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By William Van Winkle |
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And If Nobody Cares? By the time you read this, Bass Computers will have launched its reseller seminar on Vista readiness—not about why to buy Vista but how to sell it. According to Bass' Jason vonCordesen, the distributor is doing this simply because Microsoft hasn't. Resellers need to get end-users excited about the product, but Microsoft hasn't done much to excite the resellers. All this does is perpetuate the problem of potential buyers thinking that they got through the XP generation still using Windows 2000, so why change? "I've got a customer right now who on average buys 100 pieces of Windows XP Pro along with the systems we build each month," says vonCordesen. "The Pro COA goes on the box, but he loads 2000 on it, because that's what the customer is running. Hey, the COA says it's downgradeable, right? But come on. I can't even get that guy to upgrade to XP. How am I supposed to get him up to Vista?" This is a serious concern. After all the hype and anticipation, the stark fact is that a lot of people are going to look at Vista and just not care, especially after seeing the price. The historical trend in Windows releases should give further pause as it seems the conversion rate from previous to new version extends with each release. "Windows 95—big success," notes D&H's Michael Schwab. "Windows 98—big success. XP—big success but took longer for people to adopt. In between, there were variations that weren't as strong of a success. 2000 did well, but again, it took people a while to migrate. I would equate the operating system with the moves to dual-core and 64-bit CPUs. That's great news, but if there are no applications out there to take advantage of the new underlying operating system, processor, and bus, then all you're doing is future-proofing. There's no reason to rush out and upgrade if you can't see a real benefit." So what do you do? If you play the Vista card in February and find it's not enough for some buyers, what do you have left to play to get people upgrading? More than you might think. New Graphics Let's restate this for emphasis: Vista is the first Windows release in which the strength of the graphics processor is going to benefit the system in a holistic sense, not just within this or that application. Think about what this means for the breadth of your graphics performance messaging. Up until now, you'd have to say, "Oh, you play World of Warcraft? Have you seen what this card can do for that title?" A blockbuster game like WoW might sell eight or nine million copies. Windows XP sold 17 million copies in its first two months. In October, Microsoft announced it had sold its 20 millionth copy of Media Center. Over 230 million PCs are expected to have sold in 2006, and most of them will be running Windows. Take numbers like these and imagine having a firm case for selling a graphics upgrade with each box and what that might do for your ASPs. Compelling, no?
But this assumes that your customers want Vista, and some won't. Despite the loss of DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4, there is still a strong story to tell for next-generation graphics working under Windows XP and DirectX 9. NVIDIA's G80 core, available now in the GeForce 8800 parts, and ATI's R600, due in the first quarter, have excellent upgrade value. After all, many customers of whitebox builders are more likely than average to view systems from an upgradeable component rather than a sealed box perspective, and you're likely to find buyers wanting just an assembled machine ready to accept their current version of XP so they can save $200 to $400 that can be "better" spent elsewhere...like improved graphics. As both new cores are DX10-compatible, their respective cards can act as a bridge between the worlds of XP and Vista. You get a strong future-proofing play with exceptional performance improvements here and now. Thus far, the now AMD-managed ATI is still playing coy with many R600 details, and much of what is known today descends from the pre-AMD days of last spring and summer. Back in May, ATI was trumpeting that R600, which takes a massive leap from the R580 found in today's X1950 parts, as the fastest DirectX 9 product the company had ever designed. This is noteworthy given that DirectX 9 is based on separate pixel and vertex shader paths and the R600 uses a unified architecture optimized for DirectX 10. We know from the unified Xenos core ATI developed for the Xbox 360 that there is a roughly 20% to 25% performance hit when running in a non-unified mode, as when the 48-shader core dedicates 16 shaders for vertex work and 32 for pixel. Still, if you presume an increase of 50% to 100% in performance between generations and then have to shave off a bit for running under DX9, that's still a hefty performance bump. R600 is expected to bow with 64 unified shader processors, 16 texture units, and support for GDDR4 memory, which debuted on the X1950 XTX. Early rumblings indicate a 512-bit memory interface while recent rumors point to 1GB to 2GB of onboard memory. With the GDDR4 running at 1.1 GHz, that would yield a Herculean bandwidth of 140.8 GB/s, considerably more than the 86.4 GB/s on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX. This coupled with expected core clock speeds in the 700 to 800 MHz range have fueled wide speculation that R600 will toss NVIDIA's G80 to the dogs. Of course, ATI is still waiting around for the Vista launch (presumably) before shipping product, and NVIDIA is busy bringing in G80 revenue for the holidays, so hold your stone flinging.
