Introduction
Now that Intel’s Developer Forum is done until the Fall, we can start looking forward to a couple of events that will have some impact on how the PC will evolve in the next couple of years. First, there is WinHEC, Microsoft’s Hardware Engineering Conference in Anaheim, California at the end of March. If nothing else, at least will get to see AMD, and maybe we shouldn’t be so caught up in Wintel anymore, and start thinking about WAMDEL. Yeah, just what we need, another cute moniker.
Who are we kidding? WinHEC will help to put into perspective everything that Intel has been touting at IDF. It’s still going to be Microsoft that puts out the software that the next generation of hardware needs to convince us that we need that new system, or some cool peripheral. At WinHEC, unlike IDF, we should be able to see Matrox, 3Dlabs, and hopefully more of ATI. We know that Nvidia is going to be ubiquitous by virtue of X-Box, and that product is going to be something that will either make or break Microsoft’s consumer strategy, and by association, Intel’s plans for the home, too.
While we can get into digital photography, and digital video as been “high-bandwidth” applications that will make Pentium 4 palatable, it’s the gamers and the enthusiasts who drive high-end adoption. If the high-end user says, we don’t need no P4. You can bet that you don’t need a P4 for anything but vanity purposes. Yeah, there are people out there who still think it is their duty to upgrade on the basis of what Microsoft and Intel put out every year. We certainly hope those people didn’t fall for Windows ME, and we can’t tell what they’re going to make of the immediate benefits of Whistler.
We are also very keenly aware that DirectX, and the 3D graphics portion of Microsoft’s strategy has been pretty much handed on a plate to Nvidia. Good or bad, it’s going to be worth seeing what “other” graphics companies have to say. Intel seems to have abandoned 3D graphics as cornerstone of its high-end strategy. Who can blame the company when it so badly wants to be Cisco, and IBM.
The second event to look forward to is E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo. If WinHEC is going to give us the corporate and business pitch for the PC, E3 is going to give us the perspective on the consumer market. Will ATI be able to get back at Nvidia with Nintendo? Where is Sony going to take PlayStation 2 when it comes to providing an alternative to the PC-centric home? Are we going to really see the game industry lining up behind X-Box, or just paying lip service?
So, we shouldn’t take everything that IDF threw out us, and accept it as gospel. This is Intel’s wish list, or if you are an OEM, “guidance” on platform issues. The first big thrust of Intel’s strategy on the client is The Extended PC – a nice way telling you that if you are not going to fall in line and upgrade your hardware the way Intel wants you to then, the company will go after all those nifty gadgets that you attach to it.
The Extended PC
If you want to know which company is leading the way on The Extended PC concept then look no further – it’s Creative Labs. HP is bundling Nomad portable MP3 players with its Pavillion series PCs. No great news there; Compaq is trying to sell its PC Companion products with its PCs. However, way back when Creative came out with SoundBlaster there were a heck of a lot of folk who thought that we would never get audio into corporate PCs, and that there wasn’t a consumer PC market. Diamond Multimedia/Rio/S3/SonicBlue, whatever the heck the company is called, came out with the Rio first, and blazed a trail, but its Creative who knows how to get the brand name PC vendors hot on multimedia.
But, we can be honest with you. Who cares if some PC maker tries to stock your shopping cart with more stuff to entice you to buy more stuff from them? The real question is how will this shape the way the PC develops? We can only guess that is still a defensive play by Intel, and Microsoft to keep the tide of non-PC devices at bay by putting the PC at the center, as a controlling point. In reality, there are not enough apps and devices out there right now for the PC to be put into obsolescence, and people who are interested in these devices are trying to get functions outside of the PC, not keep it tethered to the PC.
We are typing this report on a PC, and do not want to even think about switching to some non-PC device. It’s not that easy to stare at a 20 inch screen with high refresh rates for eight hours, and you can’t do this stuff sitting on your couch, and running a 640×480 display on a TV screen (like how many people have a digital television, and if so, how many of them want Word on there).
