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• The Return of Lucid Last IDF, Lucid made a splash with a sophisticated, smart PCI Express bridge chip with an embedded RISC processor, designed specifically to enable multi-GPU scalable graphics across disparate GPUs. The message was: mix and match GPUs of differing performance levels and even different manufacturers. Now Lucid is back, announcing its first design win, with MSI’s “Big Bang” P55-based motherboard. The new board has one of Lucid’s 200-series chips on board. We saw demos of Nvidia and ATI GPUs paired up and scaling graphics performance. One demo, behind closed doors, even showed a GeForce GTX 260 and ATI Radeon HD 4890 not only coexisting on the same Windows 7 system, but actually working together to scale graphics performance beyond what’s capable with a single graphics card. If we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes, we wouldn’t have believed it. While the technology is very cool, we are a little concerned that the market might be limited. The number of users who actually want to run multiple GPUs is fairly small as it is. Still, from the user perspective, if you have one of MSI’s Big Bang motherboards, when a new GPU comes out, you just add it to your system rather than throw away the old card. You’ll get some benefit by having both available. USB 3.0 Nears Reality Already, the first USB 3.0 peripheral has been shown, a high resolution camera from Point Grey. The USB 3.0 Implementer’s Forum was also showing hard drives and optical drives connected via a SATA-to-USB 3.0 reference board developed by Fujitsu. Also on display was an Asus-branded USB 3.0 interface card. With speeds approaching hard drive interface throughput, USB is set to move to a new level, moving large amounts of data at speeds substantially faster than today’s pokey 480 megabits per second. Infrastructure Makes the Tech World Go Around As we noted, new CPUs are great, but you can’t make effective use of them unless the underlying support structures evolve along with the CPU. As we move forward with faster, more capable processors and graphics chips, it’s only natural that interfaces like USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s help the underlying platform evolve. What will be interesting to watch is how Intel evolves the platform underneath Atom. Will Atom-based netbooks just disappear, replaced by more capable ultra-low voltage CPUs? Maybe, but only if those new systems cost as little as netbooks. Companies like Via and AMD are waiting to step into any low-cost gap left by Intel if they should overlook the netbook market. But that’s unlikely, as Atom-based netbooks have been something of a savior to the PC industry in 2009. On the display side, DisplayPort looks to be the biggest thing since DVI, and will usher in a new generation of multi-display technology, thinner displays, and higher resolution graphics. Even technologies that are built into the CPU itself, like Turbo Boost, will help improve performance, which in turn increases the perceived value of the new generation of PCs. We’ll see if Intel and the industry can effectively communicate those improvements.

• Intel Developer Forum, Day 2: 6 Gb/s, USB 3.0, And Lucid

  There’s always a lot of focus at IDF on Intel’s processor roadmap. What’s the next CPU? How is Moore’s Law progressing? What’s the next tick or tock in Intel’s clockwork process for advancing design and manufacturing? Having a fast CPU is great, but you need an underlying support structure to get the most out of that processor. Whether it’s a fast GPU, like ATI’s spiffy new Radeon HD 5870, the imminent release of SATA 6 Gb/s hard drives (and the motherboards to support them), or the penetration of DisplayPort into the mainstream, supporting technologies are the underlying infrastructure that actually enables a PC to be useful. We’ll also take a quick look at Moorestown, Intel’s next-generation Atom processor. Surprisingly, Moorestown will bear little resemblance to the existing Atom platform (code-named Menlow), other than being an x86 CPU. But first, let’s look at DisplayPort. DisplayPort DisplayPort will eventually be the replacement for DVI and, we can fervently hope, the ever-present analog VGA connector. One of the more intriguing features of DisplayPort is that clocking is embedded in the data signal. What does this mean? This use of an embedded timing source is one of the key hardware drivers behind AMD’s Eyefinity technology. Right now, a dual-display DVI card has a separate timing signal per DVI port, so you can connect to two displays. The recently-shipping AMD Radeon HD 5870 can connect up to three displays on any combination of the included DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI connectors.  However, the Radeon HD 5870 has only two built-in display timing sources. If you want to connect three DVI displays, you actually need to get what’s known as an active DVI-to-DisplayPort adapter. On the other hand, if one of your displays has a DisplayPort connector, it can take advantage of the 5870's additional DisplayPort pipelines without the necessity for a third timing source. At some point, AMD will be shipping a card with six DisplayPort outputs capable of utilizing all six of the Cypress chip's pipelines, which is how they can connect as many displays. DisplayPort also has the bandwidth to handle very high resolutions with a single DisplayPort link. Moreover, DisplayPort will be embedded into notebook panels, which will finally replace the aging LVDS standard. The result will be higher refresh rates and higher resolutions on the road. DisplayPort even has capability for 3D displays by allowing for left/right eye channel implementations. DisplayPort looks to be the most important connectivity standard for the PC since the emergence of DVI. Its impact may, in the long run, be bigger than HDMI (at least on the desktop; HDMI is more of a consumer electronic interface), though it won’t supplant HDMI. More likely is that the VGA and, eventually, the DVI port, will finally fade away. SATA 6 Gb/s So far, all the demos we’ve seen of the latest update to the Serial ATA standard, SATA 6 Gb/s, have been with rotating media. That’s right--we’ll soon see several families of good old hard drives running on the latest SATA standard. Both Asus and Gigabyte are now shipping motherboards with SATA 6 Gb/s controllers built onto the main board, and these were on display at the show as well. Why rotating media? As it turns out, hard drive densities are going up at a rapid rate and cache sizes are increasing. Seagate, for one, foresees a time when data streaming off the outer tracks of a high capacity hard drive can actually saturate a 3gbps interface. Of course, RAID striping and fast SSDs will also likely saturate the bus. Already, Seagate has announced a premium, 2TB drive with 64MB of cache, with a SATA 6gbps interface built in. That interface is backward compatible to SATA 3gbps and SATA 1.5gbps.