The 8800 GTX and GTS continue NVIDIA's tradition of launching a groundbreaking x800 model set, leaving enough room for higher-end x900 and mainstream x600 follow-ups in the coming months. You can get an idea of the 8800's raw horsepower just by looking at some basic comparisons against the prior NVIDIA high-end part, the 7900 GTX (G71 core). Whereas the G71 processor had 278 million transistors, the G80 mushrooms to 681 million. Interestingly, the core and memory clocks slide from 650 MHz and 800 MHz on the 7900 GTX to 575 MHz and 900 MHz on the 8800 GTX. This may seem like a sideways move overall, but because the memory bus swings from 256-bit on G71 up to 384-bit on the 8800 GTX, overall memory bandwidth climbs from 51.2 GB/s to 86.4 GB/s. Other improvements include a rise in total shaders from 32 on the 7900 GTX to 128 on the 8800 GTX. Taking advantage of all this extra muscle, NVIDIA here introduces another advances in image enhancement called Coverage Sampled Antialiasing (CSAA), essentially a more space-effective method for performing 16x filtering of sub-samples using Boolean analysis. Video playback quality through NVIDIA's PureVideo software ratchets up another step, and so on. It's the same story we usually see: faster and better quality. Only with the 8800 GTX, the generational jump in speed is far better than usual, especially at higher resolutions with the filtering cranked up. Several online reviewers are finding better than double the benchmark results when comparing the 8800 GTX against the 7900 GTX, a stupendous leap in this category—and that's running under Windows XP. Beyond increases in conventional performance, next-gen GPUs will harness their programmability to tackle an ever-wider array of tasks. One of the most anticipated of these is physics computations. Physics has generally been difficult to pull off on desktop PCs since all-purpose CPUs are not optimized for the task, necessitating an inordinate amount of resources to compute how virtual objects should behave like real objects within their virtual worlds given the rules that programmers dictate. The latest GPUs, though, are far better suited to this job, which is why the G80 is stirring tremendous excitement among gamers itching to see their environments become more realistic and immersive. "Having the ability to do physics with our Quantum Effects technology, you can completely animate an environment like never before," says NVIDIA's Andrew Fear. "Remember going from no hardware acceleration to having hardware acceleration back in the Quake days? It's like that. Check out our Cascades waterfall demo. It's more than just a DirectX 10 demo. There's complete physics, as well. We do the calculations for a water effect. You click on the scene and water will trickle down and bounce off the objects. Same with the mist, too. That's physics actually being calculated in the processor."
You'll no doubt notice that the GeForce 8800 GTX has two 6-wire power connectors—a first among graphics cards. The PCI Express power connector is rated to deliver 75W, and the 8800 GTX card, according to NVIDIA, draws up to a peak of 145.5W (116.6W average). NVIDIA's info shows ATI's X1900 XTX drawing 115.1W on average, and that card only sports one power connector. Infer that ATI is overstrained or NVIDIA is overcautious as you see fit. On performance per watt, NVIDIA claims a 1.5X advantage for the 8800 GTX over the X1900 XTX. Clearly, you don't need Vista to realize massive improvements in graphics performance with the latest GPUs. Vista will make the proposition even better, but for those wanting to elevate the quality and speed of their video and graphics, the future is arriving now, and it's fully backward-compatible. Moreover, robust GPUs are going to elevate applications in ways we've rarely seen before. "I'd say the growth of stream computing applications will be huge for GPUs," says ATI/AMD's Chris Evenden. "We demonstrated a few back in September, and you can already see a 20x speed-up in Folding@Home on an X1950XTX compared to on a CPU. You're going to see these techniques take off in a number of areas—not just high performance computing but home applications, as well. Acrobat Reader 8 uses GPU acceleration already, and that's the tip of the iceberg. The computing power offered by GPUs will enable completely new applications." High-Def Discs Another thing that's going to drive sales in 2007 is the Blu-ray and HD DVD transition. As you probably know, these are the two competing successors to today's DVD technology. Both use 405nm blue-violet lasers rather than the 650nm red lasers of DVD, which is why you can cram 50GB on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc and 30GB on a dual-layer HD DVD. This markedly higher capacity coupled with much more efficient codec technologes—H.264/AVC being chief among them for blue laser formats—now enables movies at 1080p playback with stunning picture quality. If you've ever been annoyed at the blockiness and banding of MPEG-2 compression found on many DVDs, blue laser will roll over you like a breath of spring air in late summer L.A. Unfortunately, the two formats are incompatible, and despite efforts at all levels, the two camps were unable to meet in the middle prior to releasing the initial wave of movie titles in the last part of 2006. Today, Blu-ray and HD DVD drives run in the $500 to $1,000 range, but prices are expected to plummet like mad through 2007. With luck, hybrid drives able to play and record in both formats will follow close behind. Note that unlike with DVDs, no "crack" for the protection schemes used in Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD has yet gone public. Whether or not such cracks yet exist, there can be no argument that the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) safeguarding both technologies is far more sophisticated than its CSS predecessor on DVDs. This is the wrong place to start a discussion on whether PCs, set-tops, smart TVs, or remote servers are going to fuel the media center concept of tomorrow. Nobody knows; everybody has a different vision. However, we can be nearly certain of a few things. High-def will reign, H.264 will be a part of it, and somewhere in the house, whether it's the home theater or a basement closet, people will need that H.264 stream decoded for playback on whatever devices they please. As with