Hi all; Had a busy week, promised a post on up and coming
PC technology, particularly my suggestion that we are on the
verge of another set of integration waves. In the past, these
waves have turned the market topsy-turvy in terms of who is
on top, what profit margins are, etc. My guess is amazingly
cheap PCs for the near future:
...the under-$1,000 box may more closely resemble a
set-top box than an X86 PC.
techweb.com
The move toward sub-$700 PCs is forcing the industry to
look for as many ways as possible to cut costs. "By the end
of this year, you will see at least one of the major U.S. OEMs
offering a sub-$600 PC," said Samuel Liu, president of
Taiwanese chip-set maker Silicon Integrated Systems Corp.
"Moving graphics functions onto the core logic is one way
to reach that price point."
Intel has told Taiwan's mainboard makers that it will launch
its Whitney chip set in the second quarter of 1999 integrating
the i740 graphics engine on the Pentium II north bridge core-
logic chip.
techweb.com
"the world's smallest networked Pentium PC." The Mighty
Mite is a 4 x 5.75-inch single-board PC, whose format suits
being bolted down to a 3.5-inch disk drive. It's based on a
133-MHz Pentium processor and packs in up to 72 Mbytes
of DRAM.
techweb.com
The machine that fills consumer expectations for a "sub-
$1,000 PC" may resemble a set-top box more than an X86-
based PC,
The company has also developed a single-chip consumer
PC that includes a P5-type core, integrated memory controller,
PCI master, 64-bit SVGA graphics processor, and offers
National TV Standards Committee (i.e. NTSC) video output.
techweb.com
A really big integration step will be bringing the system DRAM
onto the processor chip. This is already happening to graphics
board designs. When this happens to PC speed processors,
(and it is inevitable given future process improvements) those
processors that do not include on board DRAM will be both
too expensive and too slow to be used. But right now, only
enough DRAM for the video is getting stuck on chip:
The ability to embed 4 Mbytes or more of DRAM on a
graphics controller is sparking interest among desktop makers.
Embedded DRAM has been touted in some circles as one
of the more important of the chip industry's recent innovations.
Fast on-chip buses between the DRAM and logic, low power
dissipation, fewer pins and fewer component counts are among
the technique's advantages.
techweb.com
By the way, Meathead, you should review the above
italicized statement for what the effect of integeration is: Lower
power, and fewer pins. This is in direct contradiction to your
silly statement that high integration would result in 80W chips
with thousands of pins. I've integrated designs into chips,
you clearly have not, you are clearly in denial of the basic
advantages of integration. The story of electronics for 20
years has been higher integration, and that means more
functions on a chip.
The mid-year EE-Times forecast is out, and has some
interesting things to say about low end PCs.
Increasing levels of integration will play an important role
at the low end of the market. Last year, Cyrix's MediaGX
triggered the emergence of the sub-$1,000 PC market,
and this year it will push PC prices down to $600. National has
promised to deliver a true single-chip PC, incorporating nearly
everything but memory, in mid-1999. This device will build
upon the MediaGX, adding the "south bridge" and super-I/O
functions, USB and 1394 interfaces, acceleration for DVD
decoding and modem capability. By the time the device
debuts its CPU performance will be lackluster, but National
is betting there will be a growing market for information
appliances and entry-level PCs that don't demand leading-
edge CPUs.
eet.com
Everybody is gearing up to run the price of PCs down to
very, very low levels. The ASP trend this year was not a
blip. It was a warning to those people holding stock in
box makers. It was also an indication to the PC industry
that this is the time to start gearing up to fill that consumer
demand. And they are responding. The big guys aren't
talking much, but you can get an idea of what designers
are working on from the small players, who need publicity:
Centaur, founded by renowned microprocessor architect
Glenn Henry, is focusing on the low end of the market, where
sub-$1,000 desktop machines and sub-$2,000 notebooks
rule.
From a design standpoint, what's interesting about the
C6 is that Henry chose not to follow the reigning trends in
chip architecture. Instead, he took a downsized approach,
implementing just those features he needed to deliver decent
performance in a high-volume, low-cost CPU.
eetimes.com
When these things come to fruition in 3 to 5 years, you will
see the price of a box dropping to below $200. If they want
a box that isn't upgradeable, then the price can drop to more
like $150, which is what I expect.
-- Carl |
