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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/
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.
People who have used SPDIF fiber optic audio will all agree that analog audio is obsolete.
Yeah, that's nice and all, but not everything that uses SPDIF has TOSLink fiber ports. Many SPDIF devices use coaxile RCA connectors. And any one who has any serious exposure to coaxile SPDIF will tell you that in many cases you would actually be better off with analog audio ports! Because SPDIF doesn't have ANY ERROR CORRECTION, so the moment there is a glitch in the digital up-link the whole thing goes out of sync until you reset both ends of the link! This problem happens often with any thing but the shortest coaxile SPDIF cables, but is rare when using TOSLink fiber due to better signal quality of optical.
SPDIF it self is a very old technology and needs to be replaced with something better...
Ever had a cellphone near analog speaker wire? That popping and clicking is a clear sign that the thin copper audio wire has no place in an era of cellphones.
First of all, I have to assume you meant LINE LEVEL analog lines and NOT SPEAKER LEVEL! There is NO WAY a cell phone could cause problems with the signal going from an amp to a speaker over copper wire. You are talking about a high power low freq signal from the amp vs. a very low power high freq (microwave RF) signal from the cell phone. If you hear popping from your speakers when you use a cell phone then most likely you have a shitty pre-amp that either has no/bad sheilding or a grounding issue. Then there is the fact that ALL speakers are connect by copper wires! Even if you have a speaker with a built in amp and you feed SPDIF direct to the back of the speaker cab, internal the speaker is analog and is connect to it's built in amp with copper wires. There is no such thing as a purely digital audio system, the speakers are always analog.
Now, assuming we are talking line level signals, I have never had this problem, nor do I know of ANY ONE else who has described this problem before.
Perhaps you had a bad cell phone that was transmitting into harmonics well outside it's normal RF range? Or perhaps the device it self was picking up the signal due to some poorly design internal digital audio circuit? Because I can tell you that RF passing through copper wire will almost never bleed into an anolog audio signal in any perceptable way. You are talking about microwave RF signals, they should have almost NO effect on audio signals due to the massive difference in freq range we are talking about.
Plenty of people have brought their cell phones into my little semi-pro recording studio, which is heavily analog, and we have NEVER heard noise like what you are talking about. And as much as you seem to think analog audio over copper wire is obsolete, just keep this in mind: There is NO such thing as a digital microphone. All recordings are made using analog microphones that have to send a VERY low voltage over a VERY long distance "obsolete" copper cable to a mixing board. Even if the mixing board and all other processes are purely digital beyond that, you still have an analog loop at the front end of ALL audio sources and this will not change ANY TIME SOON.
You seem to be one of these people who has the mind set that any thing that is not "purely digital" is obsolete. People like you self fail to realize that ALL eletronics are ANALOG. Digital circuits are still based on analog transistors, this is also not going to change any time soon! All the same things that can cause noise in the analog audio/video world can cause noise in the digital audio/video world.
Probably payback for BTX, which Intel designed requiring memory to be too far away from CPU for AMD's (on board IOMMU) requirements.
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.
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