shift from SDRAM to DDR, the move to DDR2 involves refinement of power usage and signalling in order to facilitate both higher memory speeds and DIMM sizes. DDR2 will initially run on an effective 533MHz bus, with plans for speed ramps to 667MHz and 800MHz over the next few years.
DDR2 will also dramatically increase the effectiveness of large DIMMs, which will become increasingly important as memory sizes rise towards the 4GB barrier imposed by 32-bit computing. According to Moore's law-driven predictions, most in the industry expect this need to arise sometime towards the end of 2007, even though AMD are already in the market with 64-bit desktop processors.
Core concernsAthlon 64 has already launched, and this new architecture will form the basis for AMD's strategies for the foreseeable future. Don't expect to see too many changes in the next year or so, with AMD saying its only short term plans are a shift to 90 nanometre cores codenamed 'San Diego' for the Athlon 64 and 'Athens' for the Opteron/Athlon 64 FX.
Architecturally there are no major shifts planned, although the company says we can reasonably expect that support for DDR2 will be built into the CPU's memory controller at some point.
AMD's weapon of choice for the future is certainly 64-bit computing, but it is only one solution
Issue: 137 | June, 2012