X-bit labs - Print version

The show has ended, however X-bit labs still has something to tell about. In this last part of our coverage we will discover some AMD Turion 64 notebooks; have a look at GeCube’s, Gigabyte’s and Tul’s graphics cards with passive cooling; hear some comments from Western Digital in regards not-that-bright future of SAS; glance at 8P AMD Opteron server from TYAN; see what ULI wants to offer the market; have a look at high-end memory maker’s GEIL’s consumer electronics products and glimpse at Biostar’s high-performance AMD64 barebone.

AMD Turion 64 Gets Adoption, but Not Yet Wide

Back in the ancient days of the K6 and then K6-2 almost no one could imagine that microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices will not only be faster than those from Intel Corp. in the desktop field, but will offer really tough competition for the latter’s chips in servers and one day will find themselves powering machines used by companies among the Fortune 100. Now that AMD has achieved spectacular results in desktop, server and workstation spaces, the company is heading to penetrate the rapidly growing market of mobile computers with the Turion 64 chip.

AMD Turion 64 – Revamped AMD Athlon 64

AMD Turion 64 targets the same space as Intel’s Centrino mobile platform – thin, light, but yet powerful notebooks. However, there is a significant difference between the Turion and the Centrino: the Turion 64 is a standalone processor, whereas the Centrino is a platform. AMD Turion 64 may be paired with any validated system logic from companies like ATI Technologies, NVIDIA Corp., Silicon Integrated Systems, ULi Electronics or VIA Technologies and any wired or wireless network adapters preferred by notebook makers. In case of Intel Centrino notebook manufacturers have to choose Intel Pentium M chip, Intel’s core-logic and Intel’s network controllers to be able to use the Centrino brand-name.

AMD Turion 64 mobile processor is designed to fit into 754-pin infrastructure with 800MHz HyperTransport speed, is equipped with either 1MB or 512KB of level-two cache and has built-in single-channel DDR memory controller supporting PC1600, PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM. Additionally, the chip features PowerNow! energy saving technology with C3 Deeper Sleep state that reduces power consumption during idle moments as well as 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 instructions. Like all AMD Athlon 64 processors, the Turion 64 supports 64-bit capability in addition to Enhanced Virus Protection technology.

AMD produces its Turion 64 chips using 90nm Silicon-on-Insulator fabrication process in its Dresden, Germany-based Fab 30.

Far From Being Thin and Light

At this point only Acer, ASUS, Averatec, BenQ, Fujitsu-Siemens, MSI and Packard Bell plan to produce AMD Turion-based notebooks shortly, while Gigabyte is planning to launch one later in the second or the third quarter. At CeBIT 2005 we managed to picture ASUS and MSI machines, it is known that Fujitsu Siemens’ and Acer’s laptops were also there, in fact, we did not succeed in finding them, but we still have all the information about the devices.

At least initially AMD Turion notebooks cannot show themselves in all their glory: the majority of manufacturers except MSI just used their old chassis originally intended for AMD Athlon 64 and Sempron processors to showcase AMD Turion 64. The consequence was that the chassis were not thin and light at all: the majority weight 2.5 kilograms of more.

ASUSTeK’s A6000K, for example, comes in 15.4” wide-screen form-factor and weighs 2.8kg, which is normal for high-performance or value, but not thin-and-light notebooks.

Fujitsu-Siemens uses Amilo A-series chassis for its Turion 64 notebook. A-family of chassis typically weight around 2.75kg.

The only company who could showcase AMD Turion 64 in a thin and light form-factor is MSI with its MegaBook S270 that features 12” WXGA screen and weight below 1.5kg. The computer comes in chassis made of magnesium aluminum alloy and seems to be a very stylish one.

Graphics Cards with Passive Cooling –A New Trend

From tiny print circuit boards with a couple of chips on them, graphics cards have evolved into monsters that occupy up to two slots and are more expensive than even mainboards and mainstream microprocessors. For years now, graphics cards have been using rather huge coolers that caused a lot of noise. Nevertheless, these days graphics cards makers are coming back into the days when their devices were utterly quiet: using modern engineering and expertise in cooling it is possible to use passive cooling even for performance-mainstream graphics cards, or, at least, make them a lot more silent while sustaining efficiency.

At CeBIT 2005 a number of graphics cards makers, including GeCube, Gigabyte Technology and Tul Corp. demonstrated their graphics cards with innovative cooling solutions, including passive coolers.

GeCube Makes Cooling Wiser

GeCube offers a range of passively-cooled graphics cards, including RADEON X700 PRO, RADEON X600 XT and RADEON 9550. For more advanced products GeCube is planning to introduce its Uni-Wise cooler that is proclaimed to be very efficient yet silent.

Uni-Wise will be installed onto special versions of the RADEON X800- and X850-series graphics cards. GeCube will also offer typical versions of the boards with default coolers like those used by ATI’s reference graphics cards.

Currently the company has no plans to introduce products based on visual processing units from different suppliers, such as NVIDIA Corp..

