Slashdot Mirror
AMD Ships First DTX Form Factor Prototypes
MojoKid writes "When AMD first revealed their plans for the DTX open industry standard, the intent of that early briefing was to explain
AMD's vision for interoperable small form factor systems. Today AMD
provided more details and a specific design example of the DTX small form-factor standard. This HotHardware article showcases a prototype system built on a low power AMD Athlon 64 BE-2350 processor and 690G chipset motherboard with integrated graphics. Maybe the HTPC just took a small step toward platform standardization?"
Here are some good shots of the chassis layout, from the article: http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_DTX_Sneak_Peek/?page=3/
I'm of the opinion that they should go taller and slimmer. I like the size/distribution of the Shuttle SFF. This has a very large footprint for not having a place for a expansion slot graphics solution.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
In the pictures it's 30.5 * 24.4 cm, that doesn't seem that small. I had a mini-itx board that was 17*17 cm. Didn't have as many expansion slots though.
Dual core and on video with dvi as well as a pci-e slot and a pci slot. It should also have on board firewire and maybe 4 ram slots. Also latter on pci-e x16 2.0 and pci-e x4 2.0 should replace the pci-e x16 and pci slot.
I doubt that this will do anything other than fragment the situation.
BTX has been an utter failure, not because there was anything wrong with it, but that there was nothing compelling enough to shift people from ATX.
Personally I'm a *big* fan of the improvements that ATX gave us over AT - Mostly that I'm no longer likely to electrocute myself by touching the live power switch in AT machines. Ouch.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When are we going to see motherboards which have NO serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse ports, floppy ports, IDE ports, analog audio output ports, analog video output ports, and all of that other legacy crutf?
All we need is SATA, USB2/Firewire, digital video, and fiber-optic audio. Such a board would be cheaper, faster, smaller, less power hungry, and less complex than today's boards. Once widely adopted, it would make troubleshooting much easier and make components less expensive to produce with better signals.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Intel already has a motherboard specification this size; it's called FlexATX.
I don't see how a 229x191mm board is any different to the new 224x200mm board apart from the fact that it will fit in those stupidly sized ITX cases (where a FlexATX board would be about 3mm too wide).
Isn't the solution to kick all these dumbfuck Chinese manufacturers of ITX cases into supporting just a little MORE than ITX?
Wasn't FlexATX open in the first place, what makes DTX "open"?
I call redundant whoring by AMD trying to get their oar in over VIA and tap their case market.
Nice artcile, too bad that hothardware web site is so poorly designed! They need to tone down all the damn popover and mouse over ads! Makes any thing of value they would have had almost impossible to bear... I just cannot read the article with all this other crap all over the screen.
For those who would like to actualy get some info about DTX and not get drowned in a sea of annoying ads, check out:
The actual DTX standard site
There is a great opportunity to create a motherboard that focussses on being very small but powerful. Think physically tiny but pro-gaming-capable desktop, perhaps the size of a book or a small shoebox. But AMD have just created another stupid physically large and midrange performer that does not differentiate itself from any other existing formats in any useful way.
This is just AMD trying to get its label out there by following the herd rather than creating anything innovative or geneuinely useful.
I remember reading here about the new BTX for factor that was going to change everything and make our ATX cases outdated. Several years later, when I built my newest system, I saw no mention of BTX in the boards or cases that I considered, and eventually built a typical ATX based system. I never even caught mention of CTX. I guess that someone defined it at some point, but that hardly matters. Same here. So AMD has pronounced that they have defined DTX. So what? There are plenty of strange small formats for special systems, and this DTX format is unlikely to affect me or most other users unless it becomes widely used. I wait for that, but will not hold my breath. And I will not get excited later in the week when someone else announces ETX either.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yep, we need ethernet. Got to be able to run stuff over the network. Especially for a HTPC.
The DTX form factor might take hold. AMD was more careful than prior attempts and just made the spec be a regular ATX card size quartered. This means that the existing ATX manufacturers don't have to do much retooling to create DTX boards. They just use the same pipeline to put four DTX layouts on their existing ATX boards and then dice them up at the end. They also made it so DTX boards will fit in ATX cases.
Not bloody likely until they get either RadeonHD or ATI fglrx to support whay they already have in the market.
Hint, hint: The 690G on-board HTPC chipset with HDMI, component-out...
If you take the screen, battery, keyboard out of my Thinkpad what's left is 9"x7"x0.5". That's 229mm x175mm x13mm. That's just my rough estimate. If you took that form factor and put it in a case that you could open up w/o wrecking it you would have a great standard small formal machine. Mine has 2-USB, 1 S-video, 1-SVGA, 1-LPT, 2-PCCard, 1-DVD, 1-speaker out, 1-mic in, 1-Docking port.
Seems to me that a no screen, no battery, no keyboard 'laptop' form factor in a case you can open combined with a planar you can add things to using the mini-PCI bus or just coupling it through a docking base would be the solution. In fact you could use a dumb coupling through the docking port via a flat cable and build all the expansion electronics and devices into the back of an outboard monitor. Basically you take the PC in the montor design and break it in two so that the basic PC is separate from the expansion bay in the monitor. Keyboard and mouse through a USB port or Bluetooth. With some work you could get the PC to be barely larger than it's own AC power adapter, sans drives.
