June 7, 2007                                                                                                                                                  

REFRESHING THE TECHNO INFO

Recently, someone asked me to update a newsletter I wrote entitled, “Our world is about to change”.  It was almost 3 years ago.  At that time we were looking at the future which has now become the present and past.  I’ll format this the same way so we can do a category comparison.

SOFTWARE – I won’t spend a lot of time on this topic since we have all been recently introduced to Vista.  If you want to know the details on different versions of Vista, go back to the February 2^nd newsletter and read all about it.  Besides Vista coming to take over the desktop market from XP, 2003 Server is about to be replaced with 2008 Server.   Office 2003 is being taken over by 2007.  There is a lot more than just desktop computing available from Microsoft but that’s all we’ll talk about here.  The Linux world has been gaining consistent popularity and there are some amazing things being done with it.  This topic could go into a lengthy newsletter all on its own so we’ll just stop here.

CPU – At that time we were just beginning to see the new LGA socket 775 for Intel and, oddly enough, nothing was mentioned about AMD.  Sorry about that  At the time I think they were stagnant.  Let’s start with Intel.

Intel - The LGA socket has not changed much but the processors have changed a lot.  We have gone from single core processors running on an 800Mhz FSB to dual core processors (They weren’t as impressive as you would expect) both of which maxed out at about 3.4 or 3.6 Ghz clock speeds and 1 or 2 MB of cache.  Intel’s latest creation, the Core 2 Duo processor requires a little explaining.  This chip is a completely new design.  It is not a revamp of the old P4 Northwood and Prescott cores.  The unusual thing about these chips is the clock speeds.  The reduction in clock speed makes it difficult to compare apples to apples.  You need to take into consideration that these new chips not only have dual cores, but they are running on 1066FSB and they have 2 to 4 MB of cache per core.  The architectural redesign of these chips gives them a better ability to take advantage of the faster front side bus and the large cache buffer.  NOTE:  Some of the lower end Core 2 Duo’s still run on an 800FSB.   On the server side, we are currently using the LGA socket as well.  Both server and desktop processors are moving more towards multi-core design.  We are now building dual Xeon servers with Quad-core processors.  It is interesting to see 8 physical processors in a single server. 

AMD – If I’m not mistaken, at the time of the 2004 newsletter AMD was just getting around to the Athlon64 754 and 939 pin socket processors running 800 to 1Ghz FSB.  Not a lot has changed except everything is dual core now and the socket has been standardized as a 940 pin known as the AM2 socket.  We are currently maxed out at the 5600+ for Athlon64.  The clock speeds again are becoming less and less important.  Cache sizes and front side bus speeds are the dominant factors right now.  The higher the PR rating the faster the chip.  It’s that simple.  The specs for the 5600+ for example are a clock speed of 2.8Ghz and 1MB cache running on a 2Ghz FSB.  Oh, I forgot to mention that all dual cores have x2 the amount of cache specified.  Each core has its own.  Opterons have taken on the same changes as the Athlon64.  Dual cores and faster speeds.  There have also been some recent subtle architectural changes as well.

Both manufacturers have their economy lines, Celeron, Sempron, as well as mobile solutions like the Pentium M and the Turion.  Last thing to mention, virtually everything is 64bit now. 

CHIPSETS -  Back then we were just starting to see the Intel 915 and 925 chipsets being paired with LGA socket boards.  They fizzled quickly.  The idea of integrating a WAP into the chipset didn’t seem to take off very well.  It is still available but unusual.  They have given way to the 945 and 965 chipsets from Intel.  These are what’s responsible for the 1066FSB’s as well as DDR2 memory controllers.  We’ll discuss memory below.  The southbridge chips have progressed to the ICH6, 7, and 8 with RAID versions of each.  After the disaster of the ICH5 USB controllers, the 7 and 8 series seem to be very solid.  6 still has some issues.  Integrated SATA2 RAID on the southbridge has become very popular.  RAID levels of 5, 10,20, and 6 are now common on many desktop boards.

Nvidia, SIS, VIA, AMD, and ATI all have their own chipsets with similar features.  There’s too many to go into here.  A couple of notes.  AMD purchased ATI earlier this year and we are going to see a lot more high end graphics integrated into chipsets.  Is the video card going to be extinct?  I don’t think so.  Lastly,  Chipsets are controlling multiple graphic cards.  This is known as SLI (from Nvidia) or Crossfire (From ATI).  Multiple cards can be bridged for high performance gaming or used for multiple displays.  2 cards is common and 4 cards is now possible.

