Introduction
Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2001 is the tenth year that Microsoft gathers the hardware world around it, and sets the agenda for developments in hardware and drivers. It’s mostly a to and fro between Microsoft and vendors like Intel, or an OEM like Compaq. Sometimes Microsoft is pushing for something that the hardware guys don’t want to do because, they can’t see anyone using it, and sometimes it’s the hardware guys pushing Microsoft to give them way of getting their nifty little designs supported by Windows. Everything from a new bus to quadratic texture mapping on a graphics chip. It all has to be blessed by Microsoft, otherwise it ain’t easy to get a product working for all the PC OEMs, and get the customers behind it.
This year, WinHEC was held in Anaheim, California, better known as the home of Disneyland. There were about 2200 developers attending from around the world, and not that many press. Of course, Intel, at their developer conference, had the benefit of being in San Jose, which got them a big crowd of the Valley audience. WinHEC suffered this year, compared to previous years, coming at a time of slowdown in the PC industry when vendors and OEMs are less likely to be pursuing new business as much as just trying to keep their heads above water.
The other important thing is Microsoft does a very good job of supporting developers, for all its faults. They’ve had XP for a while. They know what they are aiming at, and in some cases, the amount of work required in transitioning products and drivers from Windows 2000 to Windows XP may not be all that significant. It’s been a long time coming. Still, I find WinHEC more interesting then other PC developer shows because, you get a much better perspective on the hardware knowing what the programmers of software thinking should be happening.
Putting Security In Hardware
The first thing we should clear up is the issue of greater security in hardware, to protect illegal use of copyrighted digital audio and video files. It’s going to happen. It’s not a draconian move on the part of Microsoft and Intel. They are just very scared of the film industry and the recording industry. The reason why they are afraid is because, they are telling everyone, “Look at all the cool music you can play on your PC. Look at all these great DVDs.”
In one keynote I saw Gladiator on DVD, and Sting’s last album. No security; no keynote, and a Microsoft or Intel executive without a keynote is, well, it’d be like pulling the legs off a spider, on one side of its body only.
These guys just want to make sure that when they tell Joe Public that digital video and audio on the PC is very cool that no one can hold them responsible for copyright infringement a la Napster. Big companies with big stock prices, and big stockholders.
Of course, the really sad thing is that the only reason why people have so much interest in music swaps on the Web, or perhaps video, is because it is unencumbered by security. I found a copy of Steve Arrington’s Songs in the Key of Life on the Web. Its not on CD, and the vinyl LP is going to do me no good. No one is selling the LP anyhow. By the same token, I am not a fan of Stevie Wonder, but he has a couple of songs that make three year olds shout with glee and dance around the computer. I could have borrowed the CD off of a friend, or downloaded a file that gets minimal use. The social impetus is the same except somehow by having it in digital format I am creating a viral black market in Stay Gold.
Anyhow, the party is going to be over except for those of you to be lucky enough to live in the copyright free zones of academia. If they try and stop students from pirating music and doing bootlegs, I suggest we all take to the streets.
So, conspiracy theorists, relax and remember that the real threat is from cosmetic surgeons – have you noticed how they make all their clients with facelifts look like the alien leader from Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Purists, security in hardware is going to be breakable, and if you worry any further, just remember how long it took the PC industry to get DVD going because of the whole issue of piracy.
We’ll keep an eye on it, but the content belongs to guys that have the muscle to hold it back, and none of the PC manufacturers and suppliers want to see that happening.
Windows Experiences
Windows XP sure does simplify things. One Windows; all users. On the one hand that is a good thing. Drivers should get better, assuming everyone upgrades to XP because, there’d be just one flavor of Windows to support, and it would be the relative stable one. I like that – get rid of Windows 98, and Windows 2000 always felt like it was too serious for fun applications. Windows XP should be the best of Windows 2000 and allow me to run all those games, and multimedia apps that I had on my Windows 98 home PC.
Sounds good except, it’s so very uncool for so many reasons. Windows 95 was a consumer product. It existed in a sort of populist category that had, until its releases, not existed for a mere OS. Heck, there were people who were buying copies just because it was on TV. Windows 98 was a kind of bug fix, and Windows ME was just a sleep-walk through the bi-annual release cycle. Windows NT, and subsequently 2000, was always something you saw being talked about as if it existed outside this great big door with a million IT managers behind it. Would they let it in? What would they think? Would they just leave the door ajar?
So, now we have Windows XP and who is supposed to get excited about it. Well, I like it. Like I said, I’d get rid of Windows 98, and it doesn’t have the perceived stigma of Windows 2000 of being all business, and no play. Well, to my knowledge, the OS market doesn’t do much based on my whims, and you can tell that my endorsement is far from enthusiastic. I guess, it’s going to be a question of marketing and Windows XP should be exciting if it is to deliver “compelling experiences” although it’s like expecting a great tenor to front the Red Hot Chili Peppers just because he can sing. See what I’m getting at? Windows XP – is it cool, and fun, or is it just your dad trying to his hands at American McGee’s Alice because he wants to connect with you?
So, that’s where it was all going wrong for me. Now, when you see all the direction given to the hardware makers by Microsoft it might seem like Windows XP is going to do for video what PageMaker did for in-house publishing.
OnNow Design Initiative and ACPI Specification
For detailed specifications and information check out the URLs that follow. They are targeted at hardware developers and device driver writers, but you can find some useful White Papers with general information. The simple aim of OnNow and ACPI is to get boot times down, and make the whole experience more like turning on a TV, as well to reduce overall noise and power consumption. In fact, this is about the only way that the PC is going to make it into the average living room. Microsoft realizes this, and so, XP wants that on/off experience to be consumer friendly.
