Introduction
Microsoft staffers spent a long time hand carving this imposing statue of BillG at the entrance to WinHEC. Based on Native American folklore from the Northwest apparently it wards off government lawyers.
Before IDF, there was the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). It started eleven years ago. That’s when there were too many developers chasing too few Microsoft product managers. It didn’t matter what hardware you built in those days, you had to be at WinHEC to figure out how to make it work, and to find out where Microsoft would hide certain files you needed on their developer disks. It was like technical support and developer therapy for an industry growing too fast to keep up with its own success.
In the last couple of years, WinHEC has lost out in terms of coverage to Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF), a grander, more expensive, and more pushy PR effort. Seeing as hardware doesn’t do much without software, and Microsoft seems to have a monopoly in the PC arena, it’s worth giving WinHEC a wide berth, and using it as a reality check.
The sad thing is that with Microsoft’s recent anti-trust woes, company execs just don’t have that same pep, and arrogance of the past. They’ve become almost too nice and friendly. Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Platforms Division at Microsoft, kicked off the conference and, as if to illustrate the new Microsoft exec credo, said at one point, “We have a statement inside Microsoft: We have to be more transparent.”
Where’s the naked ambition and greed, guys? That’s about as transparent as we can handle.
The Big Picture From Jim Allchin
It was Allchin who quoted from an IDC report that says revenues from hardware, software, and services based on Microsoft products accounted for over $200 billion in 2001. But, perhaps scared by the thought of all that Windows stuff in the world, Allchin went on to state, “It’s not about commoditizing the market, it’s about taking advantage of economies of scale.”
Jim Allchin opens WinHEC 11 with an exuberant speech full of love for technology and “rich media experiences.”
You see, the problem facing Microsoft, and the rest of the PC industry, is finding reasons to keep people buying and upgrading their hardware and software. No one in the PC industry wants to see a commodity, because commodities don’t have perceived value add, or upgrade cycles. At WinHEC, Microsoft had separate approaches for fermenting hardware innovation in the home and enterprise.
The next wave of computing in the home was characterized by Allchin as being about four things:
- Digital Everything – audio, video, as well as text and data. This has been a running theme in the PC business since the days of MMX, but it has taken on greater urgency with interest in digital audio players, PVRs, and a host of digital television services making their way into the home.
- New Devices – from isolated to adaptive, synchronized, and connected devices. In short, devices need software, and it’s going to be some version of something done by Microsoft and connected to a PC, somewhere, somehow in the home.
- Automation – Web services. Let’s make sure we get the Internet in there.
- One inter-connected network- always wired, and wireless.
It wouldn’t be a keynote if at least one demo didn’t fail. This time, the beauty of wireless connectivity hits a nasty pocket of turbulence, and this is all Allchin had to show for his salesmanship.
This isn’t necessarily news, but Microsoft has been honing this message for the last five years. Microsoft is also the only company that has the software to bring it all together, no matter how much that may gall its competitors. Microsoft may get broken up, but it may stay unified through its connected home and networking ambitions.
So what if Microsoft’s software is split up? As long as it all talks together, the sum of the parts is going to be greater than the whole.
Freestyle and Mira
With Xbox, Microsoft is now a bona fide hardware vendor itself. However, Xbox is a Trojan horse into the living room. Or, so it seems. It appears that what Microsoft really wants to do is to make people think of PC entertainment as being distinctly separate from playing games. Xbox seems to convincingly take the number one consumer app on home PCs, games, and give it a new home so that the PC can go on to bigger, better, more catholic pursuits.
Sure, you can play games on a PC, and play DVDs on an Xbox, but Microsoft would rather you saw Xbox as being focused on games, and so it left the PC to become a media server, CD jukebox, television central, and all around family friend.
A platform that doesn’t need no stinking movie industry, or RIAA, or content partnership to make it rock, Microsoft’s axis of home connectivity revolves around three new technologies:
- Mira – a cordless smart display, a Windows CE PC peripheral for the home that let’s you take your Windows with you, as a remote display. It doesn’t have the brain power of a Tablet PC, being more in line with a Pocket PC actually, but it adds one more element of mobility to the central PC in the home, and it means more software and hardware for the average consumer. All good news for the guy who pays the bills for his developers to come to WinHEC.
