Tech Preview 2012: The PC's Bright Future

Posted 12/12/2011 at 2:31pm | by The Maximum PC Staff and Loyd Case

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Motherboards

Expect Big Changes in the Year Ahead

We wind down 2011 with the curtain falling on Intel’s X58 chipset and LGA1366 socket. Many folks will lament the end of LGA1366, but the socket is now three years old. That’s pretty good for Intel, which seems to measure its socket lifetimes in dog-to-human ratios. So, a 3-year-old socket for Intel is like a 9-year-old socket for AMD.

Replacing LGA1366 is Intel’s new LGA2011 socket and the accompanying X79 chipset. A beast of a socket, LGA2011 supports enough pin-outs for four channels of RAM as well as the PCIe 3.0 connections that are now in the CPU core (see our write‑up on Sandy Bridge-E for the full skinny on PCIe 3.0). Storage fiends are sure to be disappointed with X79 motherboards. The X79 chipset was originally to ship with a bountiful 10 SATA 6Gb/s connections—yes, 10!—but in the end, all we get is the same peripheral controller hub layout as the P67 and Z68—two SATA 6Gb/s ports plus four SATA 3Gb/s ports. Board vendors are making up for the deficit by adding third-party controllers for SATA 6Gb/s drives.

Coming to your enthusiast system soon: Asus's new P9X79 Deluxe board using Intel's X79 chipset.

On the LGA1155 side, the good news is that your motherboard will survive the transition to Intel’s Ivy Bridge chip. The bad news is that you may want to upgrade anyway. That’s because early next year, Intel is expected to introduce its Panther Point chipset. Coupled with a new Ivy Bridge CPU, Panther Point will add an improved peripheral controller hub to improve performance and compatibility with some SSDs.  On the “what took so frakking long?” front, Panther Point will also finally offer native USB 3.0 on some ports. USB 3.0 functionality should also improve when Microsofts Windows 8 ships with a native USB 3.0 stack.

On the AMD side of the aisle, there isn’t much news, except that the company will introduce a new FM2 socket with its Trinity APU. Trinity essentially updates the existing Llano chip with newer cores and an updated GPU. What’s not known is if FM2 CPUs will be compatible with existing FM1 motherboards.

I/O

An Interface War is Brewing

PCIE 4.0

There’s a lesson that everyone in the city of Los Angeles wishes its builders had taken to heart: You don’t wait for congestion before you lay down new infrastructure—you do it before the roads are clogged with cars.

That’s the mantra the PCI-SIG has followed, and the organization isn’t stopping. Before PCIe 3.0 motherboards and cards have even hit the road, the PCI-SIG is working on PCIe 4.0. The problem will be in finding clever ways to scale the popular interface without making it a cost burden. With the move from PCIe 2.0 to PCIe 3.0, the PCI-SIG was able to double the effective speed by reducing overhead in the protocol. So, while PCIe 2.0 transfers data at five gigatransfers per second (GT/s), PCIe 3.0’s transfer rate is 8GT/s, yet it doubled the bandwidth per lane from 500MB/s to 1,000MB/s.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that PCIe 4.0 will see such a dramatic gain. The PCI-SIG hopes to keep the interface on copper instead of moving to optical, which is cost prohibitive today. PCI SIG is considering a pay-as-you-go model, where only high-end applications need implement the highest bandwidth. Don’t fret that your PCIe 3.0 board will be replaced immediately. The PCIe 4.0 spec won’t be finalized until 2012, and we’d expect it to take until 2013 or later for it to materialize on desktops.

The PCI-SIG is also continuing to move forward with a new external cable for PCI-SIG. The new cable could feature from one to four lanes, each capable of transfer from 2.5GT/s to 8GT/s. That would let a cable potentially transfer 4GB/s of data. At that speed, an external PCIe cable could give even Thunderbolt a run for its money.

THUNDERBOLT

And it’s Thunderbolt that the PCI-SIG and others have their eyes on, too, as that spec continues to ease forward. Earlier this year at Computex, it was thought that the new X79 chipset would include native Thunderbolt support but it won’t (although board vendors are free to add it). Intel, meanwhile, plans on releasing two new T-bolt controllers next year: Eagle Ridge and Light Ridge. The company will also release a controller called Port Ridge that will likely go into devices at the end of a Thunderbolt chain.

We’re not sure if Thunderbolt is headed for victory or failure, but we do know that several motherboard vendors intend to integrate Thunderbolt controllers into next year’s crop of boards as an extra feature.