OnNow Initiative:
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/onnow/
ACPI specification:
http://www.teleport.com/~acpi/
Display and Video Technologies
With vertex shaders, and pixel shaders as bookends to the typical 3D pipeline operations on a graphics chip, components are becoming fully programmable number crunchers. The only exception is that you might get a few texture pipes in there to do texture blends and rendering in parallel, which is fine because, the bandwidth between chipsets and memory has grown so much.
So, don’t worry about the nitty gritty details of the your next piece of graphics silicon, take a look at the drivers, and how your favorite graphics apps interact with certain boards. I reckon in a couple of years we are going to be in for a hell of a ride on the benchmarking front because, you’ll pretty much be able to program your average graphics in so many ways that you won’t be able to get an objective benchmark on the hardware. Optimized for Quake VII, maybe, or it might just be that we’ll be getting wider performance fluctuations between individual games at the cutting edge. Just lots of sleepless nights for Tom, but he has a while to get some rest before that.
Most of the peripheral issues relating to graphics at WinHEC relate to the role of video and color display with Windows XP. We will see higher resolutions, finally a boot up screen at 1024 x 768, goodbye VGA Windows logo, and True Color as default for everyone. That’s good news. There’s some extra reading to be done on color space management and sRGB, but the short and tall of it is, what you expect to see in a color should be the same on your computer screen, your printer, and any other device where it might appear. On the Microsoft site there are white papers with more scientific details. Every device perceives color data differently, and there are standards for what are yellow, what is red, and so on, across the whole spectrum.
With Microsoft recommending that OEMs try and include things like scanners as standard in their configurations and with the emphasis in XP on the “digital media experience” you can see why color is such a serious issue.
Display technologies:
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/display/
Video capture:
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/vidcap/
Color technology white papers and Microsoft color fidelity tests:
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/color/
1394b Compares Well To Serial ATA For Storage
In the second half of this year we should see the first implementations of the 1394b specification. Good timing, and good news for Windows XP because, storage is a big deal. More hard disk space, DVD-RW, but most importantly, the convergence of media and storage on the PC. It’s all about how much audio, but mostly video, you want to store and play with on your Windows XP PC.
Microsoft believes that 1394b has the price, and the performance, with a path to 4 Gb/s bandwidth that makes it ideal for almost all the storage needs of a PC, with Ultra 2 SCSI (Ultra 160/320 beyond 2001) reserved for the mid to high-end enterprise arena.
Hand in hand with video streaming in through 1394b connections and onto some sort of storage device on the same bus, comes NTFS, obviously. XP is going to make it easier to convert over to NTFS, which was one criticism of it in the past. NTFS does have the advantage of being friendlier to streaming media files because it can handle much larger file sizes than FAT or FAT32.
More disk space; less hassle to hook it up to your system. All at the service of getting you all the digital video you need. But, let’s face it, digital video is going to need all the help it can get if it’s to populate hard disks the way digital audio files do these days.
IEEE 1394 High-Speed Bus
- Windows support:
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/1394/ - 1394 Trade Association:
http://www.1394ta.org - IEEE P1394b Rev. 1.0 Amendment: public review:
http://www.zayante.com/p1394b
VIA C3 (Codename Samuel2)
One thing that caught my eye, Via Technologies was showing a board with its new VIA C3 (codename Samuel2), which came out of the VIA Centaur Group in Austin, Texas. It’s 0.15 micron part with a very small 52 millimeter square die size. This little baby is small, low power, quiet, and powerful which kind of fills all the criteria for a PC in the living room. It supports Socket 370, and using any of VIA’s 133 MHz core logic parts, it’s going to be easy to turn out a Web Pad PC, or small Internet client. VIA’s got it at 733 MHz and 800 MHz, and puts it head to head with the same speed Celerons from Intel. VIA claims they can get half the power consumption, and anywhere from 10-15% the performance. The printed price is $54 for batches of a thousand.
Epilogue
I don’t have enough room here, or the right forum to get into the home networking discussions, as well as wireless communications, and I’d like to look at DirectX 8.1, which will come out immediately after XP launches. It’s a minor upgrade, pretty much directed at XP only, with no Windows 95 support. A closer examination of vertex shaders, and pixel shaders will be an education for me, and might shed some light on what I was hearing about graphics chips turning into digital signal processors (DSPs). That would be like completing one circle in computing seeing as how graphics chips got their start as DSPs of sorts.
Wireless communications and networking is a subject dear to my heart, and I saw some interesting stuff from 3COM, all based on 802.11. It’s a big deal for Microsoft judging the amount of information coming out of the wireless sessions. Another hot ticket item was TV entertainment. This is one area where Microsoft has struggled. However, the technologies that make it happen are very cool. There are some features in Windows XP, like the ability to use the rendering pipeline of 3D graphics cards to create translucent overlay menus on top of digital video images from a receiver, or off of DVD playback. You can do some interesting stuff with it, but I am not sure if it is ready for the home, and that big screen TV.
All in all, this WinHEC lacked the punch of past events. With another Intel Developer Forum coming up in fall, I can see a lot of overkill going on in the PC market. Neither Microsoft nor Intel has quite managed to convince the OEMs that there is a market for the digital media experiences that you see at executive keynotes at these things. Up pops the executive and expounds on the future of computing and follow it up by saying, “Let me bring on Bob. Here’s Bob. So, Bob, what are you going to show us?”
And poor Bob, he’s trying to get his mouse finger ready, and remain calm in front of the big exec while demonstrating a movie running at the same time as he burns an audio CD, and plays a game. Whoohoo! That’s a typical day’s work for me so, I can relate, but really, are people that obsessive in front of their PC?
