Basic Hardware: Innovate or Die

With stiff competition vendors have to innovate and be the first to market their products. Dual core CPUs, virtualization, SLI and CrossFire are some of the technologies that will make an impact next year

Sunday, December 18, 2005

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Predictions for 2006

PCs and servers based on dual-core processors will become mainstream Mobile versions of Dual core CPUs from Intel and AMD will be released, resulting in more powerful notebooks Overall PC platform will incorporate more features within the hardware, such as security, virtualization and manageability SATA II-based hard drives will become mass market

Basic hardware is perhaps the toughest market for any vendor to be in, largely because the competition is stiff and margins are low. The moment someone introduces something new in the market, it's soon followed by hundreds of 'me toos'. So a vendor can only earn a premium on the product till others catch up. What does that have to do with technology? It's nothing else but market forces, right? Wrong. In order for a vendor to be able to sell its product in the market, it has to innovate. It has to spend on R&D, and constantly introduce better products into the market. Not only that, but the vendor has to innovate quickly in order to remain visible in the market. The end result is that you get to hear of so many technologies and see such variety in the market.

To give you an idea of what we mean, we'll narrate an experience. We visited Taiwan early this year to see Gigabyte's manufacturing facilities. There we found that Gigabyte has gone far beyond being a motherboard manufacturing company, and put its fingers in many other pies. These included PCs, Servers, notebooks, graphics cards, mouse, wireless devices, optical drives, networking equipment and several others. Some of these like PCs, servers and graphics cards were there much earlier, but others like mouse and wireless devices are new. It was amazing to see such diversity being introduced from a company that was purely known for its motherboards. But if you'll notice, you'll find this trend of product portfolio expansion across most hardware manufacturers. Graphics maestros nVidia and ATi for instance, have also gotten into the motherboards market in addition to being in the graphics cards business. They're also pushing their graphics technology inside other products as well, including consumer electronics devices and digital gadgets. Hard drive manufacturers are not moving beyond their products, but are doing enough innovation in their own stream and going to newer markets. So besides being inside a PC or server, a hard drive today can be inside consumer electronics devices, digital devices, automobiles, NAS boxes and much more. Hard drive manufacturers are introducing more innovative ways of selling their hard drives. Their capacities have already reached half a Terabyte on one side, while on the other their form factor is becoming small enough to fit inside a pocket.

All this action obviously translates to greater variety and more competitive pricing for consumers. Take motherboards for instance, there was a time when one could clearly distinguish between expensive and cheap motherboards. For instance, Asus and Gigabyte motherboards were expensive, while Mercury and Tomato were cheap, and Intel was somewhere in between. Now, you see everybody selling everything, starting from Rs 3.5-4K and going beyond Rs 10K. The trend now is to build highly feature-rich motherboards, with lots of functions onboard, whether it's 7-channel surround sound, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, RAID or FireWire ports. While this trend is good for consumers, it's also forcing the component manufacturers to innovate further so their products don't become redundant. So even though you can get 7-channels onboard audio, you'll find sound cards with even more compelling features, such as the Creative X-Fi. Speaking of compelling, lots of compelling technologies were introduced this year with equally compelling applications. Let's get into them and see their impact, now and for the next year.

Hit or Miss

Creative X-Fi Though motherboards are increasingly putting everything onboard, component manufacturers keep coming out with more compelling products you'd drool to buy. The Creative X-Fi for instance, has features that give your PC theatre-class audio quality (paired with the right set of speakers of course), audio creation capabilities, and an internal drive bay with connectors for audio creation, headphones, and PC gaming. Who'd care about 7-channel onboard sound then?

Acer Altos Server  The trend amongst server manufacturers is to ship dual-core servers, instead of dual-CPU. According to server manufacturers like Acer, the performance remains the same. Both Intel and AMD have introduced dual-core processors for both desktops as well as servers. Next year, you should find servers with dual-core CPUs. The impact-a server with two CPU sockets that are filled with dual-core processors will actually mean a four-way server!

SLI based gaming machines  Nvidia's Scalable Link Interface Technology, or SLI based machines kicked into action this year. The technology allows multiple GPUs to be placed on the same motherboard, thereby literally doubling the performance. We reviewed the first one to be launched in India in June this year. The machine from Zebronics featured two GeForce 6800GTX cards as shown below.

Key innovations and their impact
Several key innovations took place this year, which will define the IT landscape for next year. We'll start with graphics, and major focus this year has been to have multi-GPU solutions, ie, putting multiple graphics cards in the same machine and making them work together. This started with the introduction of SLI, or Scalable Link Interface technology by nVidia. With SLI, you could take two nVidia graphics cards and place them both in a SLI-ready motherboard. Both graphics cards would work together, thereby literally doubling the performance. Soon afterwards, ATI introduced its CrossFire multi-GPU technology. The big deal about this one was that people who already had certain ATI Radeon cards could buy another CrossFire Edition card and use the two together. This saved them the cost of buying another card. Since both SLI and CrossFire are relatively new, only gaming freaks with very deep pockets can afford them. But going by the trend in the hardware segment, that shouldn't be the case for too long. Next year, they'll become common and something better will emerge. What will it be next? Multi-core GPUs? You never know!

Speaking of multi-core, Intel and AMD both introducing their dual-core processors this year, called Pentium D and X2 respectively. Multi-core technology as such is nothing new. It's been there inside RISC-based processors, such as those from IBM and Sun, which power high-end servers. But with Intel and AMD also jumping into the multi-core bandwagon, the technology has now reached desktops, which is worth noticing. By next year, one should see dual-core CPUs completely taking over from single core. The advantage of course is much better performance, especially when doing multi-tasking. Moreover, both Intel and AMD have also introduced their multi-core technology into their server CPUs, Namely the Xeon and Opteron, and the first servers based on this technology have already started shipping (see the Acer Altos server review in this month's shootout). Like desktops, most server manufacturers are likely to replace their dual-CPU offerings with dual-core ones by next year.

We're not through with CPUs yet. The mobile processors for notebooks are also expected to switch to dual core next year, resulting in much more powerful notebooks.

Many other technologies have entered the CPU this year besides dual-core, which will make the processors more powerful and yet less power hungry. The significant one to remember for the next year is virtualization. Processors with virtualization will allow multiple OSs to be run on the same machine in multiple partitions. So far this was possible only through specialized software such as VMWare and MS Virtual PC/Server. Virtualization technology as such has become quite popular in organizations these days. Support for it on hardware will give it a further boost. So a network administrator could now put multiple OSs on a single machine, with one for the user, another to do security checks, and a third to do inventory, without taking a toll on the performance.

As you can imagine, the clock speed battles in CPUs are long over. Now it's all about adding other features into the CPU, not only for higher performance, but better manageability, security and power savings.

Overall, we're seeing efforts from everyone in the hardware industry to improve the end-user experience through better products, which is a really good sign. The PC range for instance widened considerably this year. We saw several vendors intorduce PCs in the 10-12K range. Another range that was hot were MediaCenter based machines, which can act as a complete entertainment center at home. Servers are also following a similar pattern, and becoming more of a commodity than a special device. Today, you can go and pick up an entry-level server for less than 60K.

We finally realized this year that while technology is definitely important, its application is even more important, and we'll see that focus increase in the coming year.

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