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By William Van Winkle |
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Two decades ago, Professor Bernard Frischer published a paper commenting how amazing it would be for historians and students if someday the power of computing could enable an artificial 3D environment in which the participant could wander about and experience a frozen moment from history. But in an epoch when 286s roamed the Earth, you can imagine how impossibly fanciful that vision must have seemed beyond the bounds of Hollywood. |
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MANY YEARs LATER, TOOLS EMERGED THAT would allow end-users to create such virtual environments. In particular, OpenSceneGraph, an open source 3D graphics toolkit based on C++ and OpenGL, looked promising as a medium in which to recreate history in 3D. The problem was then one of hardware. By January of 2002, to model something on the scale of an entire 3D city required nothing less than a Silicon Graphics Onyx workstation.
Only three years later, though, Professor Frischer was wandering two sets of hallways. The first set was at the University of Virginia, where he is the director of The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and can often be seen dashing from appointment to appointment with a Shuttle XPC in his backpack. The second set of hallways was in buildings like the famed Roman Colosseum, where Frischer could wander the corridors, getting close enough to surfaces to see the texture of the mortar between stones. Of course, this version of Rome, a virtual reality landscape mimicking the moment of 10:00 AM, June 21st, 320 A.D., was being generated by his little XPC, much in the same way that millions of people wander around in the popular Second Life world. (This Roman universe, designed largely on Shuttle boxes, is one of two dozen similar recreations spawning from Frischer's Virginia Digital Collaboratoreum (www.iath.virginia.edu/vdc) and is scheduled to go live to the public in late May.) The small form factor XPC, Frischer notes, creates this world with better performance than the Onyx workstation could only a few years ago. "We make heavy use of the Shuttles as our desktop machines," he says. "It's great, because, like any PC tower, you can open it up and update the components, but the footprint is a lot smaller. And it's a very cool-looking box that draws a lot of attention, so there's that element, too. But it really adds mobility. It's very easy to pick up and put in a backpack and go use it in a class or at a scientific meeting to show work to colleagues. Since it uses desktop and not laptop components, and since desktop components always seem to be at least a year ahead in terms of computing power, this form factor is very advantageous for us." We point out Frischer and his Rome project because they exemplify the opportunity the channel now faces in the small form factor (SFF) space—an area many resellers currently ignore. Of course, we all remember three or four years ago, after Shuttle's XPC line became immensely popular, when hordes of XPC clones flooded the market. Everybody had a cube to sell, but very few of them actually sold. Why? Oversaturation of a niche market probably had a lot to do with it. XPCs gained their fame in the gamer community, where desktop-class machines could suddenly go toe-to-toe against towers at LAN parties without requiring a back brace for PC transportation. It seemed that SFF was about to go mainstream, everybody rushed boxes to market, and the mainstream adoption never happened, probably because of the price premium carried by the smaller, more integrated, sometimes proprietary designs. Companies like ASUS, Biostar, ECS, FIC, iWill, MSI, Soltek, SOYO, and others saw their efforts crash and burn as the demand for SFF PCs evaporated. Most of these were good PCs. It's just that nobody wanted them.
Then came Intel's Viiv platform in early 2006 and with it a surety that the real destiny of SFF lay in the living room as part of the networked home theater. This was in the months before Core 2 Duo and the transition to Core microarchitecture. The best candidate Intel had at the time for small form factor was the Pentium M, which had just morphed into the Core Duo, and its Centrino-like mobile-on-desktop (MoDT) platform. Mobile-on-desktop was a stellar idea: great performance, low power, tiny size, and about the price premium you'd expect from a notebook architecture. The problem was that MoDT was linked to Viiv, and when the Viiv effort fizzled for various reasons, MoDT largely went with it. Only this time, the situation was worse. At least in 2003, vendors had taken a leap of faith with their SFF cubes and gone to market. In 2006, the majority of MoDT boxes never made it past the blueprint or prototype stage. Critical Condition or Critical Mass? So here we sit in 2007 with a lot of evidence suggesting that the small form factor market is dead. Only it's not—not quite. "In Q2 and Q3 of 2005, small form factor was just over 1% of the market," says Toni Dubois, senior analyst, computing, with Current Analysis. "The hard thing is that when a customer looks at a SFF and a mini tower side-by-side, the mini tower not only usually has a better feature set but it also costs less. But in Q4, HP's slimline [Pavillion S] series came online, and of course there were already the Mac minis, which pioneered the space. Then the market jumped in size to nearly 4% share. This AMD/HP cooperation yielded a very reasonably priced small form factor unit that caused ASPs to drop below $500 for the first time, which is why share is now up to about 6% of the market. But the overall condition is that small form factors still remain too costly for most consumers."
