Unfortunately, when it comes to most consumer hardware, having the same model number means getting the same shape and color of plastic box around the circuit board(s). So long as doing so doesn't falsify any of the claims on the box grossly enough to be legally sticky, they can and do feel completely free to change the innards around, not infrequently without even a version or revision number bump.
Board layout changes, totally different bootloader, entirely different SoC from a completely different vendor, Switch to VXworks and halve the available RAM, hey, if the web interface looks the same, its the same product, right?
At least when it comes to such minor matters as subsidies, occupational health and safety, and environmental regulations, the American government has been pretty consistently beholden to the business interests without whose support buying enough TV spots to get elected or re-elected becomes extremely difficult. Democrats are incrementally less overt; but typically spineless and happy to bring home the bacon for their districts. Republicans, for their part, can barely get a sentence out without describing some government activity as "job killing" or invoking the interests of the "wealth creators".
Given the utility of the internet for such minor niceties as a major slice of American consumer spending, financial trading, corporate communication, and so forth, it'd have to be a really convincing "emergency" to see support for a crude, Egypt-style shutdown. Even in Egypt's comparatively less-wired economy, such a shutdown is not at all cheap and stateside internet-using corporations would be screaming bloody murder every inch of the way.
That said, such dramatic "kill switch" scenarios are something of a red herring. The Egyptian case was a crude, blunt, action by a strongly authoritarian government facing a direct threat to its existence. In the US, and in future cases generally, I strongly suspect that more nuanced tactics would be used. The internet at large wouldn't be shut down; but certain websites deemed to be trafficking in 'communications contrary to public order' would likely find themselves heavily surveilled and/or offline. One might also discover that encrypted connections not made between a user and a corporate entity large enough to be considered tractable might simply get dropped...
Such (comparatively) limited disruption would be much better tolerated by the entities whose approval the state would still be interested in securing(obviously, the protesters trying to organize are a lost cause. Apathetic users who just want their damn lolporn and twitbook will only get angry if antagonized. Corporations will only object if their bottom line is threatened. Why make enemies?)
Thus, while I find a "big red button/knife switch labelled 'Internet On/Off'" sitting on the White House, or NSA cube, desk extraordinarily unlikely, that doesn't cheer me much. It seems only reasonable to assume, in light of what is already public record, that surveillance and infiltration aimed at neutralizing the truly disruptive potential of the internet, cellular networks, and similar, will be an ongoing project for basically all nation-states that aren't at the subsistence mud-farming level.
This should really help move 4G gear in countries that the US and/or NATO bloc show signs of disapproval toward... And possibly even make subscription free GPS substantially less usable in 4G coverage areas, where those lazy consumers really should have signed up for a $100/month 4G data plan with telco provided location services by now...
Somebody in engineering just earned themselves a scapegoating in front of the FCC.
Somebody in marketing just earned themselves a nice fat bonus.
OnLive might actually have at easier than Netflix...
For all the cable company whining about how that scary, scary, "top 1%" of evil downloaders are ruining it for everyone, and they just have to protect the precious consumers, they still have plenty of bandwidth for streaming a bazillion over-compressed "HD" channels and whatever video-on-demand gets purchased... Through their set top boxes...
Netflix's real mistake isn't being bandwidth intensive, though it is moderately so; but stepping on an existing, substantially profitable, incumbent bundled service.
Were OnLive to cut a deal with the cable companies, giving them their cut of the action, OnLive support would be baked into the firmware of every cable box going out the door, just as fast as the, er, fine folks, at Scientific Atlanta could get off their sorry asses and deliver it(they'd probably be particularly pleased to have a service that the nearly DOA and lamented only in crocodile tears Cablecard was never designed to address)...
Not to worry. My sources tell me that the IEEE should be coming out with a new standard, needlessly crufty because of the need to be backwards compatible with both of its compatible predecessors, just a year or two after you've made a major investment in hardware that the vendor has no plans to support upgrading. Everything should be fully sorted out after you retire.
Depends on how fancy you want it(and how much you feel like paying...)
