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Smart Monitoring PC Hardware Launched By NVIDIA
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA has just introduced a new open-industry standard for real-time monitoring and control of PC power supplies, chassis, and water cooling systems. Dubbed ESA, which stands for Enthusiast System Architecture, the company hopes the standard will be adopted across the industry. A new wave of ESA compliant hardware that can be monitored and controlled via a standard interface could ensue, like smart health-monitoring power supplies and other components, that would increase system stability and reliability. 'The ESA standard is built around the USB HID (Human Interface Device) specification and has been submitted to the USB-if HID subcommittee for discussion and approval. ESA is essentially a hardware and software interface that takes data collected by analog sensors and converts it to digital information that can accessed via software. Below are a handful of slides taken from an NVIDIA-produced presentation on ESA.'"
Anyone wanna join my club; ATS*?
* ATS: Ambiguous Three-letter-acronyms Suck
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Are you sure MojoKid wrote that? If so, he forgot to add the presentation slides to his slashdot submission.
I hope the sensors work better than the ones in my HP printers. While it is may be interesting all the things they can detect, jam in tray 3, under fuser, etc. They really annoy the hell out of the users.
Well, I would ramble on more about voltage flux warnings etc, but I have to run and change my print toner... I have less than 1000 pages left!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Isn't this what SMBUS / I2C is for?
In NVIDIA's new open-industry standard, you can monitor components inside your computer.
In soviet Russia, components inside your computer monitor YOU!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Wasn't this already accomplished w/ IPMI? At least in more expensive server hardware? What am I missing?
.nosig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthusiast_System_Architecture
I currently have to use several programs and a manual fan controller to for half the capability this system offers. To read temps I have to use different programs for motherboard, case, and GPU, and several fans aren't even controllable, in hardware or software. I have little understanding of the temperature distribution in my case. Getting all this information and more into one integrated hardware/software package is a feature I'd gladly pay more for.
So you'll need a usb port for each item that you want to monitor (PSU, case, cooling,...).
Apart from usb port shortage, this also means more wires inside the case will be restricting the airflow.
Nothing like primary source material, folks.
I really grow tired of Slashdot linking to another site that describes a web page, instead of just linking to the page itself.
Please help metamoderate.
This would be cool if it allowed real time interactivity with the devices rather than just monitoring. Think about it, being able to monitor and control devices remotely... It can be done now, but it's highly device dependant... With an open protocol, lmsensors would become much easier to install...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Calling it "Enthusiast" implies that it isn't for serious use, just hobbyists. I assume they'll want to market this feature to businesses and government buyers eventually. They should've picked a more generic name.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
All I can say is getting LINUX to recognize sensors on various motherboards is a pain in the Ass. Any standardization in this area would be great.
I'd be a lot more interested in anything that didn't involve USB. The linked to article has very little information -- basically arrows pointing from clip art to other clip art -- but the mention of USB is enough to end my interest.
If I wanted to slow my CPU down, and screw around with figuring out what device the hardware was mapped to on this particular boot or port connection, I could buy a USB lab board with analog-to-digital ports on it and hook it up. But given that the point of hardware monitoring is usually to assure reliability and warn of failure, so that you can get better performance, why start out by using USB, which is known for hindering CPU performance and unreliability ?
The difference is that you are logged in on the one with dynamic articles, and not on the static one.
Isn't this what the System Management Bus (SMBus) is for? SMB also has the advantage of not requiring hubs to provide multiple ports since its a true multi-slave two wire bus. (Multi master, too.) Why not just provide a breakout connector on the motherboard to chain more devices? It is 100-400kbps but most of the peripherals don't need to report more than a few bits per second of diagnostic info anyway.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
that will be ignored by all the big OEMs and the general populace.
I don't mean to be a troll, because this is a great sounding idea, but anything I get excited about seems to fizzle long before it even gets a chance to shine.
I know that I'll support this tech, but, getting other people to see the light will be, quite frankly, impossible.