USB 3.0

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) is also active. The organization hasn’t laid out any concrete plans to compete with Thunderbolt and it doesn’t like to spar verbally with competing standards, but officials assure us that USB 3.0 and its future iterations can take on any competing standard in performance, and its ubiquity gives it the power to truly dominate.

That ubiquity could become even greater if the organization is successful at convincing notebook makers and other electronic device manufactures to support a universal, USB-based charging system. The idea is to use standard power bricks and Micro USB plugs to charge everything from digital cameras to external hard drives, laptops, and monitors.

Consumers could then recycle power bricks instead of throwing them into the landfill. The USB-IF says it can deliver from 2.5 watts to charge a phone up to 100 watts to power a monitor or laptop. The topology would allow you to power your laptop or phone from a monitor.

In performance, USB officials say the spec has plenty of speed left. Today’s USB 3.0 operates at 5Gb/s and the protocol can easily surpass 25Gb/s. Again, we don’t know who will win this battle, but we know that the PCI-SIG and USB-IF don’t intend to simply roll over and let Thunderbolt take over.

Storage

HDDs Speed Up, SSDs Hit Ceilings

HARD DRIVES

With solid-state drives already pushing the limits of 6Gb/s SATA, and the price per gigabyte of SSDs dropping rapidly, how will mechanical drive vendors make traditional storage more appealing—aside from its still-killer price/capacity ratio? According to Seagate’s Joni Clark, we can expect to see more hybrid drives toward the end of 2011 and into 2012, starting with Seagate’s second-gen Momentus XT, with a 750GB capacity and 8GB of NAND cache. DIY hybrids, like the ones offered by Intel and OCZ, will continue as well, while other disk makers could introduce on-disk hybrids to compete with Seagate’s.

On the desktop side, expect 1TB/platter drives to become standard in 2012, enabling one-platter 1TB drives and four-platter 4TB drives early in 2012, with a few 5TB drives here and there. From there, drive sizes will stay the same for a while until the tech for higher areal density improves and drive makers focus on speed. Seagate already announced that it's dropping 5,400rpm and “green” drives from its lineup and focusing exclusively on 7,200rpm drives. Our sources indicate that desktop hybrid drives—perhaps 1TB drives with 16GB of NAND for caching—could arrive in 2012, as well.

SSDS

It took years to hit the 3Gb/s SATA throughput limit, but SSDs are already close to saturating the 6Gb/s spec, which has barely reached mainstream adoption. So where do they go from here? Expect drives with second-gen SandForce controllers to continue shipping through 2012, joined by other 6Gb/s controllers. Samsung has already launched its 6Gb/s controller, and Indilinx (bought by OCZ in 2011) has released the Everest 6Gb/s SATA controller, which for now is mostly powering Ultrabook-style devices. Look for SSD vendors and controller companies to continue to refine 6Gb/s performance, especially in metrics like random reads and writes and sustained writes.

Speaking of Ultrabooks: Intel’s vision for ultraportable computing requires SSDs, and lots of ‘em, in new form factors. mSATA and the just-announced SATA µSSDs, as well as 7mm 2.5-inch drives, will become common, if not as common as 9.5mm 2.5-inch drives.

PCIe SSDs, like OCZ’s RevoDrive series, will continue to be a small part of the market, and will offer one way to bypass the 6Gb/s SATA bandwidth limit, but will eventually be supplanted by SATA Express.

SATA Express and SATA µSSD

In August 2011, the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced two new SATA specifications for tablet devices and desktops, respectively. SATA µSSD provides a connectorless SATA specification for tablets and ultraportables. Rather than use the familiar SATA connectors, a SATA µSSD is soldered directly to the motherboard and uses a ball‑grid array package to pass SATA commands to the SSD. This connectorless spec will allow smaller, faster SSDs to be used in tinier devices.

Concept drawings for SATA Express suggest that some connectors could accept either PCIe or SATA.

SATA Express, on the other hand, is designed to overcome the bandwidth limitations of 6Gb/s SATA without replacing 6Gb/s SATA with another spec. SATA Express uses the PCIe interface but with SATA software commands. The specification is still being worked on, but concepts we’ve seen show both PCIe/SATA combo connectors and dedicated SATA connectors that use the PCIe form factor and pin-outs. SATA Express will allow 8Gb/s and 16GB/s connections.

Both SATA Express and SATA µSSD are scheduled to appear in the second half of 2012, but since neither specification is due to be finished until the end of 2011, there’s a chance neither will appear in 2012 at all.