PCs to change radically in 2004! (The Enquirer)

LOL!

--

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"Leon Rowell" wrote in message
...
Come on John, you must be thinking of another group. No contributors
in this group ever get OT or hijack a thread.... They are all to suave
& so"fist"icated, (i.e.: Sheepish) to pull a cheap stunt like that. ;^)

Leon Rowell


John Lewis wrote:
On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 05:39:17 GMT, "Phil Weldon"
wrote:


Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the thread before jumping
in.
After all, the included text ought not to be long enoung to summarize
the
thread, and top posting saves a lot of time for those who actually
follow
the discussion.



Ah, but it is common for some regular contributors to this newsgroup
to occasionally wander far off-thread..... Some of these contributors
also top-post. With a short reply in a busy thread it is difficult to
be certain which message the reply is directed at without scrolling to
the bottom, if the reply is top-posted.

Top-posting isn't at all bad, if the person who is top-posting takes
the time to edit off all irrelevant parts of the original message, so
that there is no need to scroll madly to find out exactly what is
being replied to.

John Lewis


--
Phil Weldon, pweldonatmindjumpdotcom

I'm gonna build my new box anyway. New Lian Li case, PS, 2.8C CPU, DDR, etc.
I can't wait for the BTX form factor to appear since I *must* upgrade my old
Coppermine 600E. I'm betting/hoping that Intel won't make the same mistake
they did with the Microchannel architecture or Rambus. I paid $5000 for the
first (as far as I know) PS2 computer sold in Washington, DC. Then, a short
time later, I paid $350 for an ATI Microchannel graphics card. That was
*huge* money in those days! All of the MC stuff was extremely expensive.
I'm hoping that the BTX mobos will fit in an ATX case with a new backplane
and that they will have an AGP slot as well as a PCI Express. I can deal
with having to buy new memory. I'm fairly confidant that my PCP&C PS will
work (so is Anand). Flipping form factors too rapidly could lead to the big
guns expanding their AMD stuff?
--
Tally Ho!
Ed
"Dashi" wrote in message
news:yp_Sb.150749$Rc4.1201064@attbi_s54...
Don't you think that the Intel folks may have thought of that?

Dashi

"John Lewis" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:45:55 -0600, Just to put things in the context
of
today's games. Neither the
nVidia nor the Ati offerings fully support DX9 in hardware.
the next round of GPUs are expected to rectify that
problem, double the pixel-pipes, and raise the clock
frequency 10-20%... all on today's 0.13u process too.
Can you spell H...E...A...T... ? Or BTX plus H...A...C...K....

"Dorothy Bradbury" wrote
A problem is that CPU wattages are going to ramp...
o P4 Prescott is expected to hit 150W later on

Graphics card wattages aren't standing still
o Frankly 75W is minimalist by 2005

Overall, ATX wouldn't work very well by about late 2006.

Several solutions for chip wattage are underway:
o Solving the chip level heat problem
---- cooligy heatpipe-from-the-silicon is gaining attention
---- dual-core & multi-core to reduce avg heat per area
------- P4 heat output is because of stalls = low avg heat per area
------- Prescott removes stalls = high avg heat per area
---- distribute CPU around the cache re watts/area
------- cache in place of clock scaling is one next mkting area
------- has always attracted big margins (re dbase app benefit)
---- limit is 150W/cm^3, so balance die-shrink re size
o Solving the system level heat problem
---- BTX will come in here
------- graphics + RAM + CPU will quickly top 250W
------- that's into 50cfm now and probably more later
---- BTX will eventually suffer the same limits as ATX
------- heatsinks may get a lot more expensive

Graphics cards in particular are suffering high wattage growth.

As always it will not be a single solution, but combinations.
BTX is helping the box-shifters come up with a solution more
like Dell/Apple - without having the engineering costs of such.

Watts have outperformed die-shrink & voltage-drop.
Between 2007 & 2012 we may see a 500W CPU. It may be
the WinZP-64-bit voice driver :-) but it will probably come.

Storage is hitting tougher barriers than CPU/Graphics, we are
down to a few crystals per bit - within few yrs we need atoms.


Hi,
thanks for sharing all this information with us. Allot of this is going
over my head (surprise!) but some of it is sinking in (slowly). I will be
re-reading this thread until I am the BTX/Thermal Engineering master :P

If I may ask, how do you know all this stuff? Do you have a
scientific/engineering background?
--
Wayne ][
new specs coming soon!