Cisco has a fairly commanding lead in Real Serious WAN routers and such; but is just narrowly ahead of HP in share for the more basic managed switches that(unless you are absolutely made of money) probably provide most of the ports that your gear is hanging off. Particularly given the growth of both cost-sensitive-but-massive-in-scale commodity cluster/cloud provider stuff(which certainly doesn't cost 8.5 cents an hour by running on infiniband...) and the widespread adoption of VM clusters and iSCSI SANs among smaller outfits that wouldn't know what a fibre channel HBA looked like, being the "solid(unlike Dell switches, may no one have mercy on their souls); but comparatively inexpensive provider of bulk ethernet ports isn't exactly a bad place to be...
From the perspective of "competition", deals of this sort make me a touch nervous.
It could be largely benign: "Company that makes devices incapable of playing PC level games sees potential in service that would change that, doesn't want it to die, does want to profit if it succeeds".
However, the cellphone market is a bundling-riddled hellhole. Hardware exclusives are used to drive service subscriptions, certain carriers obtain "content exclusives", etc, etc. Seeing an "OnLive Go: Only from HTC" sticker in the near future would, let's say, entirely fail to surprise me.
That may well light a fire under some of the on-device game producers, and the device makers whose hardware capabilities they depend on(though those already seem to be moving about as fast as the, quite competitive, ARM SoC market can carry them); but a deal between a handset maker and a potential handset content publisher is unlikely to aid competition much(particularly if OnLive has any juicy patents over important parts of their comparatively low-latency streaming stuff...)
The situation it looks most similar to, to me, is when Microsoft or Sony eat an independent game developer in order to obtain an exclusive for their respective console. The amounts they are willing to pay to do so are certainly indicative of competition; but competition of a sort that is basically just a pain in the ass for buyers: many games are simply unavailable on one platform or the other, and those prices being paid then have to be ground out of the install base that they help generate...
Which is strange. All this time we've been hearing about how Obama is an islamofascist communist sleeper agent, and then they line up to extend his nearly unchecked powers until the end of the term.
Either they are very confident about Palin/Beck 2012, or they just can't get enough of the taste of jackboots, no matter who is wearing them...
Depending on what, if any, differences there are in genetic, dietary, and cultural/grooming habits, that might actually be pretty doable...
For an animal able to detect trace quantities of explosives, a population-level difference in dietary spice preferences, shampoo brands, or similar such trivial-but-chemically-distinguishable matters would be cake.(During Ramadan late afternoons, you could probably just use ketone-sniffing mice. Fasting makes humans smell different...)
It wouldn't do much about genetically well mixed and/or culturally highly assimilated cases; but those are probably a bit tricky to detect visually, as well...
I wonder if any practical jokers have picked up on this one yet...
A low concentration of, say, ammonium nitrate dissolved in a suitable volatile carrier fluid would be harmless enough; but could be sprayed surreptitiously on large quantities of baggage, travelers, random fake airport plants, etc. The sniffer dogs would be flipping out at assorted random people and objects all day...
Students in those charmless "zero-tolerance" districts could presumably inject small quantities of bong water into random lockers for similar comedic effect.
Beagles have the additional advantage of being small(food isn't free), relatively docile(even hardened cheese-smugglers tend not to resort to violence right in the terminal), and adorable(when a good percentage of the "restricted" hits are dumbasses who don't bother to read, or their innocent but idiotic children, something that isn't a baying German Shepard is better public relations)...
Somewhat less fortunately for the beagles, small, docile dogs are also pretty good for animal research.
I suspect that it depends on how many chips have been packaged vs. how many are in the wafer or future production stages.
If unscrupulous parties get a decent number of cheap 'n shady parts produced before the problem was known, it is entirely likely that we will see some misrepresentation.
If intel just continues producing the defective silicon; but lasers out or fails to connect the affected ports when packaging the die, it will be rather uneconomic for anyone to try to restore them and ship them as good...
It isn't as though European governments, in general, would have any less interest in this power than does the American one...
Just tell them that they'll need the power to block "hate speech" TLDs and they'll be all over it.
Heck, I suspect that there isn't a nation-state on earth that doesn't have some gremlin that we could use to get them into line.
"Psst... Germany... You'd better agree to this regulatory proposal before David Duke gets his hands on the.hitler TLD..."
"Hey, OAC, I know we aren't really seeing eye-to-eye these days; but I thought I'd warn you that 4chan has begun a competition to see who can buy the most offensive.muhammad domain, once they become available."
I am told that the Italians have been using an Optical Gesture-recognition communication system to supplement the bandwidth of their voice-channel for several centuries now...
