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by William Van Winkle |
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At the start of this decade, the idea of the "book PC" had already been dead for years. A few manufacturers tried to create upright slim PCs the size of a (rather large hardback) book, but standardized form factors didn’t exist, internal heat buildup was a considerable problem, and the boxes were simply underpowered, even by standards of the day. Book PCs found a slender niche in forms such as the FIC Crusader, ASUS Pundit, and ECS' BookPC, most of which were targeted at businesses more concerned with footprint than megahertz, but the book PC effort as a whole drowned quickly. |
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Then, in 2000, an R&D engineer named Kevin Huang, working for then-floundering Shuttle Computer, was told to come up with a new design for the company's product line that could fit well with its digital surveillance system products. Shuttle had small motherboards based on the Intel 810 chipset, but nobody wanted to help Shuttle design a suitable chassis, so Huang had to painstakingly work one out from scratch. Finally, the result was the world's first "cube PC," the SV24. The market then moved to Pentium 4, and Huang had to revamp the cube's interior for better heat handling, which bred the ICE heatpipe system that became standard in Shuttle XPCs. Within two years, XPCs were the talk of the enthusiast community. They were considerably smaller than even microATX desktops, usually quieter, still expandable via a couple of card slots, and able to use the latest processors. Gamers toted them around to LAN parties. Some government organizations racked them up in server farms. An avalanche of clone designs from Biostar, ECS, FIC, ASUS, iWill, Jetway, MSI, and many others sought to cash in on the small form factor (SFF) gold rush, but by the time most of them got to market, the hills were already drying up. By 2004, SFF was a losing pursuit, and no gimmicks—fancy front panel LCDs, pre-OS CD/MP3 playback, even Jetway's one-PC-two-users MagicTwin technology—could generate any fresh interest. Shuttle stepped back from resellers and sought margin by selling XPC systems direct. By and large, the SFF movement was dead. Over in a different side of the industry, Intel's Centrino push was still going b. The Pentium M continued to win friends and influence manufacturers. Two of these, AOpen and DFI, floated experimental boards that took the seemingly insane step of planting the Pentium M with an 855GME chipset on a microATX desktop platform. Despite the fact that this was obviously a play toward facilitating quiet, low temperature desktops with respectable performance, reviewers still found ways to compare the two boards against conventional Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 offerings, noted that the Pentium M emerged similar to or trailing in performance, and announced the first mobile-on-desktop (MoDT) efforts a price/performance failure. There were two problems here. First, most reviewers missed the point of MoDT entirely. Mobile-on-desktop is not about price vs. performance; it's about price/performance per watt. As AMD spokesman Damon Muzny recently told us, the game has changed. Power is now equally as important as performance. The benchmarking reviewers may not have cottoned onto this fact yet, but the market soon will.
Core Duo: Change Is Here With the release of Intel's Core Duo chip, the landscape has shifted drastically, even if the map lines haven't been officially redrawn yet. Initially code-named Yonah (Hebrew for "dove" and the alternate spelling for Jonah, the Old Testament prophet prone to traveling in large fish), the Core Duo is the industry's first low power dual-core processor. Intel specs show that the chip tops out at 25W power consumption, less than half of the nearest dual-core competitor, and boasts 151 million transistors, including 2MB of shared L2 cache. The L2 is managed between both cores by a new arbitration unit that, while requiring slightly higher latency times, eliminates the old bottleneck of passing data from core to core across the front-side bus. Core Duo uses a 12-stage pipeline, sits on a 667 MHz FSB (up from the preceding Pentium M's 533 MHz), and is expected to scale eventually to speeds in the 2.3 to 2.5 GHz range. Much of the die architecture derives from the Pentium III, but Intel has added so many enhancements and twists that overall performance now rivals conventional mainstream CPUs, such as the Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2. In fact, according to Web reports, the Core architecture is so impressive on both the power and performance fronts that Intel's next-generation desktop line, currently code-named Conroe, will share the Core architecture, sit on a 1,066 MHz FSB, and be known as the Core E6000 series. (Several comparative reviews show the Core Duo at 2.16 GHz even occasionally beating the mighty Pentium Extreme 965 and Athlon FX-60 on performance, which sounds too incredible to be real...but is.) It seems likely that much of what will differentiate desktop and mobile processors going forward are bus speeds and power levels rather than die architecture. "The standard desktop is always going to be there," says Intel channel MoDT program manager Jie Lou. "If you want sheer power, it's all about the desktop. I think that's still the company-wide positioning, but MoDT actually exceeds anything in