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After two years of echoing emptiness at Comdex Fall, the bustling crowds at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, straining the seams of the Las Vegas Convention Center, were almost too much to handle. It was a great show for microprocessor developers; all the best products at CES are microprocessor controlled, and many strain the limits of processor technology.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced a substantial expansion of the company’s Media Center PC concept, with three new products designed to allow the sharing of digital content throughout a home. A new low-cost Media Center Extender set-top box will use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) as a remote display device for any Media Center PC on the local network, providing the same Media Center user interface as the PC but without the need for local storage. The Media Center Extender can be much smaller and cheaper than a PC, so customers can afford to buy one for every TV in the house—at least, that’s Microsoft’s hope.
For those who already have a Microsoft Xbox, or who might be willing to buy one for this purpose, Microsoft will offer a Media Center Extender kit, consisting of a remote control and a DVD with the RDP software. Like the set-top box, an Xbox running this software will provide the Media Center PC user interface, but at a much lower cost per TV.
Finally, those who want their video to go will be able to get a Portable Media Center. Gates showed a prototype model from Creative. Though bulky, presumably because it needs a large battery to achieve reasonable operating times, the Zen Portable Media Center may do better on the market than current products that lack Microsoft’s support. Creative plans to ship the device in 2H04 at a price of $499 with a 20G hard disk.
Some products at CES strained our credulity, especially those in the home and car audio markets. Fortunately, there were no eardrum-straining indoor demonstrations of just how powerful today’s subwoofers are, but many companies were offering models that could easily double as lithotripsy machines for breaking up kidney stones without surgery.
What bothered me more than any of these products were the ridiculous claims of vendors of high-end interconnect devices. (We define “interconnect” as an audio or video cable that costs far more than it’s worth.) At least one company at CES was showing audio cables with a battery holder and an extra center conductor to apply a DC electric field across the dielectric to “align” the dielectric molecules, thus “smoothing” the sound. As an engineer, I believe in impedance matching and full-coverage shields, because these things are easily proved to matter. Dielectric molecular alignment, on the other hand, is simply a fraud. The best one can say about it is that it doesn’t hurt the electrical properties of the cable.
It gets worse, however. The Sony/Philips Digital Interface (S/PDIF) standard, which defines electrical and optical interfaces for digital audio, dates back to the 1980s. Optical S/PDIF interfaces often follow Toshiba’s Toslink specification for connectors and cable, which was designed to provide error-free operation using inexpensive plastic fiber with a 1.0mm core diameter. That’s simple enough, but I saw a company at CES demonstrating Toslink cables constructed from a fiber bundle—that is, multiple independent fibers. In this case, the bundle was made to be coherent; the relative positions of each fiber were maintained from one end to the other, so the cable could actually transfer low-resolution images from one end to another, just like a medical endoscope. This technology reduces the functionality of the cable, because the bundle will capture and transmit less light than one large fiber.
I believe the high-end audio industry has developed these bizarre practices because audio technology long ago passed the point where ordinary customers could distinguish between new and old products. The tremendous improvements in sound quality achieved in the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for CD digital audio, but even that high standard was well integrated into low-cost products by the late 1980s. Diminishing returns on further investments in quality have driven the audio industry to a form of madness.
Now, here’s the payoff. Are we in the microprocessor industry at risk for the same disorder? We, at least, have customers who genuinely need all the performance we can deliver, essentially without limit. That alone guarantees Microprocessor Report a long-term future. Some computer buyers, however, are already satisfied with the speed of their systems, and I don’t know what we can offer these people to get them to upgrade. I just hope we won’t be reduced to touting snake oil and silver bullets.
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Athlon 64 Moving to Mass Market
Peter Glaskowsky - Editor-in-Chief
{01/20/2004}
AMD’s Athlon 64 was introduced at the high end of the PC market, but AMD is rapidly moving it into midrange and low-end systems with the aid of integrated-graphics chip sets from SiS and VIA. By eliminating the need for an add-in graphics card or a separate graphics subsystem on the motherboard, these chip sets and new, more-affordable Athlon 64 processors allow OEMs to sell 64-bit desktops for well under $1,000.