My impression is that neural interfaces are currently in something of a bind: The effective "bandwidth" we can presently achieve without invasive surgery or big, pricey, MRI setups is unexciting.
For the small number of patients so thoroughly paralyzed that any of the minimal-motion input mechanisms are impractical, they are still quite useful; but being stuck as a "medical device" that is only really relevant to a small number of seriously impaired patients is not a recipe for high speed development and low cost.
With invasive surgery or Serious MRIs, you can actually do some pretty cool stuff(looking through someone's eyes by imaging their visual cortex? Awesome.); but neither is all that practical for user interface purposes...
True enough. I wouldn't be surprised, if given the number of laptops where that eSATA port is a combo USB/eSATA "eSATAp" port, some or all of the manufacturers will be willing to just swap the eSATAp connector for a basic USB one. Making a snap judgement from this datasheet, it should even be possible to swap the connector used without any revision of the board. Just ignore the SATA-related lines, and drop a standard USB connector in the USB related holes.
It will mean one less item for the spec sheet, until the good silicon becomes available; but it would be a cheap, fast, easy way to get your Sandy Bridge notebooks out the door Right Now.
More committed vendors might do the rework necessary to either drop a port multiplier on one of the 6GB/s ports to provide an additional port or to add a discrete controller; but the turnaround time/cost of that might be high enough to make just waiting for the good silicon worth it...
I suspect that, on the whole, incumbents benefit more than they suffer from patents(because of their ability to enforce their incumbency and create quasi-cartel arrangments, like the DVD CCA or the 4C Entity, legally). However, it is hardly true that patent trolls don't harm them. Trolling people who have pitiful amounts of money is, after all, not that valuable, while threatening entities that have large amounts of cash(and products that they absolutely cannot risk injunctions against) is where the money is.
Were the balance not favorable, we'd see a lot more action about reforming the system; but it is a balance...
Unless Intel's controller woes are substantially worse than so far disclosed, and somebody read "LVDS" as "Large Voltage Differential Signalling", I'm guessing that Joe Tweaker is sad; but safe enough...
The fact that a single PCI expansion card costs half as much as an entire motherboard does seem rather anomalous. I can only assume that economies of scale have something to do with it...
You also seem to be getting a bit stiffed in the SATA controller department, though. My Google overlord reports that you are looking at almost $55 for a 4 port. Prices stateside start at just under $40.
If you aren't using the onboard SATA ports(other than the two good ones), you shouldn't even notice...
Even low-end systems with nasty little softraid setups(either cards or embedded into the motherboard) shouldn't notice.
The only people who it really bites, potentially hard, are the midrange/enthusiast types(who, unfortunately, are just the sort who might be early-adopting the second-gen i5s...). Getting 6 SATA ports, all from the chipset, with zero PCIe lanes sacrificed, is much better for your stack-o-drives enthusiast than getting only two and then having further drives eat 1 or more PCIe lanes(especially if said enthusiast is doing SLI/Crossfire)...
Given that discrete SATA upgrade cards are in the 20$ish range, I'd assume that adding an SATA controller directly to the motherboard would run maybe half that. I assume that any motherboard makers shipping will just leave the faulty ports without the headers soldered on, and tack on a 3rd party SATA controller(something that many were already doing).
Unfortunately, that will(in some ways) be worse and more confusing than the straight crippling. With the chipset ports, basically all motherboards of a given chipset will get the same performance out of those ports. With a 3rd party controller, performance will be substantially variable; based on how many PCIe lanes they give the controller, and who makes it(anybody who remembers the god-awful JMicron[seriously, what is it with JMicron? their IDE controllers sucked ass, and then so did their SSD controller chips...] IDE controllers that some motherboard makers started using when Intel's chipsets went SATA-only should be getting nervous right about now...)
For 1-2 drive only systems, like laptops and very small form factor systems, no problem. The two good chipset ports will do just fine. For motherboards purporting to offer more, though, you'll have to really do your reading before you buy....
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Unfortunately for you, art critics have a virtually limitless supply of "+1: freaking the mundanes" mods at their disposal.
As long as the gallery doesn't get firebombed, or the funding cut, outrage=artist cred.
