Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference Summary
Held 4/9/97 - 4/11/97 in San Francisco
and was attended by over 4000 hardware design engineers
the largest show in the 6 years since it started.
The next release of Windows commonly referred to as Windows 97 oops
Windows 98 is code named Memphis.
Bill Gates Key Note Summary
- todays complex market place consists of 2883 desktop models
and 1633 notebook models
- 8 companies are offering Windows CE palmtops today. See below
for a Windows CE summary.
- Microsoft are selling 40% more windows 95 upgrades in 97 than 96
- 1680 Windows 95 and Windows NT applications
- Unix work station volumes are decreasing for the first time
as x86 based work station are offsetting RISCs
and Windows NT popularity increases
Rest of the event summary
declining volumes and a lack of applications have caused MS
to pull NT support from a number of the RISC processors leaving
only the Alpha.
60 million Win 95 users 3 million Windows NT users
38% of capable systems have been upgraded to Windows 95
94% of all US windows sales are Windows 95 or NT
new drivers will be compatible with NT 5.0 and Memphis however,
NT 5.0 will be compatible with older Win NT drivers and
Memphis will be compatible with older Win 95 drives. These
new drivers will be compatible with both, but older drivers will not
NT 4.0 was defined to support a max of 4 processors. NT 5.0
is working to support 8-16 processor based systems.
the next generation video cards will use a bus called
accelerated graphics port (AGP) and
will be shipping 2H97 really penetrating the market place in 98.
Current PCI bus limits are 133MB/s.
AGP 1x 264 MB/s, 2x 528 MB/s and 4x AGP 1GB/s.
AGP will enable a 10x improvement in graphics performance over the next
three years!
Intel are moving there processors onto a card which includes
the L2 cache. These will be called Slot 1.
Intel will not create an AGP enabled socket 7 chipset solution.
This may insure that PCI stays around for the non-Intel based systems.
Opti and Via (and the AMD version of the Via) are working on
versions of their chipsets with AGP
currently consumer systems have much higher demands on video,
processor, audio, etc than the corporate market. Corporate market
is 2/3rd of the market Vs. consumer. More and more there is a distinct
difference between PCs targeting the home user, Vs.. one targeting
the corporate user.
currently ADSL and cable modems interface to the PC through
an ethernet card. Often the cable company may need to install an ISA
ethernet card to connect into these networks.
PCs in 98 will begin to drop the ISA bus (according to Microsoft)
A little hard to believe given the status of modems and audio today.
Audio will move to PCI and USB and modems will be serial/USB.
PC98 recommended min is 200mhz Pentium, 32MB
Slot one based Pentium II (Klamath) will have to use the 440FX chipset
due to the delay of the new LX (which adds AGP) chipset.
440FX does not support SyncD.
Rumour is that Intel will add slot 2 and increase bus speeds to 100MHZ
when the 440BX chipset is eventually available.
Pentium life span of two years as the volume shipper is long in
comparison to the life span of the 286/286/486
Pentium II or Klamath is available in 233 and 266MHZ internal speeds.
External CPU bus speed is currently believed to be 66MHZ.
AMDs K6 is the fastest shipping x86 processor today (at least
until Pentium II starts shipping).
Pentium II will run the external L2 cache off a dedicated cache bus that
runs at 1/2 the CPU internal clock speed. L2 cache will longer be tied
to and load down the external processor bus. L2 cache will be on the
processor card so transparent to the rest of the system so Intel
can make changes to this at will. Intel will make all Slot 1 cards and
will not sell the processor except on a card. A mobile solution will
also be card based and will include part of the chipset, processor and
L2 cache. This will make mobiles upgradeable.
a fair bit of time was spent on Zero Administration Windows. This
is available on Windows NT 5.0 and too a lesser extent on Memphis.
This removes the machines configuration to a centralized point of control
to reduce the damage a user can do, hide a lot of the not needed parts
of Windows from the users view and also speeds initial install. All
configuration, data files, applications etc are controlled, administered
and backed up centrally. This would also seem to allow centralized tracing
of licenses used in the corporate environment. Upgrades would likely
have to be done across the corporation perhaps increasing upgrade sales.
Additionally this ZAW may be a selling point moving corporations onto NT,
creating a differentiation between Windows 95 which is intended for
the home and the more expensive NT intended for the office.
There is a kit available from Microsoft that will allow this on NT 4.0.
DirectX 5 will support MMX helping begin to provide more benefits of
the MMX processor by MMX accelerating any application using DirectX.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0 to Beta 4/8/97. Includes
Pointcast, collaboration software. It also includes the ability to
subscribe and automatically check the status of web pages.