- Freestyle – this is just a media focused customization of a Windows XP PC with the added twist of moving the control from WIMP to a remote control. It’s a set of technologies that will allow you to use remote control and move your PC with a remote control, which is another way of saying of using your PC as a media server for your consumer electronics needs. Streaming video, and audio; digital picture frames on a network. High-tech stuff.
- Xbox – This is the gaming platform of choice for Microsoft. If anything stood out for me at this WinHEC, it is the implication that, though games on the PC are going to happen, they’re really getting in the way of the big picture for Microsoft. The Xbox center of gravity is games, but the PC has bigger fish to fry, and then there are the things that are more universal, like TV.
Too early to pass judgement on the efficacy of Freestyle or Mira – they don’t leave a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, and they’re going to be expensive to develop and exploit – but it’s something to shoot for outside of the traditional play videos and audio tracks on a PC.
The remote control of Freestyle helps to take your mind off the fact that you are using a $1,000 PC to do the job of a $100 CD player, but that’s not the point. The point is to get consumers to view the PC in a new light, and not just as a tool or geeky game box.
Mira is a very tough call. It’s a floating Windows CE device that works well when you are around the PC for things like browsing the Web, or passing around the digital family album, but it has a long way to go to be a viable, practical solution. Maybe the problem it addresses is still unclear.
Don’t Forget The Datacenter
As for the enterprise and budget-strapped IT department of companies: datacenter automation is Microsoft’s rallying cry. I guess that Microsoft is acknowledging that most of its enterprise customers are working in a datacenter where servers have to be configured, updated, deleted and added to meet the demands of the businesses they support.
These datacenter customers need things to be easy to work with, easy to manage, and easy to configure.
So, Microsoft’s enterprise message is server focused, and it has 64-bit computing in there, although there wasn’t any major discussion on the topic in other places at WinHEC. The real focus in the enterprise space is on networking and storage, and the CPU is just going to have to wait its turn. Oh, yes, and there’s that good ol’ standby, trustworthy computing initiative.
Scaling out the datacenter, as Microsoft likes to put it, does have a lot of good trends dotted around it: hot swap for CPU, memory, and I/O, secure remote boot, EFI replaces legacy BIOS, ACPI 2.0, 3GIO, PCI-X (still around and will stick around), >1Gb Ethernet, multipath I/O device specific modules, and preparing developers for the end of year release of the .NET server family.
.NET is nearly here, and Longhorn shows its face on the Microsoft official roadmap for the first time.
In addition, Microsoft is encouraging hardware developers to get to work on networking – add 802.11x, and Bluetooth, and GPRS. 1394 is of growing importance and essential to allow attachment of consumer electronics devices to the PC. Allchin also foresees the possibility that 1394 might become more than a way to connect consumer electronics devices if you apply IP to it — one more building block in the connected world of the PC.
Connected Home – It’s Super!
Michael Toutonghi, Corp VP and Distinguished Engineer, New Media Platform Division, Microsoft, followed Allchin to give the dog and pony show on the connected home. Michael was very excited, and tended to use the word super a lot, but apart from the feeling that we were at a pep rally, he did give us some meat on Freestyle.
Another highly excited Microsoft executive, Michael Toutonghi, takes to the stage to tout the connected home.
Using a remote to look through My Music, My Pictures etc. folders on a start up screen that looks more like a simplified drop-down menu, Toutonghi and Molly Stone of Microsoft showed how using Microsoft’s new best friend, the remote control, could turn a PC into a CD Jukebox. In the My Picture part of the demo Stone kicked off a slide show from a family album using the remote. Always that damn remote. I think they called it a “great community experience.” Which means that guys will now get to surf their hard disks as much as their cable connection. Other features included the kind of stuff we’ve come to expect from products like the All-in-Wonder and Personal Cinema: an electronic program guide (EPG) and a personal video recorder (PVR). It all had the feeling of dйjа vu, but in a strange way, the remote control did take your mind off the fact that you were dealing with the PC so, Freestyle’s greatest accomplishment may be its psychological impact.
This is the Freestyle start screen for XP. It seems almost trivial, but Freestyle takes the XP interface and simplifies it for a remote control mentality. What do you want to watch? Surf pictures, audio, television, or video.
