A RAM Digital Home Blog

Tom’s Hardware ran an interesting tidbit recently about how ATI’s next-gen graphics core, R600, will take another jump in the wrong direction on power consumption (NVIDIA likely will, too) and may even necessitate moving to an external solution with its own power supply. Up to 32 of these could be linked in tandem and plugged into a PCI Express slot.

Mind you, this article came out a few days before the ATI/AMD merger announcement, and in hindsight it seems particularly interesting. I have it on fairly certain authority that CrossFire will move from requiring that all CF-abled GPUs be of the same family (for example, all would be from the X1900 series) to being independent. In other words, you’ll soon be able to take, for example, an X1300, an X1600, and an X1800 and have them all work cooperatively through CrossFire. This marks a great value advance because it reduces the pressure on buyers to make larger investments up front. They can buy one GPU initially and not worry about it being unusable when it comes time to upgrade later.

The trouble with this is available slots. For those (like me) who keep chassis around for many years, periodically upgrading components every few months, we’re constantly having to ditch the old graphics cards. And even once we’re able to mix and match GPUs, we’re still limited today to two graphics slots — three at the most if you’re willing to step down to x8 bandwidth per slot. But what if you could buy external GPUs? You could string a dozen of them together provided the connection architecture didn’t change…and AMD is very good at designing connection architectures. With a chipset group now under its wing, I wouldn’t even put it past AMD/ATI to come up with a proprietary bus interface that feeds straight to the northbridge or even some future CPU architecture.

On a less fanciful note, such an external design might at last give the All-in-Wonder product line a way to bypass the low-profile requirement of many small form factor media center PCs. And if there was some AMD-centric hook in there that would give AMD LIVE!-based systems functionality that you couldn’t get under Intel’s Viiv platform, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Also, don’t forget that ATI has already demonstrated a prototype OCUR HDTV CableCARD device. Would you pay for a combo All-in-Wonder/CableCARD box that delivered a lot of extra benefits on LIVE! systems? I just might.

The truth is that none of us knows where this ATI/AMD merger is going. But it’s thought streams like this that show just how delightfully dangerous these two powers might be when put together. As you may have gathered from my previous blog posts, I didn’t think there was much of a future for LIVE!. I’ve changed my mind.

OK, first the disclaimer: I have not seen the newly announced KillerNic from Bigfoot Networks, reported to go on sale August 16th, so it may deliver on everything Bigfoot promises. But forgive my skepticism. I grew up watching Leonard Nimoy’s “In Search of…” series, so bear with me if I automatically see a red flag in the company’s hirsute name.

The KillerNic is a PCI 10/100/1000 Ethernet card boasting a 400 MHz network processing unit (NPU) and 64MB of DDR memory and a bolted-on heatsink (cooling what?) reminiscent of an exotic combat knife. Woooo. Oh, and there’s a USB port next to the LAN port, because in an era of $10 USB hubs, you just can’t have enough inconviently located USB ports on the rear of your chassis. Rule #1: If you have nothing impressive under the hood, go for extreme cosmetics. Or invent a new acronym. Or best of all, both.

Now, the KillerNic aims to capture online gamers by offloading network packet processing cycles to the NPU so the CPU has more bandwidth for games. OK, we’ve seen that before. The feature has come standard with most NVIDIA chipsets since the nForce3. Bigfoot promises better ping times for lower gameplay latency, which means packet prioritization. But we’ve had QoS controls in higher-end routers for years, most notably in D-Link’s GameFuel-based products. Besides, QoS makes sense for apps such as VoIP, but why would you need application prioritization at the single PC level? Gamers aren’t toggling between F.E.A.R. and MS Office, for cryin’ out loud. They only run one application while playing.

But here’s the kicker. Back in early 2004, NVIDIA was kind enough to loan me a dual-Xeon network server with which to do Chariot benchmark testing of its nForce3 250 Gb chipset and its then-groundbreaking networking bandwidth. Out of a theoretical 2,000 kbps maximum transfer rate (1,000 kbps each direction), NVIDIA averaged 1,800 kbps. Intel’s much-lauded CSA LAN chip was getting 1,500 kbps. PCI-based Gigabit adapters were coming in under 700 kbps. As much advantage as NVIDIA showed by offloading network processing to the chipset rather than the CPU, the glaring truth was that the PCI interface was the real performance killer.