The specification is for board layout and standard port placement, case layout, etc. Manufacturers can put whatever they want on the boards, sheesh. It's got a standardized backplane, just stick a new IO shield in your standard DTX case for one that's got optical outs and TV tuner built in and you're all set. The real motivation's simply manufacturing: they can make exactly four of these boards on a standard manufacturing panel: less waste, less price. Sam
Since these new MBs will have more power concentrated in a smaller area, I am wondering if this will contribute to cooling problems. Making the MB longer, and narrower should help with the radiative aspect of cooling. It might also help with making a more laminer flow, thus cooling everything better.
Definitely making the MB smaller will make it harder for those large quiet cooling fans to find space to co-exist. The shuttle systems do it right with making the CPU fan hanging out of the back of the case.
..........FULL STOP.
BTX wasn't a total failure. A lot of the BTX improvements - like what direction air flows through your case - were silently integrated into existing "ATX" machines.
DATABASE WOW WOW
...would be somthing that will fit in a VESA mount chasis and do full hardware decoding of H.264 and AVC1 from any container file.
Given that a lot of people would want to run somthing like LinuxMCE, having to decode 1080i using a foss decoder would require somthing in the region of an Athalon X2 5000+, which makes housing it in a tiny box and ventilating it properly somwhat troublesome.
In honesty, I'd rather not run an HTPC at all. XBMC was doing it all for me, right up until I got a HD screen and wanted to playback H.264/AVC1. Hopefully the exploit work on the 360 will continue at a rapid pace and we'll see XBMC360 sometime soon, then I can stop all this faffing around finding gfx cards that vsync properly, codecs that playback everything I want to watch without dropping frames and trying to find a frontend for it all that's usable without a kb/m. Would be nice to have somthing that "Just works" again.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
ack of a good suround sound card(Realtek doesn't cut it),
HUH? who in their right mind would want a surround sound card?
A good HTPC has a Toslink or other digital audio out and use real hardware for surround sound.
In fact every high end HTPC I have ever seen uses digital audio only into the Surround sound processor/amplifier.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The slides on the first page of the article clearly state "Target 65W/45W CPUs". If you need a big honking cooling fan you're looking at the wrong form factor.
The problem is, the most popular manufacturer, Creative, only emits either stereo PCM or pre-compressed surround on the optical out.
It's enough when playing DVD and similar format with precompressed streams.
It's not enough for using other entertainment that produce livre surround sound in real-time.
You either have to use analog transmission out of the PC, or switch to some other less popular manufacturer that has on-the-fly DTS or Dolby Digital live encoding (Auzentech for exemple).
Because people keep buying cheap Creative cards for HTPC, manufacturer are starting to include multi-channel analog inputs. (Which isn't the most brilliant idea given the fact that a HTPC is electrically noisy and analog output is not guaranteed to be noise-less).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Don't worry. No reason to worry as this standard won't go anywhere - in fact it is set to be less popular than BTX. Reason being AMD is only a few months away from Chapter 11 or outright sale to a new set of owners - look out for Korean dramurai to make an offer soon. Although why anyone would buy AMD remains a mystery considering that they have _never_ made a profit.
I like the mini mac. The issue is that it doesn't support my dual monitors. It does support my SCSI DLT7000 and all the other SCSI peripherals I have which include optical discs. Sure I can transfer to some other media but these MO discs are actually a rather good archival media. It doesn't support my SCSI Exabyte tapes and I happen to have a lot of them.
One thing I will point out is a few months ago a friend who dinigrates Linux and Unix came over with his old 8mmm Exabyte tape which he recorded on a Sun. It contained some software he wrote a little over a decade ago. He runs XP of course.
I was able to read it on my exabyte under Linux and burn a CD for him and within 1/2 an hour he was off with a big smile on his face.
On that MiniMac I think we were screwed before we started.
Backward compatibility and expandability are very important. My Keyboard is even an issue. Its an IBM PC 101 and if the computer doesn't support this keyboard then I won't buy the computer.
Haha!
If you want digital I/O, the cheapest piece of crap built-in sound card will do just as well as anything else you can buy... It's digital, the AC3/DTS/LPCM sound is transferred completely unchanged, no matter what.
The DTX prototype has room for two half-height cards. Hauppauge PVR-150 or similar should be perfect for TV capture. I don't know about video cards, but I'm willing to bet there's one or two good half-height options out there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's called mini-ITX.
VIA makes mini-ITX boards, Intel makes mini-ITX boards and... wait for it.... AMD makes mini-ITX boards.
Standards are good, but too many of them is like not having any.
The original Mac mini was basically a repackaged iBook, and the current one is basically a Macbook.
The thing is, laptops have even more upgrade and repair compatibility problems than SFF PCs, and laptops (and the Mac mini) make a lot more compromises on power than a SFF PC really needs to.
USB-PS/2 adapter and PS/2-AT adapter and I can still use my favorite AT keyboard on my Mac mini until it wears out.
/dev/rmt0 or equivalent. Even on the server version.
The biggest problem with the Mac mini hardware-wise is the lack of a video card slot and the over-aggressive styling that required them to compromise on power for the sake of cooling.
For SCSI, there's things like this. Unfortunately you'd still need to boot to something other than OS X because Apple doesn't provide a UNIX tape device... there's no
So I stick with Mac on the desktop and FreeBSD in the server.