It seems like a bit of overkill for XP, but how else are you going to make it consumer friendly?
Otherwise, it is hard to tell how the PC platform is being advanced by Freestyle, apart from making the PC remote control friendly, and maybe that is the killer app. Sometimes it is that simple. For PC enthusiasts, it’s nothing new. For everyone else, it might be a refresh that changes the way they view their PCs.
Longhorn – GPU Crunch
Longhorn is Microsoft’s next generation Windows, and it is going to make the GPU work for its money. Longhorn, which probably won’t make it into consumers’ hands until the middle of the decade, is going to expect hardware accelerated 3D graphics at base level. It’s not that Microsoft is enamored of graphics chips makers. It’s more like Microsoft is finally getting around to the idea that VGA is really pointless, and that beyond the hardware cursor, there has been little innovation in the last decade to really change the way Windows is handled by graphics drivers.
Graphics hardware gets to power the Windows shell, and compositing is going to be the big deal. Windows will be treated like surfaces, as opposed to rectangular blocks of bits, as they are now. Everything, in effect, is a texture. GPUs certainly know how to move textures around, and manipulate them, and work with them. Longhorn puts the pressure on the 3D engines of GPUs, and Microsoft is exploring minimum hardware requirements and standards for OEMs to aim for.
However, it is not clear what Microsoft will do with all this extra 3D graphics power beyond making multimedia and 3D windowing easier to implement. Rumor has it that a 3D GUI is not out of the question, and may be used to push the higher-end 3D graphics hardware demands made by Longhorn. Even simple things like better rendering of fonts is going to have noticeable impact: you may notice that at 1280×1024 and higher resolutions, text fonts don’t scale well in Windows. Render them with something like ClearType, and it’s a whole different picture.
The extent of Microsoft’s graphics push with Longhorn is also clear in another area – color. We all know that the colors you see on your monitor don’t exactly end up being the same as the colors you get on your inkjet printer, or on your LCD, or in real life. 24-bit True Color, or 8 bits per pixel, is not enough. Microsoft is pushing graphics board vendors to implement greater than 8 bpp in order. One area where there is a clear benefit is in mixing video, still, and graphics images on the same screen. All three seem to exist in their own color universe, and Microsoft wants to make everyone see the same whiter shade of purple.
DirectX 9.0 Then, DirectX9.1
Holding the keys to Longhorn’s graphics kingdom is DirectX9.x. Although most graphics vendors are still struggling to get their DirectX8.1 support cleared up, Microsoft is pushing ahead with DX9 in order to remove some of the ambiguities of programmability that DX8.x raised. Things like, what do you do when you changing light sources within a scene.
DirectX9 will go live in Q3 of this year, and DirectX9.1 in March, 2003. Delivery of Longhorn is probably going to impact what goes in DX9.1, but DX9 is definitely targeted at this Christmas’ games.
DX9 will have improvements that will allow better optimizations and clearer controls within the vertex and pixel shader. DX9 doesn’t look like it’s going to have an advertising campaign to promote it, because it is very much an evolution designed for developers that struggled with programmable shaders first time around, and features that didn’t quite deliver on their promise. It isn’t a dramatic change from DX8.x.
It also doesn’t look like it is going to require major driver modifications for the hardware guys either, although it does leave room for hardware improvements in next generation chips in stenciling, anti-aliasing, and texture handling.
The Quiet PC – A Design Guide
No one will really want to have a lot of connected PCs lying around the house if they are all whirring away and making the dog suffer from heatstroke. Inevitably, the next great design challenge is going to be something that every overclocker is fully aware of: keeping PCs cool AND quiet.
Inside your average PC, it gets pretty rowdy.
Certainly, quiet PCs are aesthetically pleasing on the outside, and may be quiet enough, but they’re hard work for designers. The intestines are a mess, and it doesn’t look as if many people would want to mess around with the set-up once it is fixed.
How hardware developers choose to address the issues of ever hotter PCs and ever noisier fans to cool them down is obviously an area that needs a lot of attention. This is one suggested form factor given at WinHEC.