I’m no hardware engineer, but I’d guess that Bigfoot just stepped in a nasty slot trap. The reason you don’t hear about NVIDIA and Intel CSA LAN throughput anymore is because any desktop adapter worth a damn is already on the PCI Express bus. And I bring all this up to point out that no matter how excited we may get about finding the “next big thing” or what that may do for sales numbers, in the end our job is to deliver real value, not hype. Bigfoot has offered no hard details as to what its “technology” does or how it does it. There are several cool illustrations on the site, though. Bigfoot may prove me wrong, but am I ready to recommend the KillerNic to anyone? Not yeti.

I was very fortunate in being able to custom-build a home about two years ago for my family, and the first thing I picked in the looooooong line of options offered by the builder was structured wiring. Apparently, one or two CAT5e (Gigabit) drops is normal for this builder. I ordered nine. So far, I’ve used six of them. I also ordered a Leviton structured media enclosure with the necessary modules to let me switch data, phone, and video feeds throughout the house. None of the ports are labelled. Only through trial and error have I figured out (and forgotten and figured out again) which enclosure data ports go to which wall jacks, and I have absolutely no clue what to do with the phone and video feeds. The Leviton pamphlet I received with the house was useless, the builder has no idea about the gear because they sub-contracted the work, and the actual installer doesn’t deal with end-users like me. Being as I live in a development within easy walking distance of two major Intel facilities, I’d wager I’m not the only geek in my neighborhood who overbought his tech infrastructure and could now use some hands-on hired help in putting it to good use.

Despite that, if you were to ask me if I’m happy overall with my new home technology purchase, I’d say yes. Built-in Gigabit just can’t be beat. And apparently, I’m in good company. According to a the “New Home Buyers and Technology Purchases” study released by the Consumer Electronics Association in late May, over 75% of consumers in my boat were similarly satisfied, with home theater buyers topping the list at 89% satisfaction. At the same time, the study reported the flip side of my own problem:

“The study found that many new home buyers regret not purchasing various new technologies. For example, 32 percent of new home buyers wished they had purchased an energy management system while 23 percent regretted not purchasing a multi-room audio system or a home theater system at the time they purchased their home.”

So there are untold thousands of families out there that regret not buying home technologies and probably many thousands more that regret not understanding how to make proper use of what they did purchase. There has got to be a massive opportunity here for local resellers. Drop fliers on doorsteps in new housing developments offering to counsel homeowners on how to better use their home technologies and make free recommendations on how to boost their home data and media enjoyment. Or get in league with the builders in your area. My builder used a horribly inept home theater installer that was oblivious to the idea of integrating a PC into the equation. If you had, say, two or three Viiv configurations and a pamphlet describing them, you could swoop in after the A/V installer and add data to the home…while studying up on how to take that A/V business for yourself, of course. In any case, there’s a potential gold mine here while we’re still in this gray space where everybody wants home technology convergence and few really know what to do about it.

I haven’t written much about the whole Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD format war because I remember all too well being in the same place not long ago with DVD+R and DVD-R. Everybody was like, “Oh, you must pick a side! Take a stance, be a man!” Of course, dual-format drives accommodating both media types soon followed. In fact, a lot of things that were said in the DVD format war turned out to be untrue, including that DVD-RAM was as good as dead and that DVD+R was inexorably capped at 16X.

The bottom line is that if the market wants something badly enough, someone will figure out how to supply it. There has been buzz about this or that vendor offering a dual-format HD drive, but the trick is in doing such a design affordably, and at last Ricoh may have the answer. By the end of this week, the company will have publicly demonstrated the ability to read and write in CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD formats with just one optical pickup and one objective lens. The initial designs use a 1 mm thick diffraction plate to detect what type of media is present, then the laser beam is altered to match the format. Early models are read-only. Writing requires a stronger laser and so will follow later on.

Ricoh expects read-only commercialization for its multi-format panacea by the end of this year, and without recording support that means console players. So the earliest we’re going to see an affordable BD/HD DVD writer for PCs is probably mid-2007. But that’s fine since blank media pricing has a long way to fall, as well. Until then, expect a long window wherein HD movies are available but we have no PC drives suitable for handling them. Who knows? You might just find this to be a great opportunity for selling titles like Nero that excel in compressing large videos into smaller ones with minimal quality loss and prepping them for burning to conventional disc types.