The important thing to note about Current Analysis' numbers is that they only track through big retailers, most of which don't carry names like Shuttle or AOpen. No channel sales, no e-tail, and no corporate sales figures. What we can learn here is that SFF either doesn't sell at all or it doesn't sell through retail...unless there's an Apple or HP logo on it. More encouraging news comes from IDC analyst Richard Shim, who forecasts that small form factor market share will be 23% by 2010, roughly 39 million units out of 168.9 million desktops. In 2007, the industry sits at just above 18%, representing 26.6 million units worldwide. An increase of 5% total share by the end of the decade may not sound like much, but compared against a decline of five million annual units in the tower category, small form factor isn't doing badly. The real opportunity, though, is in the ultrasmall form factor, which is projected to grow from 3.9 million units this year to 11.8 million in 2010. "Small form factor is affordable, familiar," says IDC's Shim. "It's one of the few bullets the channel can use to stave off the erosion of desktop market share. It's a concept that doesn't require a lot of support from other factors. For example, the digital entertainment home PC requires support not just from the PC industry but also the content industry, networking, and to some extent broadband. With small form factor, you can be flexible with the design in order to attract a larger market." IDC's 2006 report is less bullish on small form factor than previous estimates, and some of that has to do with the changing fate of BTX. Other influences include the ongoing problems of easily bringing premium content to living room PCs combined with set-tops and digital media adapters consuming the primary role of living room PCs—in other words, the same factors that helped pin Viiv to the mat. However, the trend that made mini-towers become the dominant form factor over mid and full towers, trading performance and expansion for space and lower noise, will only continue to help elevate the sub-mini categories. Five years ago, there was no such thing as consumer network attached storage, and no one in the business space would seriously believe that thin clients would ever make a comeback. But here we are. An increasing number of clients don't need heavy-duty computing and storage resources, and public awareness of PC noise and energy consumption issues is only escalating.
That said, while a market embracement of SFF seems inevitable, there are things system builders can do to help push adoption along. As we asked industry contacts for their opinions, most agreed that small form factor systems should lend themselves to both portability (consider how the reduction of cable connections via a USB hub can assist this, almost in the manner of a notebook port replicator) and ease of desktop placement. In this regard, smaller is usually better, but the ability to orient the system either vertically or horizontally counts for bonus points. Vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs), found in higher-end home theater PC (HTPC) cases, can help draw attention. The same is true of media center-related features, such as HDMI output or chassis styling that conforms to most consumer electronics components. Size Matters
Anybody who doubts that mainstream PC sizes are a function of underlying form factors should harken back to the AT and Baby AT designs of the late-'80s through mid-'90s. These 386-era behemoths were immensely popular but saddled designers with certain problems, such as a large chunk of the motherboard resting under the drive cage. The smaller you tried to build the system, the less convenient the machine became to work with. Killing boards by not inserting the power cables correctly was another minor problem. In 1995, Intel produced the ATX form factor specification, still in widespread use today for performance-oriented systems. However, at 12" x 9.6", ATX isn't a contender for the SFF space. The starting point here is microATX, which shrinks the PCB size to 9.6" x 9.6". Most microATX boards use three expansion slots, although the spec allows for a maximum of four, but otherwise sacrifice very little of ATX's capabilities. Given that small form factor buyers tend not to care as much about expansion but still value out-of-the-box functionality and features, microATX has proven to be an immensely successful form factor in the mini-tower and media center arena.