Tul Investigates Passive Cooling

Tul Corp, who has been very successful with its high-end graphics cards business, continues to innovate. At CeBIT 2005 the firm demonstrated its RADEON X700 PRO and RADEON X800 graphics cards with passive coolers featuring heat-pipes.

Both products run at reference design speeds and more represent an ongoing investigation in demand for graphics cards without fan and reliability of passive coolers, rather than a lineup of products. Still, Tul seems to be more confident in passive cooling than GeCube, as GeCube did not showcase RADEON X800 without a fan.

Gigabyte Provides Broad Range of Passive Cooled Graphics

Gigabyte Technology is currently the company who has the largest amount of high-performance graphics cards that attribute heat-pipe passive coolers in the product family. Currently the company offers 8 powerful graphics cards for AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 slots without fans, which is the leading array in the industry.

Among Powered by ATI range of graphics cards Gigabyte offers passive cooling for RADEON X700 PRO, RADEON X800 and RADEON X800 XL visual processing units. The company also has numerous passively cooled boards featuring NVIDIA’s GPUs: GeForce 6600, GeForce 6600 GT and GeForce 6800.

ULi Releases New Chipsets, Pins Loads of Hopes on Multimedia Products

ULi Electronics, a core-logic division of ALi Corp., has not been present on the mass market for years now. Nevertheless, there are various applications where ALi and ULi can install their products and keep the company going and developing new products. This does not mean, however, that ULi simply does not want to address the market of mainstream personal computers where it used to be successful: ULi constantly and consistently develops new products for the PC market and seems to be getting back on track with its desktop business.

ULi’s Chipset Business Shows Positive Signs

At CeBIT 2005 ULi presented numerous ATI RADEON XPRESS 200-series based mainboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, Jetway, Shuttle (mainboard is intended for the company’s barebones), Tul Corp. with ULi’s M1573 I/O controllers instead of ATI’s own. The mainboards are in mass production now and provided that they are popular, there will be a new revenue stream for ULi. In fact, ULi’s South Bridges are very popular around the industry: they are not only utilized in computers based on Transmeta’s chips, which are rare, but also in workstations by Sun Microsystems.

ULi’s M1573 South Bridge supports 2 Parallel ATA-133 ports, 4 Serial ATA-150 ports, PCI bus, USB 2.0, high definition audio as well as other input/output capabilities required today. M1573 is the world’s first South Bridge controller that can be used on both Intel’s and AMD’s platforms that supports high definition audio.

In addition, ULi showcased numerous mainboards, including prototype mainboards, which were based on purely ULi’s chipsets, including M1695 and M1689.

Originally unveiled in late September 2003, the ULi M1689 supports AGP 8x, PCI, 2 Parallel ATA-33/66/100 channels, 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, AC’97 audio and so on. The M1689 was originally expected to be available in mass quantities in Summer 2004, though, no leading mainboard makers have so far supplied platforms based on the core-logic in mass quantities.

ULi Electronics’ M1695 chip that supports AMD64 processors features PCI Express x16 bus for graphics cards that is reprogrammable for dual PCI Express x8 lanes operation for applications that require two slots for graphics cards, such as multi-GPU technology from NVIDIA Corp. which is called SLI. The chip may be coupled with M1689 to support AGP 8x for additional flexibility.

While there is modest success of ULi’s chipsets, the company does not expect its PC core-logic business to be very significant this year, but for next year the company preps more aggressive product roadmap. Still, ULi’s chipsets are currently used in several consumer electronics products, therefore, the primary business of the company are still chipsets.

ULi Shows Off USB 2.0 DTV Chip

An additional highlight in ULi’s booth was the world’s smallest DTV tuner for USB 2.0 and supporting logic from ULi.

M9206 is world’s first USB 2.0 Digital Video/Audio controller that supports both DVB and ATSC digital TV applications. Though the 48 LQFP (7mm x 7mm) packaged M9206 may be the tiniest chip amongst its league, it enables the “most energy-efficient and cost-effective solution that all TV-Box and notebook manufacturers will want to have,” claims ULi.

ULi pins a lot of hopes on its controller business in general and multimedia solutions in particular, as they all can be used in rapidly growing market of consumer electronics.

The World’s Smallest PC?

One of the spectacular gadgets ULi demonstrated in its booth was a tiny personal computer from OQO with Transmeta’s TM8600 processor and ULi’s M1535+ I/O controller.

Despite of the sizes that resemble a PDA, the device is fully-fledged PC with Windows XP operating system and Microsoft Office applications running. While its performance is not really fast, such computer can definitely be useful for businessmen or journalists who need fast access to certain data in MS Office format or ability to quickly write short stories using nearly normal keyboard.

WD: Serial ATA Will Take Over Serial Attached SCSI

Western Digital, who is currently the world’s No. 2 maker of consumer hard disk drives did not make any serious announcements during CeBIT 2005, but still revealed some details about the market of data storage components in an interview with X-bit labs.

Currently the bulk of the company’s business is represented by desktop components. It is interesting to note that only 20% - 25% of WD’s HDDs are Serial ATA, whereas the majority of hard disk drives are still intended for Parallel ATA applications. Quite naturally, but the most popular HDDs among the company’s shipments are currently 80GB products, whereas customers seeking for larger size buy 160GB hard drives (HDs).