"Ed Forsythe" wrote
I'm gonna build my new box anyway. New Lian Li case, PS, 2.8C CPU, DDR,
etc.
I can't wait for the BTX form factor to appear since I *must* upgrade my
old
Coppermine 600E. I'm betting/hoping that Intel won't make the same mistake
they did with the Microchannel architecture or Rambus. I paid $5000 for
the
first (as far as I know) PS2 computer sold in Washington, DC. Then, a
short
time later, I paid $350 for an ATI Microchannel graphics card. That was
*huge* money in those days! All of the MC stuff was extremely expensive.
I'm hoping that the BTX mobos will fit in an ATX case with a new backplane
and that they will have an AGP slot as well as a PCI Express. I can deal
with having to buy new memory. I'm fairly confidant that my PCP&C PS will
work (so is Anand). Flipping form factors too rapidly could lead to the
big
guns expanding their AMD stuff?


Hi Ed,
I'm in the same boat as you (except PIII550), just sold my 4 month old AMD
Thunder-clap sniff lol but I am soooo interested in the INTEL stuff. I
was gonna build this INTEL box 4 months ago but opted to devote the time to
catching up on the AMD platform AMD (T-Breds, Bartons, nForce2) as they
represented stunning performance for a great price (and I was on a *Tight*
budget*). Now The Northwood/Springdale/Canterwood line has dropped in price
allot, the time is ripe for me, a keen PC enthusiast to get hands on. So
now I am about 3-6months behind everyone else in the INTEL loop, but I have
£400/£600 or so to spend on some new kit. The AMD side of things (AMD64,
Opteron, FX:51) is all over the place right now, with new platforms and
sockets coming up, so I thought I would catch up on the now *mature* INTEL
platform. . .

I'm not so sure about buying a brand new ATX tower, and ATX PSU, I did have
a CoolerMaster Praetorian/ANTEC True-Blue 480w lined up (nearly £200 for
both), but now I may opt for an all-in-one ANTEC Case/PSU combo

SX835II - Performance Series II Mid Tower
inc 350w Smartpower PSU (£71.66)
http://tinyurl.com/ywpqg

Also with DDR-II nearly here I'm not certain I want to spend too much on
current high-speed memory, but we will see. . .
--
Wayne ][
new specs coming soon!

In article yp_Sb.150749$Rc4.1201064@attbi_s54, says...
Don't you think that the Intel folks may have thought of that?

Dashi

Like they did the first 2 times?

--
____________________
Remove "X" from email address to reply.

Ed Forsythe wrote:
I'm gonna build my new box anyway. New Lian Li case, PS, 2.8C CPU, DDR, etc.
I can't wait for the BTX form factor to appear since I *must* upgrade my old
Coppermine 600E. I'm betting/hoping that Intel won't make the same mistake
they did with the Microchannel architecture

Microchannel was IBM's idea to improve on the ISA architecture but also
to 'close' the box, ala Apple, to competitors with a proprietary bus.

Too late though. With Microsoft out the door and the PC market open with
thousands of vendors, the cat was already out of the bag and wasn't
going to go back in: bad for IBM; good for the market.


or Rambus. I paid $5000 for the
first (as far as I know) PS2 computer sold in Washington, DC. Then, a short
time later, I paid $350 for an ATI Microchannel graphics card. That was
*huge* money in those days! All of the MC stuff was extremely expensive.
I'm hoping that the BTX mobos will fit in an ATX case with a new backplane
and that they will have an AGP slot as well as a PCI Express. I can deal
with having to buy new memory. I'm fairly confidant that my PCP&C PS will
work (so is Anand). Flipping form factors too rapidly could lead to the big
guns expanding their AMD stuff?

On Sun, 01 Feb 2004 03:30:38 GMT, "Dashi" wrote:

Don't you think that the Intel folks may have thought of that?


Nope. At least not officially in the Intel PC architecture groups.
They are encouraged to worship CPUs and integrated solutions.
I happen to live close to the major design center for the latest-gen
CPUs and am somewhat acquainted with the internal dynamics.
Highly frustrating to those in Intel engineering wishing to "break
boundaries" with more holistic and innovative solutions to PC
performance issues. Intel has some very bright minds indeed
working for them, but very conservative technical management
in the PC architecture development areas.

John Lewis


Dashi

"John Lewis" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:45:55 -0600, Just to put things in the context of
today's games. Neither the
nVidia nor the Ati offerings fully support DX9 in hardware.
the next round of GPUs are expected to rectify that
problem, double the pixel-pipes, and raise the clock
frequency 10-20%... all on today's 0.13u process too.
Can you spell H...E...A...T... ? Or BTX plus H...A...C...K....

