RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 49

By Andrew Sametz

BACK IN GRADE SCHOOL, I HAD NO PROBLEM sleeping straight through my History classes. They weren't like Math or Physics, where if you missed one lecture the next five might as well have been taught in Latin. No, history was a matter of cramming the night before a test and hemorrhaging facts onto paper the next day. That's part of the reason I pulled my best grades in History classes later on in college. But there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past. American author Pearl Buck once said, "If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday." Those words could have stopped me from buying a new car every two years and losing thousands of dollars on each had they only registered sooner. That's not the point, though.

Taking a retrospective look at the last 12 months should give you some inclination as to where IT is headed and how you as a reseller might be able to improve your bottom line in 2006. Remember that new technology is only worthwhile if it offers some appreciable gain, and the channel often determines how to best add value. This is your chance to take emerging concepts and do something unique with them.

Multi-Core is Here to Stay

The dual-core processors introduced in 2005 offer a perfect illustration. In fact, for as much attention as the technology has drawn thus far, its effect will only really be felt in the year to come.

Take Intel's Pentium D debut. The decision to prioritize a dual-core desktop processor was confusing in its own right given a lack of software. (as you likely know, software has to be properly optimized in order to take advantage of a threaded architecture.) Instead, Intel relied on the multitasking message: A dual-core processor speeds things up when you have lots of programs running concurrently. Unfortunately, that's a tough benefit to quantify, and, as a result, the fastest Pentium D chips are selling at prices below the best single-core models.

The Viiv platform, which we previewed a couple of months ago, should change all of that by giving dual-core a purpose on the desktop. We're talking media encoding, high-definition video, and networked content here. Intel has already let slip that there will be a channel showing, which may very well make Viiv more attractive to resellers than today's Centrino initiative.

A half-hearted dual-core Xeon DP launch late in 2005, based on the Paxville core, will give way to Dempsey, a proper 65nm part sporting dual independent front-side buses. Those waiting for true value from Intel at the high-end will appreciate the price and performance enabled by that design early on in 2006. Markets more sensitive to power and heat will even get their own Pentium M-based server architecture.

All along we've said that servers and workstations stand to gain the most immediate benefit from multi-core hardware. And while Intel was unquestionably outmaneuvered in 2005, its portfolio moving into next year suggests a much more mature approach to dual-core. Expect the company to leverage its expertise in manufacturing and process technology as it gradually rolls out products with more upside in the channel.

Meanwhile, AMD is rounding out 2005 firing on almost all cylinders. It continues to offer impressive performance to server customers, albeit at a premium price. And because the high-end is already well-seeded with threaded software, dual-core Opteron processors are demonstrating material gains and consequently receiving greater market acceptance.

Desktop customers were introduced to the same dual-core architecture this last year. However, in a move that acknowledges a shortage of threaded mainstream software, AMD's fastest Athlon 64 FX models are still single-core designs offering gratuitous clock speeds. Moving into 2006, you can count on AMD to change its tune and transition more aggressively to multi-core, even with the Athlon 64 FX.

How will such a jump affect resellers? Well, AMD doesn't have an exciting initiative such as Viiv to push. But an undeniable performance advantage and fairly broad range of mid-range to high-end prices ensure your customer can adopt dual-core, maintain performance in non-threaded applications such as games, and enable substantial gains as threaded software materializes.

Architecturally, AMD doesn't plan to change its recipe much. DDR2 memory support is on the menu for 2006, which will require an infrastructure shift as AMD adopts a new socket interface. The mobile market, AMD's most glaring point of weakness, will see the first dual-core Turion processors and a dual-channel memory implementation. Of course, as we know from history, Centrino is the dominant market leader and any attempt to usurp that platform in 2006 will require AMD's existing performance and a lower power envelope.

64-Bit in the House

Dual-core wasn't AMD's only victory in 2005. After two years and numerous delays, the company's 64-bit vision was finally realized when Microsoft took the wraps off of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Granted Intel had already joined the 64-bit x86 party by then. However, to AMD executives, such a move only validated its original message. At least on the desktop, 64-bit technology didn't really seem to gain traction in 2005, though. Maybe it was overshadowed by the dual-core hullabaloo. Or perhaps there just wasn't a compelling reason to upgrade. After all, a majority of benchmark results demonstrated no appreciable performance gain with the operating system.

PCI Express at Last
Available in a variety of configurations, the PCI Express interface, seen here on Intel's D915GEV motherboard, employs a serial architecture for more bandwidth than either PCI
or AGP.

Now, it's true that existing 32-bit applications run in 64-bit Windows environments. And it's true that the programming model applied to 64-bit development is largely similar to 32-bit. But the lack of 64-bit consumer software would suggest limited potential for improving performance in the near future. The most prominent 64-bit selling points, according to Microsoft's XP product page, are memory support ranging up to 128GB (up from 4GB) and multi-core optimizations. If there emerges a real reason for resellers to start pushing 64-bit in 2006, it'll be software written to take advantage of 64-bit architectures. You see, 32-bit programs running on top of XP x64 Edition aren't programmed to exploit the advanced hardware. Code specifically compiled for 64-bit operation will recognize the extra registers and pick up free performance, though.

The server market is a different story entirely, of course. There you'll routinely find mainstream boxes with room for 8GB of memory or more. Additionally, much of the enterprise-level software used in development, infrastructure, database, business processing, and engineering is already primed with 64-bit goodness. Then you have multi-processor/multi-core support, which works really well with 2005's overarching threaded theme.