the mainstream space from a processing perspective, and that includes any of the jabs AMD has been able to lobby at us on the desktop. Crank as much power as you want into it, Core Duo is going to outperform anything. Now, there may be times when dual graphics with a conventional desktop chip will win in gaming benchmarks—although there are even a couple of dual graphics MoDT platforms out there now—but from a pure processing perspective in the mainstream desktop arena, nothing beats Core Duo. So for the next six months or so, this is a great performance play opportunity." True enough, mobile-on-desktop designs are pouring into the market much like SFF cubes did in 2003, only this time the long-term prospects look much better. AOpen, for example, currently has six MoDT small form factor motherboards in the pipeline spanning mini-ITX, microATX, ATX, picoBTX, and microBTX form factors. Customers wanting a more budget-conscious approach to cool and quiet may lean toward an older model, such as the i915a-HFS, built on ATX for the second-generation Dothan Pentium M chip. Those who want to push the boundaries of what can be done today on a 479-pin socket should try the Core Duo-compatible i975a-YDG, which takes the unusual step among MoDT designs of including overclocking options. Hop over to MSI's Web site (www.msicomputer.com) and you'll see promotions for mobile-on-desktop in the form of AMD's Turion 64 chip. Turion, of course, is the prime competitor of the Pentium M. First released in March of 2005, Turion processors presently span from 1.6 GHz to 2.4 GHz and come in 25W and 35W maximum TDP varieties. A Turion update to dual-core, the Turion X2, is expected to arrive in June on the new S1 socket. Until then, we have Turion 64 on Socket 754. Any Socket 754 motherboard can run a Turion 64 processor provided the board vendor has released an appropriate BIOS update. In MSI's case, six currently shipping motherboards are Turion-ready. Just remember to buy the requisite Mobile PAD heat spreader and install it between the CPU and standard Socket 754 heatsink fan. Turion-compatible boards are available in both ATX and microATX form factors along with AGP and PCI Express support. From a chip-versus-chip perspective, Turion matched up very closely against the Pentium M on mobile platforms. That said, AMD's Muzny cautions resellers to keep an eye on overall power consumption in case wattage is a primary buying consideration. While Turion has some of the best single-core power numbers in the world, particularly under load, the motherboard under it also needs to be factored in. Notebook motherboards are built with special high-end components designed to cut overall consumption at every turn in an effort to prolong battery life. On the desktop, boards are almost universally built for speed. So while mobile processors may be optimized for low power consumption, the motherboards on which they run, if not built specifically for cool running, may not be. Be careful in your messaging, and, when in doubt, do some testing to confirm actual system power draws. Also, keep an eye on your heatsink options. We all know that a slew of third-party, premium heatsinks exist for desktop processors, most of which aim for greater cooling with less noise. The MoDT segment has yet to see such a third-party market surface yet. In general, MoDT motherboard vendors will bundle a heatsink. The ASUS N4L-VM DH board (see below), for example, comes with a rather stock looking heatsink fan that quickly clips onto the motherboard's Socket 479 mounting. As you would expect, the fan is very quiet, but it won't be long before higher-end users start wanting heatpipe-based upgrades for even quieter systems. "Mobile-on-desktop is a very interesting market," says MSI senior product manager Andy Tung. "In North America, the main competition for system builders is OEMs, and the only factor in that competition is price. But the point here is that OEMs haven't touched MoDT. Second, this is a very interesting concept for customers. Regardless of power, everyone who uses desktops knows the solution is fast enough. Rather than keep increasing gigahertz, they'd rather find other areas to emphasize, like low noise, low heat, less power consumption. Schools and government will be big customers. Then there will be appliance customers, including gaming systems, kiosks, media storage, or whatever." Small Form Factors Now We predict that it won't take long for mobile-on-desktop and small form factor to become synonymous phrases. Today, though, they're still separate ideas. Mobile-on-desktop addresses four key vectors: smaller size, better acoustics, more styling, and lower power consumption. Small form factor, of course, is just about small box size. By nature, many SFFs have lower power consumption than their desktop counterparts, but this is not a key design criterion. We've also seen some strikingly ugly SFF designs and a few rather loud ones to boot. The key thing to note about SFF today is that the "cube" is not the only or even the dominant paradigm. The XPC is certainly alive and well, and companies such as Biostar and AOpen are still rolling out worthy new shoe box PCs. (AOpen in particular is giving Shuttle a run for its money with a surprisingly broad cube line.) But "ePC" designs fashioned to look like conventional, low-profile home theater components are gaining ground, and the Apple Mac Mini seems to have ushered in a new wave of ultra-small form factor designs, most notably