This is a topic that we are going to stay on top of in the future. Looks like there are a tremendous amount of implications in terms of the limits its puts on people’s systems and their upgrade paths.
AMD’s Mobile Thoroughbred
AMD made a couple of interesting moves during WinHEC. The first was the release of the mobile AMD Athlon XP processor based on the 0.13 micron Thoroughbred core. While adding a 266MHz front-side bus option and a new micro Pin Grid Array (uPGA) package, AMD also managed to announce two new OEMs to its line-up, Epson and Hitachi.
In addition, with Hammer proving to be AMD’s bell weather for its SOI strategy, the AMD roadmap took a slight detour. As you can see below, Barton is still ticking, but taking a back seat on SOI in anticipation of Hammer.
The latest AMD roadmap repositions Barton and sets Hammer up for its impending arrival at the end of the year.
It all bodes well for AMD’s continued confidence in Hammer, or is there something else afoot? There’s something else afoot. For some people it’s going to be the equivalent of the discovery of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odysee.
On The Exhibit Floor – VIA, SiS, and MSI
We met with Richard Brown, Director, International Marketing for VIA. Brown was enthusiastic about VIA’s latest acquisition, IC Ensemble. We reviewed Creative’s Audigy agains Terratec, which is based on ICE’s technology, if you’d like some background on this company’s technology.
Look out for VIA to aggressively push high-end audio onto the motherboard and into value systems. In addition, VIA’s Eden mini-iTX platform was getting quite a bit of attention. With so much of WinHEC’s emphasis on the device universe around Windows, there was bound to be demand for small form factor products.
Also on show was the P4X333 reference platform launched at CeBIT.
Richard Brown, standing in front of P4X333 reference platform. The audio in there is from VIA’s latest acquisition, IC Ensemble. Brown wanted us to know that VIA is going to be pushing high-end audio, naturally. Watch out, Creative.
VIA’s Eden mini-iTX platform attracted quite a bit of attention at the show.
Every small form factor motherboard and subsystem deserves a case. While these cases have fans, Brown told us that VIA was showcasing these cases with a view towards fanless designs in the future targeted at the consumer market.
MSI had a small presence at the booth manned by the company’s affable Marketing Manager, Kevin Huang.
Kevin Huang of MSI plays it cool despite standing in front of somethng that no one was supposed to see.
On The Exhibit Floor – VIA, SiS, and MSI, Continued
It wasn’t officially there, or to be discussed, but MSI had an 845 platform on display. Sounds strange, but that’s how you play the game on these things. We can show it. We can see it. We can even write about it. No one can say it.
Shhhh! This is what Kevin didn’t want to talk about. Big sign on top says it all, Intel 845. Are there any secrets left in this business?
SiS had a low key presence, but was showing the SiS550 for the first time. Targeted at the Windows CE market, it didn’t hold our attention, but again, the interest is there among developers, so it’ll be interesting to see how these types of platforms will evolve over the coming year.
SiS had a relatively low key presence at the show.
The SiS550, first time on show.
Of more interest, we got a peek at SiS’ graphics roadmap. SiS hasn’t always had a good reputation for its graphics products, but Xabre gives the company a roadmap for graphics that seems to have legs. Xabre is a DX8.1 graphics chip, maybe we should call it a GPU too, and it is sampling this month.
We’ve got Trident, we’ve got S3 Graphics, we’ve got Matrox, we’ve SiS. Graphics isn’t just Nvidia and ATI, although they rule the roost in the performance sector.
Fundamentally, in transitioning to DX8.1 graphics support, chip makers are faced with a number of issues: they need to build bigger devices with more transistors to support all of the functions of DX8.1. Often, as is the case with SiS, the target audience is in the value segment, so compromises have to be made in order to keep the chip small and the costs low. I didn’t get enough on Xabre to know its limitations, but if you take the SiS presentation as Gospel then, it is firmly positioned against the best on offer from Nvidia and ATI.
Trident’s – The First DX8.1 Graphics Chip For Notebooks?
Trident, on the other hand, went into a lot of detail on its new chip.
Here’s something that got me: Trident is 15 years old. That ages me, definitely. Both Trident and I started in PC graphics at the same time. I never got to IPO me of course (Trident went public in 1992 on NASDAQ), but we’ve survived the business, Trident in compact form, and me…. in a slightly expanded form, so, it’s always a sentimental journey with the guys at this company.