The Extended PC is best served by familiar peripherals like scanners, and back-up drives. Things that USB and Firewire address.
USB 2.0 and IEEE P1394b
USB 2.0 is going to play an important role, and even though Intel doesn’t give it too much print, 1394 is still around, and has its supporters. USB 2.0 was a feature of the exhibit floor at IDF, and we should be seeing USB 2.0 devices being introduced in Spring, and therefore, shipping in quantity in time for the Fall PC buying season. The new products are going bear a new logo, “Hi-Speed USB”, with NEC and NetChip Technology leading the way on controller chips. USB 2.0 has been touted since Comdex Fall 2000, but it is not clear if you want to hook up a CD/RW or drive to it, even at 480 bps bandwidth performance.
The P1394b spec was being presented by Texas Instruments. The raw bandwidth of P1394b is claimed at 4 GB/s, which makes it, on the surface, a better choice for digital video and peripherals, such as disk drives. However, there are some issues concerning performance that can be as low as 128 Mb/s, which is where USB 1.1 is. P1394b is going to tax PCI buses, and would probably be best suited to PCI-X. It’s probably an alternative to Ethernet in home networking, relying on a mechanisms that sense and adapt access based on what devices are installed on it. It’s also sensitive to EMI, and noise so, designing P1394b into your system is not as straightforward as USB which is probably why it is not as popular.
Probably the easiest way to look at USB and P1394b is that neither is ideal to ultimately extend your PC. USB makes great sense because, it is cheap, ubiquitous, and plenty of device support exists for it. P1394b has a heck of a lot of potential, and can be used more effectively if you buy into the PC as the hub, or gateway, for a multimedia connected house with everything from camcorders, to storage, to your digital cable televisions signals passing across it. In fact, both these technologies point out the major weakness of The Extended PC concept – too much stuff connected to the PC. Heck, it’s like hitching up a camper, a trailer, a bike rack, and a roof rack to your car. If you can figure it out, and have enough power to pull the lot with you, all power to you, but don’t bet on the neighbors thinking, “Got get me one of those!”
The whole area of home networking seems to be a critical component of The Extended PC concept. Going into the corporate world, you might assume that networking is not the problem, but neither is getting digital video on to your desktop. PDAs and Internet-enabled cell phones may be a logical extension of the corporate desktop, but effectively, the driver for these products is not the PC. If you think about audio, the driver for audio on all desktops was games. People liked to hear noise coming out of their PCs. An emotional reaction. Palm seems to have hit a similar emotional reaction – a digital notebook that let’s you write down a phone number, or jot down an appointment in a calendar, and turns it into computer stuff.
For our money, the coolest thing to add to our laptops on long flights might be a prototype heads-up display that was being demonstrated by a company called CMD Inc. out of Boulder, Colorado. CMD doesn’t make products itself, but licenses technology used in chipsets that can display the output of your computer screen on a chip less than a half inch in size. It’s pretty much analogous to an LCD on a chip. CMD puts together a set of components that can map SVGA, or NTSC/PAL inputs onto a small microdisplay of RGB LEDs. The display is small enough to go into one eye piece or, as we saw in the company’s binocular prototype, a heads-up display that you fit like a pair of glasses. It’s not new technology, or novel, but CMD had a very cool implementation, and the image in the binocular version was a very clear 800×600. Not good for prolonged use, but a nice way to shut out the world, and not let the guy next to you on the place see that you are using your very expensive laptop to watch the Gladiator DVD.
Beyond The Extended PC was another hot spot of high-performance demand, Peer-to-Peer computing.
Intel’s Peer-to-Peer Strategy
One of the keynote presenters at IDF was Louis Burns, VP, GM, Desktop Platforms Group, Intel. Judging by the title, a very important guy at the company. Great presenter. Pretty much gave the message out loud and clear, “Bye, bye Pentium III, except on mobiles. Hello Pentium 4. That’s 2001 done.”