Why I'm sure Vista will be the least of my problems. Those nasty fans, power doohickies, whatchamacallits will wipe me out.
I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Seems to me that this could be better named?
"Enthusiast System Architecture"? When its really
more of an investigative or monitoring addition.
Hence, couldn't this be better named "Enthusiast Investigation System Architecture"?
EISA, for short? Oh, wait...
Why are they trying to put this in the Human Interface Device part of USB when it isn't for a human interface? I think having this functionality would be great, but I'm curious why it's proposed to be in HID.
Why don't they fold more video monitors (and enthusiast monitors like water temperature of water coolers) into SNMP or SNMP2? (Or have they already?) Why do we need another standard?
SNMP is an industry standard, well-supported, flexible with multiple attractive interfaces... pretty sure it can be realtime and has the added bonuses of being networkable by default.
Today's motherboards use I2C/SMBus for sensor access, and it is a total mess. There are hundreds of models of sensor chips that need drivers, and there's no way to know the mapping from sensor numbers to the real world (which fan is "fan 0"?). Then some vendors add microcontrollers that are not on the SMBus and have totally undocumented interfaces (hello AIGuru). I haven't looked at ESA, but hopefully it solves some of these problems.
Again, this isn't a troll...I'm just a realist.
I just hope that the standard requires high-quality components, because I can see this backfiring. I have sold ASUS motherboards since I starting selling computers a few years back, and have had a lot of success (read: very very low RMA rate). Even though I choose to include only high-quality components, I have seen a situation where the motherboard -thought- it was running over temperature and began throttling itself (ASUS P4S800-X I think it was)...and this happened on 90% of those specific boards I sold (10% had celeron chips, which run 10C cooler or so). Mind you, I'd rather have an erroneous overtemp than undertemp. Anyway, ASUS claimed that there is and was nothing wrong with their boards. Meanwhile, many other people suffered the same situation, even after BIOS updates and thermal repasting. Obviously ASUS tried something different (cheaper?) and it sucked.
Having said that, if this is all going to work, please, for the love of our computer gods, oh please, only use high-quality parts so us techs don't have to suffer so much.
Too bad they don't spend more time fixing the drivers for products they've already made.
One thing the PC architecture is seriously lacking on is hardware diagnostics. If you have a machine that's crashing with when booted off of CD in your known-stable OS, it's a pain in the rear to track down what piece of hardware is causing the crashes. The almost complete lack of hardware diagnostics (work on a big iron machine once to see how good life can be with real diagnostic tools) means you're almost always reduced to just pulling out/swapping random bits of hardware until it stops crashing. This is slow and error prone, and doesn't work very well if you have say a faulty power supply that burnt up a cap on the motherboard, giving you two points of failure.
If something could monitor the voltage on every piece of hardware and tell me when something is out of spec, or when you start getting lots of parity errors on a bus, or when your ECC memory detects too many errors (as if you can get ECC memory for PCs anymore). If you spend a lot of time on it, you can get some of that functionality today with tons of proprietary pieces that don't integrate with each other. We have been long overdue for some standardization. I would have even been happy with standardizing SMBus stuff, but a completely new bus works too. I hope enthusiast boards get into races to see who can instrument the most parts of their board, since that's the sort of thing that would let manufacturers discover what is useful and what isn't in the long run and let it trickle down into the regular boards.
I read the internet for the articles.
Why is this moderated as a 'Funny' comment? I also have had this issue and would like to revert to the prior interface.
Come on Nvidia how about a little fan service since you live here, I want the name as: Unified System Architecture
Their not much better either.
Also PMBus, which standardizes much more of the relevant stuff.
For the record, SMBus maxes out at 100 Kbit/sec. PMBus allows 400 Kbit/sec, as does I2C. Neither of them is really intended to be a multi-master bus, except in the very limited sense that they define a way to send notifications from slave to master. (Though the alternative SMBALERT# mechanism seems much simpler... I think the "notification" thingie was designed to prevent a simple migration path from I2C, and promote fancier Intel southbridge or LPC chips.)