At WinHEC, Trident was laying claim to being the first past the post with a true DX8.1 compliant graphics chip for notebooks, the XP4.
Is this the first DX8.1 notebook graphics chip? Trident’s convinced it’s got itself something that will keep it ahead of Nvidia, and on the heels of ATI in the mobile segment.
For the XP4, Trident claims 80% of the performance of a GeForce4 Ti 4600. The kicker for the company is 3W max and 0.5W static power consumption at this level.
If a notebook could have a 256MB frame buffer the XP4 would support it. It has the obligatory Vertex and Pixel shaders for DirectX 8.1, and very cleverly, it squeezes all of it into 30 million transistors. This is about half the count of the average modern day GPU, and at 0.13 micron it gives Trident a lot of leverage on its costs.
Trident claims that because the XP4 doesn’t have a legacy architecture like the GeForce and Radeon, this is a true, ground-up GPU, even at the lower transistor count. While the Radeon and GeForce work on the basis of ever-growing numbers of pixel pipelines, Trident uses a hierarchical tiling technology to process the same number of pixels using less transistors.
Trident is pushing aggressively on the XP4 and believes it has a jump on its more high profile rivals by being first out the gate with a DX8.1 mobile graphics chip.
Having seen the information on Xabre, and the XP4, and looking ahead to what’s coming in DX9, it’s probably time to do a little more digging around and research on the different architectural approaches the graphics industry is using.
Tiling has become a hot ticket item. Intel’s using a form of tiling in its 845GL integrated graphics architecture, too. Yet, tiling means different things to different vendors. There’s definitely more work that needs to be done, and maybe we have all grown a little complacent on the graphics side because of the long dominance of Nvidia. It’s worth considering.
Transmeta Shrinks: Goes OQO
It’s hard to know what is going to happen to Transmeta in the near future. However, the company’s OEMs continue to come up with some pretty cool stuff. Take the OQO shown below.
Yes. It really is that small.
10GB hard drive, 802.11b, Bluetooth, 640×480 LCD screen, Carusoe 5600 processor, USB, Firewire – a fully, functional Windows XP PC.
OQO’s strength is in having managed to squeeze so much into so little space, and in being an American company rather than a Japanese consumer electronics giant.
Whether this product will ever find an audience is still up for debate. It would be very, very cool if it works, and at $1,000 -$1,200 retail, it’s a 9 ounce bargain if it can deliver on its specs.
Otherwise, it’s one more piece of cool PR for Transmeta, and where it goes from here for the company remains to be seen — particularly seeing as the hype just puts more weight on the company’s shoulders to deliver on its promise.
Finally – The $200 Billion Question
So, the Justice Department has the bigwigs at Microsoft acting like they’re up for a part in a Disney movie, but that doesn’t stop them from thinking business. The only other monopoly that we can compare Microsoft to is PC CAD software company Autodesk.
Allchin quoted an IDC report claiming that Microsoft’s software has created a $200 billion business empire around it. That was just 2001, by the way. Autodesk’s Windows, AutoCAD, was never that big, but it was as just as dominant, and around it orbited vendors and service providers in their own lucrative cosmos, just like they do around Microsoft.
As times got tough, Autodesk bought out third party software add-ons, or just added their features to the next version of AutoCAD. How else could they keep people buying the next greatest version?
Microsoft, in turn, has continued to add more functionality to Windows, and we all know what happened to the browser. Now, that functionality is audio and video playback. With Xbox, Microsoft has already encroached on the PC gaming business for its own gain.
Slowly, but surely, Microsoft has to eat away at the universe around it, and it appears that the next stage of evolution is going to see the consumer PC being replaced by the consumer electronics PC. It may not be such a big deal for Dell or Compaq, but Sony, NEC, Philips, and other consumer electronics giants may be set to make a killing if this all works out.
In the enterprise, Microsoft still has a long way to go, and it needs a lot more help if it is to establish itself in the server and networking areas. That pie is still too big for one company to handle all on its own, and Microsoft needs all the friends it can get.
PC gaming is dead; long live PC gaming.