Unfortunately, when it comes to most consumer hardware, having the same model number means getting the same shape and color of plastic box around the circuit board(s). So long as doing so doesn't falsify any of the claims on the box grossly enough to be legally sticky, they can and do feel completely free to change the innards around, not infrequently without even a version or revision number bump.
Board layout changes, totally different bootloader, entirely different SoC from a completely different vendor, Switch to VXworks and halve the available RAM, hey, if the web interface looks the same, its the same product, right?
I'm definitely not bitter about this.
At least when it comes to such minor matters as subsidies, occupational health and safety, and environmental regulations, the American government has been pretty consistently beholden to the business interests without whose support buying enough TV spots to get elected or re-elected becomes extremely difficult. Democrats are incrementally less overt; but typically spineless and happy to bring home the bacon for their districts. Republicans, for their part, can barely get a sentence out without describing some government activity as "job killing" or invoking the interests of the "wealth creators".
Given the utility of the internet for such minor niceties as a major slice of American consumer spending, financial trading, corporate communication, and so forth, it'd have to be a really convincing "emergency" to see support for a crude, Egypt-style shutdown. Even in Egypt's comparatively less-wired economy, such a shutdown is not at all cheap and stateside internet-using corporations would be screaming bloody murder every inch of the way.
That said, such dramatic "kill switch" scenarios are something of a red herring. The Egyptian case was a crude, blunt, action by a strongly authoritarian government facing a direct threat to its existence. In the US, and in future cases generally, I strongly suspect that more nuanced tactics would be used. The internet at large wouldn't be shut down; but certain websites deemed to be trafficking in 'communications contrary to public order' would likely find themselves heavily surveilled and/or offline. One might also discover that encrypted connections not made between a user and a corporate entity large enough to be considered tractable might simply get dropped...
Such (comparatively) limited disruption would be much better tolerated by the entities whose approval the state would still be interested in securing(obviously, the protesters trying to organize are a lost cause. Apathetic users who just want their damn lolporn and twitbook will only get angry if antagonized. Corporations will only object if their bottom line is threatened. Why make enemies?)
Thus, while I find a "big red button/knife switch labelled 'Internet On/Off'" sitting on the White House, or NSA cube, desk extraordinarily unlikely, that doesn't cheer me much. It seems only reasonable to assume, in light of what is already public record, that surveillance and infiltration aimed at neutralizing the truly disruptive potential of the internet, cellular networks, and similar, will be an ongoing project for basically all nation-states that aren't at the subsistence mud-farming level.
She's arguably more sociopathic than outright psychotic...
Also, will it have video-out capability yet? Or possibly video-in so I can use it to pretend I have a portable DVD player?
The very idea is heretical: A video-out capability would imply the existence of screens more perfect than the one Apple sees fit to include.
A video-in capability would imply the existence of things worth seeing that are not already in the app store.
Absurd to reason and dangerous to faith.
This should really help move 4G gear in countries that the US and/or NATO bloc show signs of disapproval toward... And possibly even make subscription free GPS substantially less usable in 4G coverage areas, where those lazy consumers really should have signed up for a $100/month 4G data plan with telco provided location services by now...
Somebody in engineering just earned themselves a scapegoating in front of the FCC.
Somebody in marketing just earned themselves a nice fat bonus.
OnLive might actually have at easier than Netflix...
For all the cable company whining about how that scary, scary, "top 1%" of evil downloaders are ruining it for everyone, and they just have to protect the precious consumers, they still have plenty of bandwidth for streaming a bazillion over-compressed "HD" channels and whatever video-on-demand gets purchased... Through their set top boxes...
Netflix's real mistake isn't being bandwidth intensive, though it is moderately so; but stepping on an existing, substantially profitable, incumbent bundled service.
Were OnLive to cut a deal with the cable companies, giving them their cut of the action, OnLive support would be baked into the firmware of every cable box going out the door, just as fast as the, er, fine folks, at Scientific Atlanta could get off their sorry asses and deliver it(they'd probably be particularly pleased to have a service that the nearly DOA and lamented only in crocodile tears Cablecard was never designed to address)...
Not to worry. My sources tell me that the IEEE should be coming out with a new standard, needlessly crufty because of the need to be backwards compatible with both of its compatible predecessors, just a year or two after you've made a major investment in hardware that the vendor has no plans to support upgrading. Everything should be fully sorted out after you retire.
Depends on how fancy you want it(and how much you feel like paying...)