I went to go see An Inconvenient Truth with a friend last night. I’ve always wanted to be a professional movie reviewer, but I’m not. So rather than try to shoehorn a review into a blog about digital home technology, I’ll simply encourage you and everyone you can possibly encourage in kind to go see it. I’ll leave the matter with Roger Ebert’s own words: “In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.”

It is impossible to see this movie and not contemplate and discuss it deeply afterward. My friend and I sat for hours doing this, and, taking inspiration from the Centrino whitebook in my lap, I told him a bit about the Core architecture, the industry trend toward performance-per-watt, and how Intel had been able to recently slash the power consumption of its chips in over half while increasing overall speed. That led to a discussion of VBI, the Common Building Blocks program, and how standardized replacement parts not only offered a TCO benefit to the buyer but also far less environmental impact. I recalled that Intel was among the early leaders in transitioning to lead-free designs in all of its products, despite the cost, and that the company had done incredible work in reversing its groundwater pollution and waste reclamation issues, which also doesn’t come cheap. My friend, a librarian who stays up on environmental topics and is a huge critic of Big Business, noted, “You know, I’ve never heard about any of this.” And even I, who knew all the facts, and never spread them out in a row like this and taken them in at once. I would challenge even the hardest Intel critic to watch An Inconvenient Truth, look back at the company’s environmental efforts of the last five years, and not be swayed.

As I drove home, I thought about what I could do to improve matters within my four walls. (Swapping out my family-toting Toyota Sequoia for a hybrid SUV or minivan is a given.) This in turn had me thinking about what resellers could suggest to PC buyers for making their systems more environmentally responsible. Switching to a low-power processor, such as those based on Intel’s Core architecture, is an obvious necessity, but what else?

Look for RoHS. Just because U.S. policymakers seem oblivious to long-term environmentalism doesn’t mean we can’t follow the example of better minds. The European Union’s RoHS directive mandates low levels of hazardous materials in electronics products. Seek out RoHS-compliant motherboards and other components. If nothing else, this will ensure your eligibility if you need to act on European export bids.

These are just a few ideas. Obviously, there are plenty more to be had. But the point I keep coming back to when debating An Inconvenient Truth with people is this: Even if you hate Al Gore, even if you think global warming is a left-wing political football, even if you think all the data shown by scientists supporting greenhouse warming is faulty and fabricated, what does it hurt to live and purchase with greater environmental consciousness? Green manufacturing is less toxic, power costs to the user are lower, noise levels with configs as described above are lower, and on and on. There is no downside to anyone in the chain, including resellers who will probably win higher margin on environmentally conscious designs.

It’s like religious belief. An environmental atheist says there is no problem, no man-made warming, no threat to anyone. A believer sees the data and intuitively grasps the need for remedial action. An agnostic listens to the arguments on both sides, and while he may not buy into the believer’s position entirely, what does it hurt to keep an open mind? Given that there is no downside to you or your customers, be open and tell your grandkids you did the right thing.

The picture sort of says it all, eh? I’m thumbing my prayer beads, bowing all four directions, and otherwise praying like mad that this Intel Viiv remote control, styled after an F1 racing wheel, does not go the way of the Intel microscope, Intel sound morpher, digital camera, and all those other nifty, doomed Intel stabs at consumer gadgetry. You can tell this is a prototype because those blue knobs look suspiciously like highlighter pen caps.

In fact, I was tempted to write off this image, purloined from the good geeks at Stuff across the pond, as a hoax until I stumbled across this page on Intel’s site. I don’t follow racing, but apparently Intel is a sponsor of the BMW Sauber F1 Team, and the team car is outfitted with all manner of Centrino Duo technology. (Is it illegal to check email at 150 MPH? Probably should be.) And sure enough, at the bottom of the page, there are links to the Centrino Duo and Viiv sites.