"Chris Phillipo" wrote in message
.. .
In article yp_Sb.150749$Rc4.1201064@attbi_s54, says...
Don't you think that the Intel folks may have thought of that?

Dashi

Like they did the first 2 times?

You don't think that they thought of it?

Dashi

On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 17:02:44 +0000 (UTC), "Wayne Youngman"
wrote:


Hi Ed,
I'm in the same boat as you (except PIII550), just sold my 4 month old AMD
Thunder-clap sniff lol but I am soooo interested in the INTEL stuff. I
was gonna build this INTEL box 4 months ago but opted to devote the time to
catching up on the AMD platform AMD (T-Breds, Bartons, nForce2) as they
represented stunning performance for a great price (and I was on a *Tight*
budget*). Now The Northwood/Springdale/Canterwood line has dropped in price
allot, the time is ripe for me, a keen PC enthusiast to get hands on.

WAIT for the CPU and motherboard !

The Official Intel Price Llist issued on 25 January has ZERO price
change from the 26 October 2003 issue. This is a very unusual event.
Intel is obviously delaying price changes until the formal
announcement of Prescott. The Northwood prices should tumble then.
And of course you will then find out whether or not any of the current
478-pin Motherboards are compatible with Prescott without voltage
regulator hacks, or worse.............

John Lewis


So
now I am about 3-6months behind everyone else in the INTEL loop, but I have
£400/£600 or so to spend on some new kit. The AMD side of things (AMD64,
Opteron, FX:51) is all over the place right now, with new platforms and
sockets coming up, so I thought I would catch up on the now *mature* INTEL
platform. . .

I'm not so sure about buying a brand new ATX tower, and ATX PSU, I did have
a CoolerMaster Praetorian/ANTEC True-Blue 480w lined up (nearly £200 for
both), but now I may opt for an all-in-one ANTEC Case/PSU combo

SX835II - Performance Series II Mid Tower
inc 350w Smartpower PSU (£71.66)
http://tinyurl.com/ywpqg

Also with DDR-II nearly here I'm not certain I want to spend too much on
current high-speed memory, but we will see. . .
--
Wayne ][
new specs coming soon!

On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 01:32:04 -0000, "rstlne" .@. wrote:

Admittedly, the driver here is fan size = cost & fan qty = cost.
A big OEM selling point of BTX is less fans over ATX designs,
not that Dell haven't shown how it can be done - Apple too altho
that was perhaps with an excessive number of fans quite frankly.

One nice point is the downsizing of case size over ATX, which
in tower and even midi-tower form are somewhat overly big. It
also allows much bigger & heavier heatsink designs with a very
robust motherboard/case reinforcement - and of course gives
Intel another socket design to terminate non-motherboardal u/g.
--
Dorothy Bradbury



I dont think the problems are Fans/Heatsink(size)...

I think the problem is down more to overall airflow through the case and the
thermal property's of the material being used.. I say it's time to bring in
some of the newer cooling options, Using pulsating heat pipes, Like what
Tsheatronics used for their "Zen" coolers..
This (and other) technologys out there could move the heat over such a large
area that the whole cases could become the coolers, Instead of having air
flowing through the case you could simply have it flowing over the case, or
even through a cooler section of the case (allowing the guts to be seal'd)..

I have seen some new Heatsink materials out there on the market that would
make the SLK HSF's look like they dont even work..
When it's all said and done then I dont think we'll see thermal outputs of
150/200/250w coming from these chips.. My guess is that we'll start seeing
IBM/AMD bring in new processing methods that companys like Transmeta uses.

Today's joke, no doubt. Transmeta is going nowhere but down.

I mean why not.. Something as fast as a duron 500 that runs at 6w is what
we see out NOW...

Not without process shrinks and lower core-voltages.

If that same technology grows then in 2 or 3 years time we'll have something
similar that could still be passive cooled, and be more powerful than todays
64 3600+'s..

The idea of having everything being fed by a central fan will def work IF
the power consumption doesnt go verry high

My hopes is that the power consumptions will stay around where they are now,
100w for the CPU and 50-100w for the video/sound processing.. Anything more
is just overkill..

Agreed, but the performance demands are outstripping the process
development, so we will certainly go through a cycle of very high
power, just as when the first toaster-oven Pentiums were released,
only to be replaced a year later with parts clocking faster and
dissipating 1/2 of the power.

John Lewis