When one talks about media center PCs, the assumption is that one means a mini-tower in an office setting and a CE-friendly desktop design in the living room. Strictly speaking, these aren't really small form factors, although the sleek styling from case manufacturers like Antec and SilverStone sure make you think twice. Fortunately, microATX does allow for some size shavings beyond these dimensions. "Given that it's the dominant form factor in the industry, how small can you build a system on microATX?" posits Intel's Peter Brandenberger, marketing manager, channel products group. "If you're only willing to use desktop components—desktop hard drive, desktop power supply, a half-height add-in card, and so on—the answer is about 10 liters, and we have systems in beta to support that. Then you have to ask how much you gain by going with a slim optical drive; that'll take you down to about the 7L space. If you're willing to go to an external power supply and maybe a slimmed down heatsink-fan, like around 10mm, you can get about 5.8 liters. But getting that small will be hard for the channel because of external power supplies, custom solutions, etc. From an OEM perspective, it will be an option, but the channel will do best in that 7L to 10L range. So as an industry, what trade-offs are we willing to make? A lot of people focus small form factor just on the motherboard, and I keep trying to push people on whether they're willing to accept a slim optical drive or a riser card—those kinds of things. Because if the answer is no, which a lot of times it is, then I don't care what board you use. You're in a fairly big system. You're up in the 10L space, even on a mini-ITX board." For a few points of reference, a hulking beast like Zalman's TNN500A fanless tower is about 100 liters. A conventional mini-tower hits around 40L, and a set-top style ATX system from the likes of U.K.-based Hush Technologies measures about 17 liters. Shuttle XPC cubes hover around 10L, and slim mini-ITX systems often slip under 8 liters.
Intel saw early on that small form factor would be a popular trend and that microATX likely wouldn't hold the industry forever. Thus 1999 saw the arrival of FlexATX as an adjunct to the microATX spec. Outfitted with the same mounting hole and I/O plate arrangement as microATX but measuring only 9.0" x 7.5" (229 x 191 mm), FlexATX should have been all the rage among SFF manufacturers. But it wasn't. FlexATX volumes never grew large enough to give the form factor a fighting chance against microATX, and this lost cousin on the ATX family tree has been wilting into obscurity ever since. Truth be told, there are a couple dozen open form factors for vendors to develop on, but the dictates of economics and market momentum can have more to do with which thrives than technical superiority. [ BTX, Begone! ] No better example exists of this disparity between market conditions and top engineering than BTX, which, if it isn't officially decapitated, at least went into indefinite exile when Intel decided to stop developing on the platform last September. The various BTX designs arrived in 2004, and with them came a complete revamp of mountings and component placement, all with an eye toward smarter airflow, cooling, acoustics, and smaller size. BTX was seen as the saving grace for the thermal problems set to overtake desktops at a time when CPUs were edging past 130W and quad-GPU setups would swallow at least another 300 watts. Despite the added costs tied to transitioning the whole industry to a new form factor, everyone from the tier-one OEMs on down was getting onboard...and then Core microarchitecture arrived. With that, the biggest thermal concerns vanished like a puff of ozone, and BTX, already much maligned by critics as being a work-around for poor processor designing, was finished. There were lingering thoughts that picoBTX, with only four mounting holes and one expansion slot, would still survive in the ultrasmall and tiny desktop spaces, but that plan also hit the skids.
"Large multinationals and OEMs are still on BTX and planning on staying there," notes Intel's Peter Brandenberger. "Therefore, we'll continue to support BTX. From a channel perspective, the benefits of BTX weren't sufficient to overcome the hurdles of adoption. As a result of that, our channel roadmap is no longer offering BTX solutions for next year. We expect adoption to be very slow over the next several years unless something significant happens." Or, as Antec senior vice president Scott Richards puts it, "Yeah, BTX was a big disappointment—and if anybody out there still needs BTX cases, I've got 1,100 pieces!" The logical question is: Well, we've gone from the Pentium M at 40W back up to the quad-core Core 2 Extreme's 130W, so aren't we back where we left off with the Pentium Extreme Edition? Well...yes and no. Manufacturers repeatedly tell us in vague terms that the industry has found "better ways" of coping with thermal problems in the last couple of years, making BTX no longer necessary. Even Brandenberger admits that ATX should remain sufficient for the low-end and mainstream segments for "the foreseeable future." Below the microATX form factor, Intel is largely quiet these days. When pressed, representatives will mutter something about ITX being a solid solution, and we recall seeing at least a couple of ITX-based reference designs when the MoDT concept systems were floating about. However, given that VIA was the originator of the ITX specifications, not Intel, embracing the form factor must be a bitter pill for the blue team to swallow. ...more |
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