David Fearon pulls apart the tiny notebook, and asks why Intel and Microsoft can't match the excitement.
One of the clichés I hate the most is the one you’ll find when you open a guidebook on any given city. “Ouagadougo,” the opening line will invariably say, “is a city of contrasts”. How ironic, then, that this month the glittering city that is computing technology has been one of contrasts.
It started with a briefing in Munich, which may well be a city of contrasts, but it’s hard to tell when you don’t get any further than the convention centre at the airport. Despite the less-than-inspiring surroundings, I was given a fascinating briefing by one of Intel’s R&D people on the breakthroughs involved in producing 45nm transistors (see p54). It’s impressive stuff, and a fringe benefit of the briefing was picking up a nice little factoid to add to my collection. (I have lots of them: for instance, did you know that the power consumption of a 66MHz 486DX2 was a mere 6W, and that it didn’t even need a heatsink?) The one I picked up from this briefing concerned something called a dielectric. Core 2 processors use MOSFET transistors that have three terminals called the gate, the drain and the source. The dielectric layer separates the gate from the other two terminals. In a 45nm transistor (factoid alert!), that layer is manufactured to a thickness of five atomic layers. Five. Atomic. Layers. Put another way, that’s only five times thicker than the thinnest thing it’s possible to make in this universe.
So here’s the contrast. Once we’d finished testing Asus’ Eee PC, I found myself with a screwdriver in my hand and 15 minutes to spare. Once those 15 minutes were up the Eee was in pieces on my desk, although I’ve still no idea who did it. Since it was all in bits, though, I had a look around before sending it off to be mended. Its insides are a model of prosaic engineering, designed to do the job at absolute minimum cost. Most notebooks, for instance, have a magnesium heat-piping system attached to the CPU. In the Eee PC, the heatsink for the processor and chipset is simply a flat sheet of tinny-looking metal sandwiched between the mainboard and keyboard. With its ULV Celeron M processor consuming little more at full pelt than that 486DX2, this is perfectly sufficient. There are no overly clever or tricksy innovations – the thing is just a simple, single-board computer, with its solid-state storage soldered directly to the board and only the screen and battery demanding any sort of complexity as fr as the mechanical design is concerned.
Back to the scene of the Intel briefing and the glamorous convention centre at Munich airport. The conversation had moved to SSE4, which you’ll no doubt recall is the extension to the last extension of the previously twice-extended instruction extensions. Intel, for reasons we’ll get to in a minute, is obsessed with telling journalists how great SSE4 is for encoding video. And indeed it is: one of the new instructions does something called the sum of absolute differences, a necessary step in video motion prediction. The sum of absolute differences operation, written in standard C, needs a few dozen lines of code, but SSE4 condenses it into a single instruction. This will be great for those ravening hordes of average users who sit around encoding video all day, but for the rest of us it isn’t quite such hot stuff.
Fixating on the tremendous benefits of an odd new feature that doesn’t seem very useful tends to be a sign that a manufacturer hasn’t got much else up its sleeve for a new product. When you asked Microsoft reps what else Vista’s interface had apart from Flip 3D, for example, they’d look at you brightly as if to thank you for the question they had desperately been hoping someone would ask. Then they’d expertly waft the mouse pointer over the taskbar. “Look!” they’d shout as a useless thumbnail of an Excel spreadsheet popped up, “You get a little preview!”
Intel’s version of this was far more endearing. When asked what SSE4 is good for besides video-motion prediction, an engineer replied – and I swear I’m not making this up – “Uh, there’s video encoding, specialised maths and, ah, I can’t remember the third one”. That’s 47 new instructions to cater for two-and-a-half applications, then. I think SSE may finally have run its course.
So the 45nm CPU employs highly specialised cutting-edge engineering to accommodate a narrow band of high-performance computing tasks. Response to this mind-bending technology has been lukewarm. The Eee PC uses off-the-shelf parts engineered into a cheap, cute package that does 95% of what 95% of people do 95% of the time. The result is a device that’s easily the most talked-about new product to come into PC Pro’s office since the summer, and a queue of people at my desk asking if I’ve finished with it yet and can they please have a go? I still haven’t seen the contrasts of Munich, but you don’t get much more of a technology contrast than that.