The company said that fastest growing hard disk drives markets are consumer electronics and handheld applications. Citing estimations from Gartner, WD said year-over-year market growth rate for CE is 30%, whereas the growth in supplies of HDs for mobile apps is 94%.

Commenting on the performance of its workstation business and Raptor HDD acceptance Western Digital says that Raptors are very successful products at the moment. Still, despite of their triumph WD does not have plans to introduce either 15 000 rpm Raptor models as well as Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or SCSI products.

The firm claims SCSI market is declining, while SAS products have not yet come to the market. As times goes, and Serial ATA II evolves, SAS will be less and less attractive to potential customers and Serial ATA II will not only be widely adopted in servers and workstations, but also in storage systems. While the high-end of the external data storage market is expected to be occupied by Fiber Channel solutions, Serial ATA II will have enough maturity, cost-efficiency and support to compete for entry-level and mid-range enterprise data storage, unlike SAS, which will have to build up infrastructure and reassure clients in its reliability, WD believes.

8-Way AMD Opteron Server is Here from TYAN

Advanced Micro Devices powers a lot of enterprise servers these days, but the majority of AMD64 servers on the market are 2-way systems, whereas 4-way and 8-way systems are hardly popular. Especially 8-way machines which have been offered only by IWILL for about 9 months now, but with no tangible success, it seems. Even though it’s a long time before 8P AMD64 machines will gain acceptance among enterprises, TYAN was at CeBIT 2005 to demonstrate its own 8-way AMD Opteron system.

TYAN’s Transport VX50 (B4881) is based on NVIDIA nForce Pro core-logic that sports 1000MHz HyperTransport bus along with PCI Express interconnection. The system contains 2 mainboards for 4 CPUs that are interconnected with special HyperTransport connectors. One of the mainboards is primary, with slots for add-in cards and numerous additional controllers, another is secondary, which has only CPU sockets and DIMM slots.

TYAN’s 8P AMD64 system can be equipped with 128GB of registered DDR SDRAM, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 3 PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz slots, 1 PCI Express x16 slot, 1 PCI Express x4 slot and 5 PCI expansion slots. The system can support up to 16 hot-swappable Serial ATA and SCSI hard disk drives.

Actual pricing and availability timeframe of 8-way AMD Opteron-based server from TYAN are unclear.

GEIL Goes Consumer Electronics

GEIL has been renowned for its high-performance memory modules in innovative packaging methodology. The company's primary business is still memory modules, but recently the company began to manufacture its consumer-electronics oriented products, particularly portable music and video players.

At the moment GEIL’s consumer products lineup consists of two devices: iBall MP3 player and David 300 video player. Both devices seem to be rather stylish, which is not something you would expect from a company who is novice on the market of consumer electronics.

The iBall player is small, about the size of powder-box or something like that, round and is fully made of metal – it even comes with special headphones that match design of the device itself. The iBall has a small screen to control the playback and even watch some digital movies in MPV format, even though it is too small for proper video playback. The player can integrate up to 1GB of flash memory and is compatible with USB 1.1. The iBall is already available on the market.

GEIL's David 300 is portable video player that will be launched commercially in future. The player integrates a mobile HDD, can playback movies, music and also view pictures and even play a game. The menu and controls of the device are done really properly: everything is very logical and intuitive.

Design of the David 300 is similar to Apple’s iPod player, which is not bad, but not really exciting. Furthermore, it would really be a lot better if they use a bit larger screen with the player – size definitely matters when it comes to movies.

Biostar iDEQ: When Style Meets Performance

Since the introduction of the first cube-like PC barebone in 2001 and rapid jump of numerous Taiwan companies in the bandwagon in 2002 one thing has changed on the market: in the consumer-oriented PC barebone business the challenge now is not only for the visual attraction of such computers, but for their performance, usability and additional capabilities probably with a blend of trendy digital home concept. These days few will buy just a small and good-looking PC, but will get something which complies to their needs well: either in terms of high performance, additional feature-set or any other specific needs. The market became broad and has started to address different types of usage models.

Biostar’s new iDEQ barebones also come in two variations: one is stylish, another is high-performance.

iDEQ 330P barebone is powered by NVIDIA’s nForce4 chipset that sports AMD Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX processors with dual-channel memory controller. Additionally, the model 330P PCI Express x16, PCI and miniPCI expansion slots, Serial ATA-150 support, 7.1 channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet, built-in card-reader and other capabilities.

It is interesting to note that the concept of iDEQ330P’s cooling solution resembles that of BTX systems: the cool air taken from outside of the case cools down the processor and core-logic at the same time and is exhausted from the backside.

iDEQ 210P is not as powerful as iDEQ 330P, but is smaller and looks generally more fashionable. The barebone is based on the nForce3 250Gb core-logic, support Socket 754 processors, such as AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Sempron, with single-channel memory controller. iDEQ 210P has AGP 8x, PCI and miniPCI expansion slots, Serial ATA-150 support, 5.1 channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet, built-in card-reader and other features.

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 7