MPEG-2 playback a decade ago, H.264 decoding is done far more efficiently in the graphics adapter than on the CPU. H.264 will crush most mainstream CPUs and will leave even the fastest chips out today panting under at least a 50% load. Bill Gates at one point noted that this Blu-ray vs. HD DVD debacle will likely be the last format war we will face. The qualifier to that statement is that it is probably the last disc media format war we'll face. iTunes, CinemaNow, and their like are slowly but persuasively moving legal movie downloads beyond early adopters and into the mainstream. iTunes movies are encoded in—you guessed it—H.264, although their smaller resolution so far isn't as taxing as true HD. Still, we're a long way yet from download-only homes. Blu-ray and HD DVD will use their expanded capacities to bring a wealth of "extras" that download sites have shown virtually no interest in offering. And if the two formats (or their hybrid conjunction) do in fact steer clear of cracking software, expect studios to push the discs on consumers with all their might. After all, despite its aging, never-protected technology, Compact Disc still rules music distribution. Digital downloads only accounted for 4% of the music market in the first half of 2005. Presuming similar growth in the video space, there's little doubt that blue laser formats will thrive. Your job is to show how stunning Blu-ray and HD DVD can can look on a PC. This in turn means you need an ATI X1000-series or NVIDIA GeForce 7- or 8-series card handling the decode work on those discs for stutter-free playback in the face of background tasks along with the Avivo or PureVideo post-processing to make that video look its absolute best. Customers should understand that blue laser movies on a high-quality flat panel can exceed the quality of a traditional consumer electronics player plus deliver the full functionality of a networked PC. You don't want to just sell the blue laser drive; it's about selling the experience and the infrustructure that will enable that experience in its various forms over the many months to come. Storage Seagate remains the capacity king at 750GB per 3.5" drive. We hear through the grapevine that the perpendicular-based 1TB drive is either done or nearly done, but until any of its competitors get close to hitting the 750GB mark, why would Seagate rush the market with 1TB? So don't plan on having 1TB drives under the Christmas tree, or maybe even in your Easter basket, but they're definitely locked and loaded for the first half of 2007. What to do with all this storage? Back it up. We can say this with absolute conviction because we have an external drive in our office, only about four months old, containing nearly 600GB of audio and video content. The drive is in the process of failing and swallowing stray files on its way to the scrap heap. Not even we can throw stones on this point. So many people, consumer and corporate alike, don't adequately protect their data, and there's really no excuse. All but the lowest-end chipsets today support at least RAID 0 and 1 modes, and internal drives now cost pennies per gigabyte. Those who don't want to take a screwdriver to their PCs can opt for USB or FireWire backup drives, and those more into sharing their files can turn to network storage. There's no new message in backup for 2007, though. All you can do is keep pressing the point and try to win new converts. Strangely, the biggest news in storage for the coming year seems to be developing in the mobile drive arena. "There are a number of reasons people are going to want to upgrade their storage soon," says Seagate spokesman Michael Hall. "If we look at notebooks, security is a big issue. There's been a lot of publicity about that. But companies need an easy way to deploy security. It can't be complex. They need a transparent way to deploy security in their laptops. That's what we've got and will be equipping the market with on our Momentus FDE 5400.2. We seamlessly encrypt and decrypt data on the drive, so if someone walks off with your notebook, all of its information is undecipherable." More precisely, Seagate's Full Disk Encryption technology uses a dedicated chip on the drive's PCB to perform realtime encryption and decryption, authenticated by a user password, of incoming and outgoing data. While not as versatile as Vista's BitLocker in some respects, FDE has the advantage of performing its operations locally on the drive, not as a system overhead function shouldered by the CPU via the operating system. If you've seen us detail Seagate's FDE drive before, that's because the drive has been around for several months already. However, the firmware needed better integration capabilities with the wide range of motherboard BIOSes in the channel, and the software needed to be improved for easier installation and management. Additionally, Seagate improved the on-drive encryption method from Triple-DES to 128-bit AES. This work is now done, and Seagate is planning to roll the Momentus FDE out to resellers in a big way throughout the first quarter as part of its DriveTrust platform push. Encryption is only one aspect of DriveTrust. The platform is also about establishing a trusted relationship between the drive and its host system. This can manifest as trust between the two physical devices as well as trust between the host and the data located in secured areas on that drive. There are applications of DriveTrust waiting for virtually every market segment, but one of these is already available and selling in Seagate's DVR-oriented desktop media drive, the DB35. "Our DB35 already integrates DriveTrust," says Hall. "It doesn't have encryption, but it does have authentication in the form of the drive locking feature. It basically locks the drive to the host. If you try to remove the drive from the system, say to copy it onto another computer, you can't do it." One more storage breakthrough waiting for 2007 is hybrid drives. Originally developed in cooperation between Samsung and Microsoft for Windows Vista, hybrid drives entail up to 1GB of non-volatile flash memory being resident within the hard drive—in effect a sort of very large L2 cache for the drive, although there is far less (if any) speculative prefetching involved with hybrid drives. Rather, the drive's expanded cache is meant to store temporary and commonly used files.