from AOpen (miniPC), ECS (P60), and Shuttle (X100). "Small form factor is getting more and more popular in the U.S.," says ECS' Jason Fan, vice president of sales, notebook division. "In the past, for whatever reason, people tended to go with a bigger machine. But I think maybe the iPod changed that perception. Or even the Motorola RAZR phone. People are starting to understand the convenience of having a smaller form factor. Now, monoputers were not popular before. Even Apple tried the all-in-one concept, and it was not well-accepted. People felt they wanted something more powerful. But the performance of today's SFF designs, even some of the all-in-one approaches, is now very powerful." As shown by IDC's infographic, small form factors are where the market's future growth rests. All other conventional form factors will recede in volume as SFFs, including ultra-smalls and all-in-ones, gain share. The smaller a form factor gets, the less likely it is to adhere to an industry standard. The three ultra-smalls mentioned above are all proprietary designs. Not coincidentally, ultra-smalls tend to closely resemble notebooks, sporting the same processor, chipset, hard drive type, wireless adapter, and so on. In fact, on paper, the only thing that separates a Centrino notebook from, say, an AOpen miniPC is Centrino's requirement of a battery to enable unplugging from the wall. The potential downside here is that, just like when whitebooks arrived in the channel three years ago, there are few standardized parts. There is no equivalent of Intel's Common Building Blocks program (see last month's cover story, "Whitebook War II") for ultra-smalls. If your optical drive or motherboard goes down, expect to RMA the entire unit back to the vendor. Again, note that these difficulties primarily apply to ultra-smalls. The real titan in today's SFF world is microATX, even among set-top-style cases. With microATX, motherboards measure only 9.6" x 9.6" and can sport up to four card slots. Cases will accommodate one or two external 5.25" bays and one to three hard drives. For much of the mainstream, this is more than enough expandability, and the interior is roomy enough to support even today's hottest CPUs provided there is an adequate cooler and ventilation. Whether microATX is up to accommodating tomorrow's hottest chips, however, is a subject of industry argument. The microATX form factor has one huge advantage over ultra-smalls: full-height card compatibility. It's ironic that we now have PCs with the performance levels expected from an enthusiast's full tower that can fit on your hand but we can't come up with a low-profile dual TV tuner card much less a card with dual analog tuners plus one over-the-air HD tuner. In the consumer world, an increasing number of buyers expect SFF boxes to replace their Tivo or set-top, and this means having at least two tuners. Ultra-smalls tend to have no PCI slots and only one Mini PCI available, which is often used for either Wi-Fi or a TV tuner. MiniCard (not Mini PCI) combo cards with both of these functions aren't expected until the third quarter, which means you're stuck with selling customers this fabulous, tiny box that now has to be saddled with external USB devices.
Whether addressing consumer or business, SFF resellers should take heed of the Apple lesson: cosmetics sell. An executive's office or the receptionist lounge of a design firm is not going to put a beige tower under the public eye. These types want to convey impressions of style and innovative thinking, and today that means small form factor—the smaller the better. "The exterior of the box is of great importance to consumers," says Shuttle product marketing manager Kevin Tu, "and mobile-on-desktop allows the architectural designers to give something new to the market, something like the X100 or the Mac Mini. In general, I think this is where the industry is going. A few years ago, you wouldn't have heard something like ‘performance per watt.' Everything now is focused on power consumption. I saw an ad yesterday for ‘the world's most Earth-friendly server.' For performance users, I don't think they'll move into small form factors, but I think SFF will satisfy 80% to 90% of the rest of the market. With capacities reaching to 750GB, most users aren't going to need multiple drives locally." On a broader scale, SFF seems destined to prevail if only because of the rapid rise of broadband deployment and the shift to Gigabit and higher networking. In the days before GUIs, thin clients dangling from a central server were a cost-effective approach for businesses that didn't need workers to have more than basic data access and input capabilities at their desks. With the rise of Windows and multimedia-based content, the distributed model took over, putting more CPU and storage power out at the network's edge. Now, though, perpendicular recording-based hard drives are about to allow for 200GB to 300GB on a device little larger than a credit card. Core Duo and subsequent chips deliver all the computing power an average office worker could need. And if Google and Microsoft are real harbingers of the future, chances are that productivity apps are soon going to be running from remote servers. Centralization is ripe for a comeback. If the "thin" clients of old were Kate Moss, the clients of tomorrow will be more robust Beyoncé designs, but the thin client model as a whole is set to prevail again. ...more |
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