Obviously, he was also the guy to get the most questions about AMD, and why would companies buy Pentium 4 when it, obviously, didn’t do much for things like Word. His answer was something to do with the emergence of P2P in the enterprise. This struck us as an interesting tack to take for a company that wants high-performance chips to be gobble up in volumes when everyone starts to make their year-end purchases. So, we took a look at some of the sessions on P2P.
One example of a P2P application is available for all to try at www.entropia.com. Sign up and have your PC’s idle time used to solve the world’s problems. Distributed computing, or something like that. Well, we are not giving up any part of our CPU cycles to anyone, and we are certainly not going to be buying more Intel processors because, it might help solve world hunger. It won’t.
Intel did try and push multimedia P2P application development. Basically, these apps would have us streaming video to each other, and sharing localized images, and rich media. We’d videoconference. We’d hold virtual reality conferences. We’d be training on archived digital media, audio and video. We’d be collaborating and interacting with documents, audio and video.
One way that we could do this is to use our trusty CPU power to encode MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 for better transport. Hence, there was a proliferation of MPEG-4 video running on all kinds of devices at IDF. Encoding uses CPU cycles. MPEG-4 is supposed to be device agnostic so, in the connected world you’d want to use MPEG-4. Right?
There’s the always reliable networked games. Yet, none of this added up to demand for performance. We found it hard to understand how P2P, other than the fact that it is a marketing buzzword, could be an effective driver of high-performance PCs.
Intel makes the argument that companies are building P2P infrastructures, and they should be planning ahead by buying a high performance PC now so that it can meet the demands of future applications. Of course, this is not too different to what Intel has been saying in the past. In the past, it was always frustrating to think that what you bought this week was out of date next week. The trouble recently has been that Intel’s competitors have done a better job of selling a safe performance bet than Intel has.
Conclusions – Watch your I/O
In Part I of our review of IDF, we said that IDF is going to be more interesting for what we read between the lines than, what is actually handed to us on a platter in various sessions and meetings. The impressions that we came away with lead us to believe a few things:
- The flaws in Intel’s desktop strategy with Pentium 4 is there, and Intel is just going to try and force things to go its way using its manufacturing muscle, and its brand name OEMs. The company probably doesn’t think that the present state of the market is going to give much of an advantage to AMD.
- Intel’s communications strategy, trying to be in the networking and communications chipset business, will probably start to have an impact on the PC by the end of this year. The first place it is going to start is, I/O. Basically, if Intel delivers the severs then, what if it can also deliver the clients configured, or optimized to work in an all Intel network. The 82544EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller Intel unveiled at IDF kind of sets the tone. The next stage is going to be a move away from I/O on the PCI bus. What that means is unclear, but you can bet that it will put more of the functions of the network on the Intel motherboard, or integrated into Intel chip real estate.
- Intel doesn’t have a strong software partner to counterbalance Microsoft, and that is going to be make the company’s adventures into mobile devices an uphill struggle. Not that Windows CE would help the company either. The Intel Web Tablet, which was being demonstrated at IDF, is not the answer, but it is a proof of concept, and Intel’s StrongARM SA-1110 is, for want of a better word, a very handsome chipset for these types of devices. We are going to have spend some time researching this area of Intel’s activities. There are ways to compare even handheld devices on the basis of performance and features. Just as there are ways of comparing portable MP3 players for quality of sound using audio metrics.
- The Extended PC for most of us is going to be a bunch of USB devices, and the odd PDA. Will they all co-exist happily? Will Windows never crash?
- P2P- buzzwords rule.
- WinHEC – The ball is firmly in Microsoft’s court. Intel can try and own the network, but Microsoft owns the heart of the PC, and the demonstration of Windows XP at Craig Barrett’s IDF keynote were anything to go by, it is going to be a heck of an interesting year for the hardware enthusiast.
This story ain’t over for a few more months, yet.