![[AskAboutComputers.com]](logo_com_232x90.gif){kind=logo}
AskAboutComputers.comKeeping up with Technology,
so you do not have to
AskAboutComputers.com
Keeping up with Technology,
so you do not have to
Hardware Developers Gone Wild
6/2 - Ah, WinHEC 2006. But how to condense 128 sessions across 12 tracks, and three keynotes, into one synopsis? And What does Microsoft know about hardware anyway? They are a software company. Continue to find out.
Much of the first day of WinHEC consisted of three keynote presentations. Senior VP Will Poole's keynote was about Windows Vista. Bob Muglia, also a Senior VP, delivered a keynote primarily on Windows Server. Bill Gates' keynote covered a little bit of everything, including Windows Vista and Windows Server, but also much, much more.
It has been noted before, but it bears repeating, that in the past performance was primarily driven by pushing clock speeds higher and higher. That was the past. Today, the trend is to increase performance through adding more cores to CPUs. Bill Gates: "a lot of the performance gains will come from activating those additional cores".
The first dual-core chips saw marked improvement over their single-core brethren. Even so, Gates said that moving to quad-core and beyond shall not be so easy, not so much from a hardware standpoint, but on the software side of things. So software engineers have their work cut out for them. Getting the full value out of multicore in the future "requires architectural changes".
Will Poole talked mostly about Windows Vista. "Vista is the first operating system to be fully developed under our security development lifecycle".
One of the things about WinHEC, and the demoing of new technologies there, is that it affords a rare opportunity for Microsoft to be brutally honest about its current products. For example, the small form factor space has fragmented, and small form factor devices have proliferated. I'm talking about laptops, the ultramobile PC, tablet PCs, and so on. Small form factor devices are proliferating so much that, according to Microsoft, Windows XP has been hard pressed to keep up. Enter Windows Vista. "Windows Vista is going to be the best ever operating system for mobile PCs".
Longhorn used to be the codename for what is now Windows Vista. The name is still around, however. Longhorn is now the codename for the next major release of Windows Server. Bob Muglia's keynote had to do not with Longhorn but with Windows Server. Nevertheless, Longhorn is the next version of Windows Server, so over half of the keynote was about Longhorn.
Throughout his keynote, Bob highlighted certain segments that have been experiencing significant growth, and which are expected to continue growing, so that the hardware attendees in the audience could capitalize upon these trends. Storage is one such area. Currently "more information is stored and attached to Windows Server, either through SANs or directly attached than any of the other operating systems".
Similarly virtualization is an area that is set to explode over the coming years. The technology is off to a good start. Currently "the majority of operating systems being virtualized are Windows".
We all know that Intel and AMD have started to provide virtualization hardware on their CPUs. Hardware virtualization better enables software virtualization to run multiple instances of systems on one physical machine. While we already have virtualization hardware and virtualization software, much remains to be done. Microsoft's Virtual Server is available now, for free, but it shall be superceded by Windows Server virtualization.
With Windows Server virtualization, you can take 64-bit hardware and run both 32-bit and 64-bit virtual systems on it. One can better utilize server resources this way. Instead of many servers, you may just need one.
Virtualization affords an additional layer of abstraction between hardware and software. The virtualized image "does not interfere with or require interaction with the operating system itself and other applications present on the desktop".
If a physical server needs to be taken down, one can migrate the virtual systems to other servers, without missing a beat. If someone needs a server, you can provision one, "in just a few minutes".
You can hot-add hardware, such as more memory, or additional network connections, without taking down either the server or the virtual system. "No other hardware virtualization technology provides this functionality for Windows".
WinHEC 2006 was the first time for Microsoft to simultaneously release beta versions of all three of the company's flagship products: Vista, Longhorn, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The Office release is the "most significant update to the Microsoft Office system user interface (UI) in more than a decade".
Everyone knows that the Microsoft Outlook client is integrated into Microsoft Exchange Server on the backend. One can run Outlook by itself, apart from Exchange, but in order to get the full value out of Outlook one really needs the server. Similarly, the new Microsoft Office is integrated into Microsoft's SharePoint Server. This is for collaboration and document sharing purposes, to enable better teamwork, both within an organization and without.