AUDIO – Not much to talk about here.  You can find integrated audio with various surround sound outputs and optical audio jacks.  Home theatre is a breeze with today’s high tech audio controllers.

FORMFACTOR – BTX seems to have died out.  There are rumors of it being dead and not going to happen.  I still see some BTX boards and cases though.  It may just be that we are slow to adopt as always.  Power supplies have all changed to 24 pin ATX connectors.  Power supplies have always been the number 1 most failed component in the computer industry.  I don’t care how good you think it is, it is only as good as the power you’re feeding into it.  One lightning strike or power surge and poof!  You let the smoke out.     

HARD DRIVES – In the previous newsletter I stated that parallel ATA (PATA) drives were being phased out and serial ATA (SATA) would be the norm.  PATA transfer rates peaked at 100 or 133Mb while SATA hit 150Mb.  Now, we have SATA2 which has a 300Mb transfer rate.  The SATA controllers on most boards has grown to 4, 6, or 8 since only 1 drive can be attached to 1 head and multiple drives are needed for RAID.  The cost of high performance storage has plummeted over the last few years as SATA performance is rivaling SCSI for a fraction of the cost.  We should see 1 terabyte (TB) drives anytime now.  500 and 750GB drives are dirt cheap.  Also, there are some interesting controllers out there.  SAS or Serial Attached Storage is a neat way of creating huge arrays in single systems with beautiful integrated cable management.  We recently built a 5U server with 24 removable hard drive bays all controlled with a 3ware RAID controller.  A single partition with 8TB was created. 

RAM -  PC100, PC133, and RAMBUS is all still available.  Why people waste money on this stuff is beyond me.  It is ridiculously expensive compared to what’s current.  DDR is now antiquated as well.  DDR2 is commonplace and DDR3 is soon to come.  We are pushing over 800Mhz on RAM these days.  1 and 2GB modules are common.  Vista runs best with at least 2GB of RAM.  On the server side we are using Fully Buffered DIMMS or FBDIMMS now instead of ECC registered.  One problem note to keep in mind as the onboard RAM quantities climb.  For years we have had problems with Intel advertising that their chipset supports XXGB of RAM (usually 4GB.  We’ll use that figure for discussion sake).  If you populate the board as instructed to reach 4GB you don’t always get 4GB.  Some chipsets have limitations that will not allow the entire 4GB to be recognized.  Usually you get between 3 and 3.5GB.  We have taken several motherboard manufacturers down this road and they always come back with the same answer.  “It must be a limitation of the chipset.”  Whatever happened to testing a product before advertising its ability to perform?  I’m shocked by the number of manufacturers who take Intel’s word for it without testing it out for themselves.  We don’t see this problem as often with other chipset manufacturers but it does happen. 

EXPANSION SLOTS -  PCI is not dead.  It is not going to die, at least for now.  PCIe or PCI express is eventually going to phase it out.  I’m not going to spend a lot on this category because it’s complicated.  I’ll give a brief overview of PCIe.  First of all, if you read the 3 years ago comments know that I was using the wrong acronym.  PCI-X is actually PCI extended.  It is the long 64bit PCI slots you occasionally see, more often on sever boards.  PCIe is different in many ways.  All I am going to tell you is that there are currently 6 different types of PCIe slots.  X1,x2,x4,x8,x16, and x32.  The physically shorter slots are the lower numbers and they get longer as the numbers get higher.  All graphics cards are x32.  The transfer rate gets higher with each higher number as well.  Remember ISA and VESA??  You’re old and you’ve been doing this too long.  J

EXTERNAL INPUTS -  I mentioned that Firewire and USB 2.0 should both be moving to 800Mb transfer speeds.  I haven’t seen much on that yet.  I guess they figure 400 is fast enough for now. 

GRAPHICS -  This is still the fastest changing segment of the industry.  GPU wars between AMD and Nvidia are as hot as ever.  Nvidia still seems to dominate the gamer market but if you ask me, AMD is much more stable.  Nvidia no longer has unified drivers and as far as Nvidia and Vista are concerned, I’ll run screaming rather than try to make them work correctly together.   Don’t get me wrong, Nvidia makes a great product but they seem to know XP a lot better than Vista.  Of course that’s true for everybody right now.  Give them some time.  The PCIe interface is still the norm for graphics.  The SLI and Crossfire technologies mentioned previously can create some extremely impressive graphics.  DDR3 RAM upwards of 512MB and blazing fast GPU’s are current. 

I think we saw a much broader change on the horizon 3 years ago than we do now.  Expect another sweeping change in about a year or so.  As always, if I made a mistake please feel free to reprimand me.

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