Cisco has a fairly commanding lead in Real Serious WAN routers and such; but is just narrowly ahead of HP in share for the more basic managed switches that(unless you are absolutely made of money) probably provide most of the ports that your gear is hanging off. Particularly given the growth of both cost-sensitive-but-massive-in-scale commodity cluster/cloud provider stuff(which certainly doesn't cost 8.5 cents an hour by running on infiniband...) and the widespread adoption of VM clusters and iSCSI SANs among smaller outfits that wouldn't know what a fibre channel HBA looked like, being the "solid(unlike Dell switches, may no one have mercy on their souls); but comparatively inexpensive provider of bulk ethernet ports isn't exactly a bad place to be...
From the perspective of "competition", deals of this sort make me a touch nervous.
It could be largely benign: "Company that makes devices incapable of playing PC level games sees potential in service that would change that, doesn't want it to die, does want to profit if it succeeds".
However, the cellphone market is a bundling-riddled hellhole. Hardware exclusives are used to drive service subscriptions, certain carriers obtain "content exclusives", etc, etc. Seeing an "OnLive Go: Only from HTC" sticker in the near future would, let's say, entirely fail to surprise me.
That may well light a fire under some of the on-device game producers, and the device makers whose hardware capabilities they depend on(though those already seem to be moving about as fast as the, quite competitive, ARM SoC market can carry them); but a deal between a handset maker and a potential handset content publisher is unlikely to aid competition much(particularly if OnLive has any juicy patents over important parts of their comparatively low-latency streaming stuff...)
The situation it looks most similar to, to me, is when Microsoft or Sony eat an independent game developer in order to obtain an exclusive for their respective console. The amounts they are willing to pay to do so are certainly indicative of competition; but competition of a sort that is basically just a pain in the ass for buyers: many games are simply unavailable on one platform or the other, and those prices being paid then have to be ground out of the install base that they help generate...
Which is strange. All this time we've been hearing about how Obama is an islamofascist communist sleeper agent, and then they line up to extend his nearly unchecked powers until the end of the term.
Either they are very confident about Palin/Beck 2012, or they just can't get enough of the taste of jackboots, no matter who is wearing them...
Depending on what, if any, differences there are in genetic, dietary, and cultural/grooming habits, that might actually be pretty doable...
For an animal able to detect trace quantities of explosives, a population-level difference in dietary spice preferences, shampoo brands, or similar such trivial-but-chemically-distinguishable matters would be cake.(During Ramadan late afternoons, you could probably just use ketone-sniffing mice. Fasting makes humans smell different...)
It wouldn't do much about genetically well mixed and/or culturally highly assimilated cases; but those are probably a bit tricky to detect visually, as well...
I wonder if any practical jokers have picked up on this one yet...
A low concentration of, say, ammonium nitrate dissolved in a suitable volatile carrier fluid would be harmless enough; but could be sprayed surreptitiously on large quantities of baggage, travelers, random fake airport plants, etc. The sniffer dogs would be flipping out at assorted random people and objects all day...
Students in those charmless "zero-tolerance" districts could presumably inject small quantities of bong water into random lockers for similar comedic effect.
Beagles have the additional advantage of being small(food isn't free), relatively docile(even hardened cheese-smugglers tend not to resort to violence right in the terminal), and adorable(when a good percentage of the "restricted" hits are dumbasses who don't bother to read, or their innocent but idiotic children, something that isn't a baying German Shepard is better public relations)...
Somewhat less fortunately for the beagles, small, docile dogs are also pretty good for animal research.
I suspect that it depends on how many chips have been packaged vs. how many are in the wafer or future production stages.
If unscrupulous parties get a decent number of cheap 'n shady parts produced before the problem was known, it is entirely likely that we will see some misrepresentation.
If intel just continues producing the defective silicon; but lasers out or fails to connect the affected ports when packaging the die, it will be rather uneconomic for anyone to try to restore them and ship them as good...
It isn't as though European governments, in general, would have any less interest in this power than does the American one...
.hitler TLD..."
.muhammad domain, once they become available."
Just tell them that they'll need the power to block "hate speech" TLDs and they'll be all over it.
Heck, I suspect that there isn't a nation-state on earth that doesn't have some gremlin that we could use to get them into line.
