Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AMD Ships First DTX Form Factor Prototypes

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the size-matters dept.

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?"

5 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Platform standardization? - Not likely. by bitkari · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. still has legacy components by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:still has legacy components by mccalli · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When are we going to see motherboards which have NO serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse ports, floppy ports, IDE ports....

      Yep, nodding along...

      .... analog audio output ports....

      Awake now. Analogue audio output ports are far from legacy - almost every non-computer speaker system on earth uses analogue. Headphones too. I can agree with your other points*, but it's far too soon to get rid of analogue audio.

      Cheers,
      Ian


      (*well I would do - I'm on a Mac here which has none of those anyway)

    2. Re:still has legacy components by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, and anyone who has had a 100 foot screen installed in their private theater room would agree that LCD panel televisions are obsolete.

      Except, you know, that they're not, because 99.999% of the market doesn't want to pay for that.

      Copper cabling is perfectly adequate to carrying a digital audio signal with adequate forward error correction; it's adequate for carrying a digital video signal, for goodness sakes. That'll eliminate all your pops and clicks right there. It can make sharper turns than fiber, too.

      In fact, I fail to see the point of fiber other than that TOSLINK got established early on for audio already. Optical audio is pretty much one of those "legacy" connections you're so keen to get rid of, and yet one that most people don't have equipment for. The "future" (whether it's a good idea or not) is probably a copper HDMI line running to a receiver, carrying both the audio and the video. Heck, HDMI will carry more, completely uncompressed audio channels than TOSLINK can, at a higher bit depth and sample rate.

  3. Use laptops as a starting point by gelfling · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.