Now With SM 3.0
ATI's recently launched Radeon X1800 XT marks the company's first foray into Shader Model 3.0 support.

Actually taking the next step and offering 64-bit solutions to your customers is now easier than ever (and more important, too). You already have access to Windows XP x64 and Windows Server 2003 x64 operating systems. SQL Server is available in 64-bit trim, as is Visual Studio. Moving forward into 2006 and beyond, Microsoft has already announced that the next Exchange Server will only work on 64-bit systems. The same goes for the Longhorn variant of Small Business Server. Take heed of Microsoft's fair-warning to small- and mid-market resellers. Familiarize yourself with the developing 64-bit infrastructure in preparation of an industry migration to 64-bit computing.

PCI Express Proliferates

A Whitebook to grow on
ASUS' Z71V chassis is a perfect platform for building custom whitebook configurations

In all fairness, PCI Express emerged midway through 2004 with Intel's 925X Express chipset. Then the interface popped up later the same year for Athlon and Opteron processors with NVIDIA's nForce4 platform. But PCI Express peripherals weren't readily available. Without an established install base, companies such as ATI and NVIDIA sold almost all of their supply to top-tier system builders. Only after motherboards started moving early in 2005 did the channel see decent quantities of PCI Express hardware.

Oh, what a difference a year makes. PCI Express graphics cards are readily available, particularly at the high-end. In fact, many of the fastest cards sell exclusively as PCI Express models. The throughput virtues of PCI Express started catching on elsewhere in 2005, as well. Hard drive controllers, FireWire 800 cards, and TV tuners began emerging in a trend you can expect to continue through 2006.

Media Center Madness
Windows XP MCE represents a growing market for VARs moving into 2006.

Is there money to be made in PCI Express? Sure, but the real story is value. PCI Express is an enabling technology. It paves the way for extra bandwidth, squashing the 133 MBps limit of PCI and obliterating the half-duplex communication of AGP. PCI Express gives you SLI graphics, 10 Gbps Ethernet, and massive SAS disk arrays. Each of those technologies would have previously either been impossible or prohibitively expensive. Now, they're accessible, if not reasonable, in a mid-market environment.

The value comes from integrating PCI Express components—priced more attractively than the Ultra320 SCSI and exotic PCI-X 2.0 cards of yesterday—in such a way that they run faster, cost less, and lay a scalable foundation.

3D Keeps Getting Faster

The 3D graphics industry marches along at a very unforgiving pace. But the traditional six-month cycle was broken in 2005 when ATI tripped up and delayed its Radeon X1000-series family. Thus NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra dominated the first half of the year in its SLI mode while the GeForce 7800 GTX took the second half.

In between, ATI announced its own CrossFire multi-card rendering technology and family of Shader Model 3.0-compliant graphics processors. As it turns out, those two showings were the biggest news from ATI all year and unfortunately, both product families are still seeing limited availability even as the year closes out.

So although nothing particularly revolutionary happened in graphics, which is frankly understandable given our current proximity to Windows Vista and the changes it will introduce, ATI and NVIDIA are at least both on the same page with DirectX 9.0c support. In other words, the two graphics vendors now recognize games written with Shader Model 3.0 in mind from their fastest products down to the mainstream boards. Selling those lower-end cards might mean sacrificing performance, but customers won't lose out on important image quality features. That's great news for gamers eager to witness the latest titles in all of their visual decadence.

Moving forward, we're not quite sure what to expect from graphics in 2006. ATI is reportedly putting the finishing touches on an improved version of its current flagship, which should make it more competitive with NVIDIA's latest GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB. However, there is little word on how the two companies intend to scale their current enthusiast parts down to affordable levels where most of your action takes place.

Whitebooks and Media Center Systems

In case you haven't noticed, margins on beige boxes aren't so hot any more. Here's hoping 2005 saw you spreading out and covering some new ground. At least two markets continued to dole out success and promise growth in 2006. Whitebooks—generally identified as unbranded notebook chassis sans processor, memory, and storage—really picked up steam. Intel deserves a lot of credit for jump-starting that market as it started selling boxed Pentium M CPUs to the channel. The slow maturation of empty whitebook systems also played a role as manufacturers enabled great performance through PCI Express graphics, DDR2 memory, and mobile SATA storage.

It certainly helps that while prices of desktop PCs have dipped precariously, notebooks continue commanding a premium. A resourceful VAR building fully modern mobile machines can absolutely compete on a cost basis with top-tier vendors. And as we cruise into 2006, Intel will take the wraps off of its dual-core mobile lineup, giving your customers another reason to get excited about whitebooks.

Then you have media center boxes, which started out on a slow path to adoption but now constitute more than 30% of retail desktop sales according to Current Analysis. That growth, prevalent in the latter half of 2005, may very well propel value-added media center whiteboxes, especially in the face of Intel's Viiv initiative. You see, most MCE systems (in excess of 70%) ship without a TV tuner. Current Analysis's research indicated average selling prices below $900, too. It'd seem that there's plenty of room for slightly higher-end configurations better able to harness the operating system's full feature set, including its free electronic program guide and PVR functionality.

See You Next Year

If you didn't explore media center boxes in 2005, failed to evaluate the value of dual-core, and kept shipping Windows XP Professional without paying a mind to the x64 Edition, make it a New Year's resolution to catch up. Those technologies will be critical in the 12 months to come.