"Psst... Germany... You'd better agree to this regulatory proposal before David Duke gets his hands on the
"Hey, OAC, I know we aren't really seeing eye-to-eye these days; but I thought I'd warn you that 4chan has begun a competition to see who can buy the most offensive
Etc., etc.
I am told that the Italians have been using an Optical Gesture-recognition communication system to supplement the bandwidth of their voice-channel for several centuries now...
My impression is that neural interfaces are currently in something of a bind: The effective "bandwidth" we can presently achieve without invasive surgery or big, pricey, MRI setups is unexciting.
For the small number of patients so thoroughly paralyzed that any of the minimal-motion input mechanisms are impractical, they are still quite useful; but being stuck as a "medical device" that is only really relevant to a small number of seriously impaired patients is not a recipe for high speed development and low cost.
With invasive surgery or Serious MRIs, you can actually do some pretty cool stuff(looking through someone's eyes by imaging their visual cortex? Awesome.); but neither is all that practical for user interface purposes...
Hmm... I think I smell a "business method" patent in the making...
True enough. I wouldn't be surprised, if given the number of laptops where that eSATA port is a combo USB/eSATA "eSATAp" port, some or all of the manufacturers will be willing to just swap the eSATAp connector for a basic USB one. Making a snap judgement from this datasheet, it should even be possible to swap the connector used without any revision of the board. Just ignore the SATA-related lines, and drop a standard USB connector in the USB related holes.
It will mean one less item for the spec sheet, until the good silicon becomes available; but it would be a cheap, fast, easy way to get your Sandy Bridge notebooks out the door Right Now.
More committed vendors might do the rework necessary to either drop a port multiplier on one of the 6GB/s ports to provide an additional port or to add a discrete controller; but the turnaround time/cost of that might be high enough to make just waiting for the good silicon worth it...
I suspect that, on the whole, incumbents benefit more than they suffer from patents(because of their ability to enforce their incumbency and create quasi-cartel arrangments, like the DVD CCA or the 4C Entity, legally). However, it is hardly true that patent trolls don't harm them. Trolling people who have pitiful amounts of money is, after all, not that valuable, while threatening entities that have large amounts of cash(and products that they absolutely cannot risk injunctions against) is where the money is.
Were the balance not favorable, we'd see a lot more action about reforming the system; but it is a balance...
Unless Intel's controller woes are substantially worse than so far disclosed, and somebody read "LVDS" as "Large Voltage Differential Signalling", I'm guessing that Joe Tweaker is sad; but safe enough...
The fact that a single PCI expansion card costs half as much as an entire motherboard does seem rather anomalous. I can only assume that economies of scale have something to do with it...
You also seem to be getting a bit stiffed in the SATA controller department, though. My Google overlord reports that you are looking at almost $55 for a 4 port. Prices stateside start at just under $40.
If you aren't using the onboard SATA ports(other than the two good ones), you shouldn't even notice...
Even low-end systems with nasty little softraid setups(either cards or embedded into the motherboard) shouldn't notice.
The only people who it really bites, potentially hard, are the midrange/enthusiast types(who, unfortunately, are just the sort who might be early-adopting the second-gen i5s...). Getting 6 SATA ports, all from the chipset, with zero PCIe lanes sacrificed, is much better for your stack-o-drives enthusiast than getting only two and then having further drives eat 1 or more PCIe lanes(especially if said enthusiast is doing SLI/Crossfire)...
Given that discrete SATA upgrade cards are in the 20$ish range, I'd assume that adding an SATA controller directly to the motherboard would run maybe half that. I assume that any motherboard makers shipping will just leave the faulty ports without the headers soldered on, and tack on a 3rd party SATA controller(something that many were already doing).
Unfortunately, that will(in some ways) be worse and more confusing than the straight crippling. With the chipset ports, basically all motherboards of a given chipset will get the same performance out of those ports. With a 3rd party controller, performance will be substantially variable; based on how many PCIe lanes they give the controller, and who makes it(anybody who remembers the god-awful JMicron[seriously, what is it with JMicron? their IDE controllers sucked ass, and then so did their SSD controller chips...] IDE controllers that some motherboard makers started using when Intel's chipsets went SATA-only should be getting nervous right about now...)
For 1-2 drive only systems, like laptops and very small form factor systems, no problem. The two good chipset ports will do just fine. For motherboards purporting to offer more, though, you'll have to really do your reading before you buy....