Late in 2003, AMD introduced the $218 Athlon 64 3000+, a chip configured with 512K of L2 cache but otherwise equivalent to other Athlon 64 processors. Like the Athlon 64 3200+, the 3000+ operates at 2GHz internally; the difference in model numbers reflects the performance penalty of the smaller cache. The 3000+ is based on the same 130nm die with 1M of L2 cache that AMD has been selling since the Athlon 64 was launched rather than the forthcoming Newcastle die that will be manufactured with just 512K of L2.
Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) was the first to announce an integrated-graphics chip set, the SiS760, for the Athlon 64. VIA says its K8M800, which has a different mix of features but represents a comparable value, was the first such chip set to ship. Both chip sets have built-in graphics accelerators, the source of their cost savings but also a potential source of performance penalties.
Even at retail prices of less than $1,000, systems based on the Athlon 64 3000+ and either of the new SiS and VIA chip sets will be very attractively configured. Their only major shortcoming lies in their mediocre graphics performance—at least compared with systems using discrete graphics cards priced at only $100 to $200 more. Application performance will also suffer slightly, because of the unified-memory system architecture, but few of the targeted customers will look past the speed rating of the Athlon 64 processor.
There is some risk that by offering fully featured systems at such low prices, AMD and its partners will cannibalize sales of their higher-end products. This certainly is a risk, but we believe it is outweighed by the potential benefit of taking sales away from Intel. By so aggressively pushing the Athlon 64 into a wider market, AMD is eating its own children in a way that will, in the long run, surely help it to expand the family.
In announcing the new Xserve G5 at MacWorld Expo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs glossed over what we consider the most interesting fact about the new system: it represents the debut of IBM’s 90nm PowerPC 970FX, which Apple calls the G5. The Xserve G5 is offered with one or two 2GHz CPUs. We expect to see new G5 desktops soon, with faster processors, and G5 laptops later in the year.
The new server, scheduled for February availability, also adds improvements, such as dual PCI-X expansion slots and support for up to 8G of DDR400 SDRAM with ECC protection, to the features of the original G4-based Xserve. Standard Xserve G5 configurations are priced from $2,999 to $6,599. More information is available online at www.apple.com/xserve.
Papers scheduled for presentation at the 2004 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), which runs February 15–19 in San Francisco, reflect the diversity of circuit-design technologies being developed to suit the growing range of electronic systems. We’ve assembled some highlights of ISSCC 2004 from the advance program published last month; following the conference, we’ll go into more detail on some of these presentations.
Intel will talk about its Prescott design, the first 90nm member of the Pentium 4 family, and IBM will describe a 90nm implementation of the PowerPC 970, the original 130nm version of which was launched at Microprocessor Forum 2002. The ISSCC program says IBM will incorporate a feature called PowerTune for “rapid frequency and power scaling” in this new chip; this feature should allow Apple to produce PowerPC 970–based laptops to go with its PowerMac G5 desktop.
A separate Intel abstract also appears to refer to Prescott, describing logic circuits designed to operate at 7GHz in the double-clocked ALUs of a 3.5GHz chip. The abstract says low voltage-swing logic and 90nm technology were the key elements needed to permit such high-speed operation. The abstract does not report whether these ALUs are 16 bits wide, which is the case with the current 130nm Northwood Pentium 4 die, or 32 bits wide, which would better suit the rumors of 64-bit datapaths in Prescott.
A session on emerging technologies pushes the boundaries of integrated-circuit fabrication and operation. Seiko Epson will describe polymer transistors manufactured using ink-jet printing. The transistors have channels 10 microns wide and 500 microns long, and they presumably operate at very low frequencies. Superconducting circuits are also described in this session, one paper presenting a complete 8-bit microprocessor that operates at 15.2GHz, with power consumption of 1.6mW. The 5mm2 chip includes 5,000 niobium Josephson junctions. Its power efficiency is more than one thousand times better than that of conventional silicon processors.
ISSCC never fails to amaze us with new technology, and it’s clear that ISSCC 2004 will continue this tradition. For more information on ISSCC 2004, visit www.isscc.org/isscc on the Web.