Now, if I had to take a guess — and it’s only a guess because Intel hasn’t said a word about this to me — I’d wager that there’s some exclusive NASCAR content for Viiv owners coming up as part of a platform marketing effort, probably once the whole Core 2 Duo frenzy dies down and perhaps just in time for the holidays. That remote sure would make a sweet stocking stuffer, eh? It definitely would make for a sweet co-marketing effort with resellers. “Racing Into the Future of Digital Home Technology” or some cheesy smarm like that. Most likely, Intel will offer up the design to other hardware developers with more experience in the entertainment accessory space. I just want to play with the remote, you know?

Personally, I’ve resisted the whole webcam movement. People have told me for years that I have a great face for radio, and I believe them. So given a choice between voice technology or voice with video, I prefer the former. Of course, the fact that so many people have webcams tells me that I’m probably in the minority and the Jetsons were on the right prognostication path.

The Jetsons probably had one other thing right: Videophone technology applies just as much in the home as the office. In the corporate space, we call it videoconferencing, and in the home we call it…what? I’m not really sure. Consumers have been slower to pick up the technology, in part because of the near-requirement of broadband and in part because your hair and clothes are already in order when you reach the office. But we’ve seen corporate tech trickle into homes countless times before, and I’m sure videophoning will follow suit once calling goes digital in the mainstream.

Now, my mother is always on me for pictures of the kids, and she’s very curious about what my house looks like. (No, she’s never seen it…long story.) Getting a four-year-old and a one-year-old to sit around a table is easy; getting them to sit in the field of view of a regular webcam is not. Solution? Microsoft’s RingCam project, more recently called RoundTable. This is a 360-degree, microphone-enabled videoconferencing camera. Remote participants will be able to see the faces of those who are active in the discussion. Details are unclear as to whether this will be done by voice activation or manual selection. I’d like to see a client application with some sort of slider control that lets me control what field of view in the ring is visible. And hey — what a great app for driving multi-monitor sales! Imagine if you could span a full 360-degree conference at full-screen across three displays. With the proper compression, aspect correction, and line bandwidth, it should be possible.

If I were Microsoft, I’d find some value-add way to integrate RoundTable into next-gen Office apps, like in Outlook or Live Meeting. Yahoo!, Skype, MSN, and all the rest can adapt on the lower-end webcam front. Either way, I don’t know that 360-cams will become a huge market — although that may be my bias getting in the way — but I suspect there will be a strong niche for it in both the corporate and home markets. Keep an eye out for the technology and grab those high-margin early adopters when you can.

One of the best value-adds you can do for an on-site home theater PC installation is to calibrate the display. I learned this lesson the hard way when I bought my 50″ plasma a couple of years ago. At the time, I narrowed my search down to a handful of vendors, and I had a line on getting the Samsung for about $1,500 less than the Fujitsu. But I looked at both in the showrooms, and I went for the Fujitsu. Months later, I learned that the two screens are virtually identical in terms of potential output quality. The difference is that the guys in the AV store took the time to calibrate the higher-priced Fujitsu in a display by itself and left the Samsung on a wall, uncalibrated, with its lower-end brethren. Clever marketing. Dumb buyer.

For the best results, you should go through the CEDIA training and learn how to do a proper home theater calibration. But if you’re just getting your feet wet and want to show the customer that you care about the experience you just sold him, two tools are available for under $30 that can help. The first is the Monster/ISF HDTV Calibration Wizard DVD. ISF is the outfit that validates the video quality in Windows MCE, ATI Radeon cards, and other products. ISF is the THX of PC video. The second tool, Digital Video Essentials: Optimize Your Home Entertainment System, was designed by video guru Joe Kane and is widely regarded as the cheapest, best tool for HDTV calibration.

Where Digital Video Essentials can get a bit technical and intimidating for newbies, the Monster/ISF title may be a little too simplistic and cheesy. Either is better than nothing, and I recommend trying both to gauge where your comfort level is at. With time and experience, you’ll want to get more sophisticated calibration tools, but these will get you started at a very reasonable cost.

I feel sorta sad for the handful of people at Intel charged with popularizing the mobile-on-desktop (MoDT) effort. On one hand, what a great job! You’ve finally got a product that fulfills a dream digital home enthusiasts having been pining after for years: a high-performance, low-power, low-noise processor platform that lays to rest every problem we’ve ever faced with HTPC hardware. On the other hand, your bosses are telling you: “Just sell the idea, not the name, because in only a few months the ‘mobile-on-desktop’ idea is going to vanish since there won’t be much difference between mobile and desktop processors anymore. The cores are all the same.” So these poor guys are left with a stellar concept, great product, no name to market, and imminent demise. Cheery.