Microsoft Office is also growing up and starting to include ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) features, such as BI (Business Intelligence).
WinHEC provides the opportunity for hardware vendors to strut their wares.
An initiative that has been underway for quite some time, but only recently announced, is Microsoft's FlexGo. This is more than just a new way of selling PCs in emerging markets, where people can scarcely afford a PC. Actual modifications and specializations to hardware have to be used. Infineon, for example, worked with Microsoft "to develop specialized security chips".
Both Intel and AMD shall provide microprocessor support for FlexGo. The chips that AMD supplies, for instance, will be "designed specifically to support Microsoft FlexGo".
And you thought microprocessor company Transmeta was done for. It seems not. Transmeta CPUs shall be used in FlexGo, too. Transmeta's "software-based architecture enabled customization for this specialized application".
Possibly the most important device demonstrated at WinHEC was the hybrid hard drive. Ever since the advent of the iPod, the one that replaced its hard drive with NAND flash memory, the financial community has been predicting the demise of the traditional hard drive. It is too hard to do away with the hard drive all at once, however, so what we have here is a more or less traditional hard drive, with NAND flash memory included. Samsung exhibited "the first commercial prototype of a Hybrid Hard Disk (HHD)".
In a nutshell, the benefits of a HHD are threefold: performance, battery life, and reliability. Apparently the NAND flash is faster than magnetic storage technology, and Samsung "uses the fastest flash device on the market as cache".
At any rate, the drive performs better. The HHD improves boot and resume time by about half. That's a fifty percent improvement. To put this in perspective, when a new CPU or chipset is introduced, it normally results in performance improvements of only a few percentage points.
The cache on the HHD consumes less power than magetic platters as they spin, which prolongs battery life. Expect the batteries of laptops with HHDs to last 20-30 minutes longer. Samsung lists longer battery life and faster boot and resume times as "the two biggest consumer desires".
The third area of improvement is reliability. HHDs are more resistant to shock. This is because when a notebook is accessing data from the flash memory, instead of the rotating magnetic platters, there are fewer moving parts. This is what makes the drives less resistant to shock.
However, in order to take advantage of these three things—performance, battery life, and reliability—software has to accommodate the hardware. Consequently, Bill Gates said that Microsoft was hard at work "to make sure we've got the right approach here".
Samsung is on schedule to have HHDs shipping in volume in time for the consumer launch of Windows Vista in January.
I have some good news and some bad news. First, the bad news. Windows Vista will not ship with support for the newer 1394b FireWire specification. Now the good news. It will eventually. Microsoft intends to support FireWire 800 "shortly after the release of the new operating system".
Because of Vista's upcoming support for FireWire 800, Texas Instruments (TI) demonstrated two new 1394b devices at WinHEC, one of these the "smallest 1394b device on the market".
FireWire has traditionally been a Mac technology. Nevertheless TI claims itself as the "leader in 1394 (FireWire®) technology".
The 400 mbps throughput rates of 1394a are competitive with the 480 mbps of USB 2.0. The newer version of FireWire, however, 1394b, offers throughput rates of up to 800 mbps, which is better still. TI has "the largest 1394b portfolio in the industry".
First, there was the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), then the LCD (Liquid Crystal Display). What's next? How about the LCD, with touchscreen capabilities? Wacom is "the industry leader in pen input technologies".
The CPU is rarely a bottleneck on desktop computers. The speeds of networks, however, have increased to the point where the CPUs of servers are often a bottleneck. The performance improvements of networks "have far surpassed the CPU's ability to keep pace".
The solution is special networking hardware that works with Microsoft's Scalable Network Pack (SNP) on Windows Server 2003, with Service Pack 1. The hardware consists of special network adapters that offload packet processing overhead from the CPU and place the burden of the packet processing on the network adapters themselves, freeing up the CPUs to concentrate on application processing.
The industry has responded, and several networking vendors offer compatible hardware. The basic concept is the same, even though the vendors use different names to describe their products: converged network interface controllers (C-NICs), Intelligent NICs™, TCP/IP Offload Engine Network Interface Cards (TNICs), high-performance Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) silicon, and 10Gb Ethernet networking solutions.