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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?"
I don't think that these are really meant to be lain pizza box style on a desk. I had a couple of old Alphas which were similarly shaped, and similarly quite tiny. If you didn't stand them up on their side they would overheat in about 15 minutes, if you stood them on their sides, the lasted about an hour in a small poorly ventilated room.
Small form factor computing, requires a large amount of cooling, the most efficient way is almost invariably to just allow for convection to do most of the work.
The old school desktops of the 80s and early 90s could get away with being horizontal, because they had large metal cases with plenty of air inside. Lacking at least the volume of air, these wouldn't last very long at all without a large airflow.
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.
Buy what you want and be happy. I, on the other hand, routinely build systems with 2-3 PCI cards. If you are doing video editing, or PC based DVR, PCI capture cards are the way to go. That is why we have more than one motherboard standard. You get what you want, and I get what I want. The point is that what does this new standard offern the ATX mATX and miniATX do not? Damn little from what I can see.
Common mode noise suppression in digital or analog line level signal wiring can be very important. Naturally, none of the current copper standards except ethernet and Midi provide ground isolation. USB and Firewire can be isolated at the endpoints but that is rare except in medical or industrial equipment. Professional quality audio equipment relies on balanced wiring of course which largely although not completely mitigates the problem as far as noise is concerned.
Digital signals of course enjoy huge amounts of noise rejection because of their very nature but physical damage from ground loops is still possible. RS-232 serial and VGA connections seem to be particularly prone to problems of this type but so far their replacements seem to have learned a lesson about cable shield and signal ground connections.
Speaker cable runs do not normally need to be balanced or shielded because proper output amplifier design will reject conducted or radiated RF interference.
I agree however that in a majority of installations copper cabling (and analog) is completely adequate.
Xbox 360 has supported h.264 4.1 High Profile playback from disc since May:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2007/0408-im.htm
http://www.redkawa.com/blog/post.php?t=892