Microsoft have added a new member to the Windows family, it is called
Windows CE. It will be used in non-PCs. This includes some of the
newest palmtops, set top boxes etc. Windows CE is a subset of the
Windows programming family so programmers can use the same tools
and methods they do for Win95. Programs and drivers will have to
be rewritten to support Windows CE, however MS says it is not a
difficult task. Windows CE ca be loaded into 2MB of ROM and runs in
under 500K of RAM. MS has used their experience in porting NT to
non-x86 processors to allow Windows CE to support numerous RISCs
used in palmtops including Hitachi SH3, NEC 4100, Phillips 3900 and
are working on x86, PPC and ARM. Pocket versions of MS Internet
Explorer, Word, and Excel are all available today!
All of the current WindowsCE machines are not DOS compatible
(because the processor is not an x86).
Microsoft are beginning to implement a Web Push scheme where by
new drives could be downloaded from Microsoft from your TCPIP connection
when new drivers are available. I wonder if like on MSN registration
the list of code you have and registration number for this code
is also going to be sent. It was not implied, but I wonder?
processor baseline will move to 133MHZ Vs.. 100MHZ
Pentium Pro supports up to 4 way processors Vs.. 2 for
Pentium II which will mean Pentium Pro will coexist with Pentium II.
a 233MHZ version of the existing Pentium may come out
compilers have not been updated yet to include the MMX instruction
set meaning that coding to take advantage of MMX requires coding
in assembly language. Performance boost on MMX processors is
due largely to the double L1 cache rather than MMX instructions.
MMX processors will displace non-MMX processors by 1Q98.
Pentium II or Klamath will be released May/97
AMD with there K6 and now AM640 chipset are the leading
Intel alternative. AMD K6 has been announced at 166, 200 and 233MHZ
with a 300MHZ (100MHZ external) rumored. L1 cache is 32KB.
Cyrix shipped 575,000 CPUs 4Q96 6x86s
Digital will offer a sub $3000 Alpha based home PC at 400, 466
and 533 MHZ. This will be an NT machine compatible with
al Win32 programs through emulation and translation.
benchmarks show performance of a P150 is actually
less than a P133 in spite of costing more due to the slower
processor external bus speed decrease from 66 to 60 MHZ.
Intel competitors may be able to get 10-20% of the market in 97
and 20-30% of the market in 98.
previous years battle of the RISCs is largely over with hardly
anyone left standing.
Memphis commonly referred to Windows 97 oops Windows 98
will include the following:
- everything released in OSR2 (which was released to the
OEMs for pre install only) which includes support for FAT32.
FAT 32 breaks the 2 GB partition limit and largely eliminates
the wastage cause by large sector sizes
- WDM a common driver coding model between Windows 95 and Windows
NT allowing hardware vendors to support both easier
- tighter integration with the Web including OS views of the
machine like any other data on the Web
- parts of Zero Administration for Windows discussed above
- and other subtle adds you will discover when you try to do
something only to find out you need Memphis.
DVD Stuff
- DVD ROM was everywhere and is largely a reality in the US today.
Record stores are carrying DVD movies for $20 US. DVD can be best thought
of as:
- a large CDROM
4 sizes of disks
- Single Sided Single Layer 4.7GB,(up from 650MB of the current CDROM)
- Double Sided Single Layer 9.4GB
- Single Sided Double Layer 8.5GB
- Double Sided Double Layer 17.0GB
Double Sided DVDs have turned out to be very expensive to make so are currently
not being widely used.
- a replacement for the large, bulky and unpopular Laser disk
- 133 min of MPEGII movie with 6 alternate audio channels will fit on one side of a DVD
- interactive movies allowing the watcher to choose story line paths will be possible
- DVD video players are available today
- DVD ROM drive for computers are also available today, however
the technology is just starting and by no means mature
- DVD writeable is still about a year away
- DVD can also read standard CDROMs, play standard audio CDs
- DVD discs however can not be read in standard CDROM players.
- DVD will include copy protection schemes
- PC DVD will be done using an add in card that will do MPEG-2 decode,
ad ACS-3 audio. This is being done largely to ensure legal concerns
associated with copyright issues of movies often called Hollywood content.
DVD playback could be done in software but would require most of the
resources of a 200MHZ Pentium to achieve.
- by YE 98 10-15 Million DVDs will be shipped
Miscellaneous other technical ramblings
- Western digital have come up with a new way to do CDROMS. The
CDROM is hung off the hard drive rather than the EIDE bus. They are called
SDX and use a 10 pin connection to the hard disk. The hard disk in
turn caches the commonly used parts of the CDROM for a large performance
boost. Apparently speeds up to 40x simulated are realized.
- advances in hard drives continue. Quantum have come up
with a new technology called Near field recording and achieves densities
of 12 GB per square inch Vs.. 1.2GB per square inch today Apparently
a 20GB single platter disk is possible and will be available 1Q98.
For more information check out the Western Digital SDX Page
Hope you enjoyed my summary.
Next years WINHEC will be March 9-11th in San Jose.
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