But help is on the way. As you know, the third-generation Centrino processor, Core Duo, is at the heart of current MoDT designs. Core Duo started out life as a mobile processor but now sits on the fence, straddling both the mobile and desktop fields. The imminent Core 2 Duo (Conroe) follow-on tears down the fence altogether. Yes, “Merom” is targeted at mobile platforms owing to its slower front-side bus and possibly smaller L2 cache while “Conroe” uses a 1,066 MHz bus and 4MB of L2, but the processor cores are identical. This is what makes it so easy for Intel to name Santa Rosa as the successor platform to Napa (today’s Centrino) and say it applies to both desktop and mobile, even though Santa Rosa specifies use of the Merom CPU. Clear as mud?

Santa Rosa will utilize the new 965 northbridge series (including the G965 with dual-monitor output), the ICH8M southbridge, and support up to 800 MHz DDR2 memory. You might say, “Huh, most of that is coming out now along with the July 23rd Conroe launch, so why do we have to wait until 1Q07 for Santa Rosa?” Well, probably two reasons. First, because Santa Rosa will use 802.11n wireless connectivity, which isn’t due to be finalized until then. Second, because Santa Rosa supports HDMI and UDI video interfaces and is slated to support HDCP, which not even 99% of the discrete video cards out today embrace. A third possible reason is that Santa Rosa supports Intel’s “Robson” NAND flash-on-motherboard technology, which, while demonstrated and operational, isn’t ready for roll-out just yet.

But Santa Rosa will be worth the wait. Supporting form factors include the largish microATX but also embrace picoBTX and custom mini and all-in-one designs. Three-liter and 1.44-liter standard designs should give even Nano-ITX a run for its money. At last, we’ll be able to have HTPCs the size of a sleek gaming console that don’t have to whack small features like, oh, wireless networking and TV tuners. Think of the brilliance of a compact design like ECS’ P60 now escalated with even more performance and a far wider potential for displaying next-gen premium content courtesy of HDMI and HDCP. While I wish that we would have all this in time for the holidays, I’d rather have Santa Rosa done right than rushed, and it shows every sign of being a huge play for the channel when the time comes.

Being a denizen of the Northwest and a lifelong camper, when I see a PC advertised as an EcoSystem, I get interested. I mean, yes, I’ve put my share of toxic waste in the landfill, but at least I make an effort to by environmentally cognizant and responsible, and I know a lot of other people do, too. Even though Europe has RoHS, we have the aging Energy Star program and a generally growing awareness that less power consumption is better for many reasons. My eye floats over ads for power towers like oil on the local Willamette River, but show me something that says EcoSystem and you’ve got my attention.

I came across the EcoSystem on another blog site. The name refers to a family of PCs made by a system builder called Jinglehorse. Now, I’m still more of a skeptic than a treehugger, so I set out to find all the ways Jinglehorse wasn’t making a green PC. Why, I don’t know what hard drive is being used! Options include battery-powered peripherals, which means more disposable, toxic waste! But after a minute or two, I got a grip. No matter what, Jinglehorse is a system builder trying to make a living, not Al Gore out to save the planet. I have to take the EcoSystem for what it is: a well-built whitebox using low-power, low-noise parts that at least give lip service to environmentalism while most PC builders don’t give green a second thought.

The EcoSystem defaults to the SilverStone SG01 SFF box and progresses up through the amazing Zalman TNN 300 silent tower. Only one mobo is offered — the Viiv-ready ASUS N4L-VM DH — and all CPUs are Core Duo SKUs, hence the emphasis on low power. Of course, adding a 7900 GTX card and Hauppauge tuner negate much of the Core Duo’s power savings, never mind going with dual 21″ displays, but you get the idea. Jinglehorse pursues conventional configurations using the best compromise between price and environmentalism it can get away with, then calls the who thing an EcoSystem to draw in would-be greenies like me. It’s a smart marketing slant, and it’s one that I think could work for a lot of system builders aiming at the home market. People buy hybrid cars; they’ll be energy-conscious PCs, too, if you let them.