• The deep dive session on Moorestown, Intel’s update to the wildly successful Atom processor, was heavily attended. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Moorestown is how far it will distance itself from the PC. Moorestown's power consumption at standby will be reduced by up to 50x. Moorestown will be the core of a new line of SoCs (systems-on-chip) from Intel. So, unlike the current Atom, we may see many different instantiations of Moorestown products, aimed at highly segmented markets. The Moorestown platform will mainly consist of two parts: Lincroft (the SoC) at 45nm and Briertown. Lincroft will have the CPU, MIPI display interface, LP (low power) DDR memory controller, plus 2D/3D graphics and memory controller. Briertown is the second chip which has SDIO, audio engine, modem for 3G, and so on. Lincroft brings in the display and memory controller into the CPU die, plus graphics and video decode capabilities. The new CPU will have Hyper-Threading and “burst mode,” similar to Turbo Boost on Intel’s desktop and laptop CPUs. Power reduction is partly enabled by moving to the type of I/O infrastructure used in handheld and mobile devices, including SDIO, MIPI (for displays), and low power DDR memory. Also, the graphics and video decoders can run independently of the CPU at lower power. So graphics, video decode, and audio are fixed-function coprocessors. What’s being left out of Moorestown are PC interfaces. For example, MIPI is replacing LVDS as the display interface. PCI Express is out entirely. USB will be present, but not SATA I/O. If Intel’s goal is to segment Atom based netbooks so that they’re more limited than PCs, then Moorestown will accomplish this. On the other hand, it will be much more power efficient than a PC-like device, while maintaining Atom-like levels of performance. Turbo Boost We’ve talked about Turbo Boost in the past. Turbo Boost is a feature of Intel’s Nehalem CPU that allows the frequency of utilized cores to ramp up to higher clock speeds in order to bolster the performance of a lightly-threaded app. The limiting factor is TDP--thermal design power. As long as the overall CPU remains within the thermal budget, the core (or cores) can be pushed harder than the default frequency to get a bit more performance. With Intel’s upcoming Arrandale and Clarkdale 32nm dual-core CPUs (which support four threads via Hyper-Threading), Turbo Boost also affects the on-die integrated graphics core. Graphics Turbo will be introduced with Intel’s Arrandale 32nm mobile CPU. Intel is building in a “graphics turbo manager” that manages the power budget for the integrated graphics core. There will be a Turbo Boost driver that handles Turbo Boost across the two CPU cores and the graphics core. In the case of running a graphics-intensive application that’s not hitting the CPU very hard, then the GPU clock frequency scales up, just as it would on a CPU core affected by Turbo Boost. Currently, the Arrandale Turbo Boost driver will be a Windows 7 component, and only support the integrated graphics core. Should the laptop instead include a discrete graphics chip, graphics turbo doesn’t affect its performance. However, Turbo Boost still has some impact on the graphics chip, since the processor has PCI Express and memory controllers on board. The upshot of all this, from the point of view of companies building laptops, is that the design of the thermal solutions to keep notebooks cool are more critical than ever. Turbo Boost will keep the system running closer to the maximum thermal envelope. So, it’s important that Arrandale laptops have proper cooling solutions. Intel has data that shows the skin of the laptop (palm rests, the underside of the case) often become hotter than the actual CPU, which affects its overall performance envelope. A poorly designed cooling solution will mean the system won’t run at its maximum possible performance under Turbo Boost.