So long as the flash memory is able to hold all of the drive data the rest of the system needs, the platters are free to spin down. In fact, some early estimates state that a regular user might see platter accesses decrease by over 90 percent. There are several key benefits here: lower noise, far lower power consumption, less heat output, and much longer drive MTBF (there are no moving parts if the platters are idle) to name four big ones. Also consider that platters usually take three to five seconds to spin up whereas flash accesses happen in microseconds. Thus performance from hybrid drives stands to be remarkably better for small-size, common tasks than conventional drives. Expect Vista to have native support for hibernating directly to a hybrid drive's flash cache. This has the potential to make resuming a Windows session nearly instantaneous. Users may even be able to cold boot straight from a hybrid's buffer, dropping power-on to login to under 10 seconds. Efficiency buffs may find this one feature alone enough reason to upgrade. A Must-Sell a Minute If we broaden our net a bit, there are plenty more reasons for people to upgrade in 2007 besides Vista. Consider networking. Most mid-level, business, and high-end motherboards now come with Gigabit Ethernet, but deployment of Gigabit infrastructure (switches, cabling, etc.) still lags far behind. Customers who want tolerable backup times to network storage or fast gaming or sharing of HD media need a solid Gigabit infrastructure. Gigabit switches and routers can come with advanced features like packet prioritization (QoS), which can improve both gaming and voice-over-IP applications—two big sales opportunities opened up by a switch upgrade. Similarly, with a wired LAN capable of speeds greater than 100 Mbps, shouldn't users have support for 100+ Mbps wireless protocols, such as Draft N? (The first Draft N firmware releases can be flaky, however, so make sure to update your customers' gear.) Enter another round of hardware sales. And while we're talking about networking, expect Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions to be big for businesses in 2007. Consumers have a slew of $50 to $90 applications and suites to handle their desktop security needs. Enterprises have very sophisticated solutions, maybe even with physical security methods like biometric scanning attached. But small businesses rely on resellers to recommend a solution with consumer simplicity but enterprise-class security, and UTMs are quickly emerging as the answer of choice. A UTM is essentially an end-to-end security suite (figure antivirus to anti-phisphing and all points in between) backed with the strength of a stand-alone appliance. This solves the problem of having antivirus from one vendor, a router from another, a firewall from a third, and so on. No small business wants to manage and patch all that, never knowing when an update may just cause an incompatibility with another security component. UTMs from names like Cisco, ZyXEL, Symantec, and SonicWALL are increasingly affordable and robust, and the knowledge required to sell and manage them is well within the reach of most small resellers. And that's just a peek inside of networking. Practically every product category has its own persuasive upgrade story to tell for the coming year. For example, Intel quad-core processors stand poised for monumental results in the next several months and have the capacity to take user experiences to a whole new level, so make sure you read our Core 2 Quad feature starting on page 52. Vista is good, but we don't need Vista to drive sales in 2007. The hits will keep coming in from the hardware side one after another after another. "Usually, the period after Q4 is a time when people wait to see what's coming," says D&H's Michael Schwab. "I think that this year, people are going to have a lot on their plates to talk about early on in Q1. We're not going to sit around looking at roadmaps from CES. We're going to be just as busy in Q1 as we were in Q4." "Content is king," adds NVIDIA's Andrew Fear. "If you show somebody something they've never been able to do before, that's going to make them want to upgrade. We can argue about Aero and whether that's going to drive upgrades, but I actually think it will. People are going to see at it and think it's more future-looking. Style sells. Also, most people have never experienced Blu-ray or HD DVD. And as good as the new game consoles are, with the DirectX 10 titles coming out next year, you're going to see that the PC is still unequivocally the best gaming platform available." We'll be digging more into Windows Vista soon enough. But don't let Vista be a distraction for your customers. Keep their attention on finding solutions that will help their productivity, profitability, and enjoyment. If Vista fits in that framework, great. If not, keep on with the OS status quo and find those solutions in some of the other hot developments waiting right around the corner. The coming year is going to be amazing, and we believe that Vista is only going to be one piece of it. |
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Copyright © 2007 RAM Magazine. All rights reserved.
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