• Illustration: Future High-Speed Connections

Faster-starting computers and better power management were among the familiar themes at Microsoft's eleventh annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), where the company again tried to enlist hardware manufacturers in its vision of how PCs should evolve over the next decade. According to Microsoft, the key to future PC growth will be home entertainment scenarios (for example, for storing, manipulating, and distributing digital audio) and technologies that support them, such as wireless networking and high-speed input/output (I/O) buses. However, it will be several years before most of these technologies are commercially available.

PC Architecture Still King

Microsoft expressed no concerns about the future of the PC architecture, which it defines as a common and uniform software platform based on the Windows operating system family and the .NET Framework, running on a hardware platform consisting of Intel-architecture processors; standardized memory, storage, graphics, sound; and I/O devices that continually become smaller, more powerful, faster, and less expensive. Microsoft is confident that this PC architecture can morph into a variety of form factors and devices that include home entertainment devices, network edge devices (such as gateways and firewalls), tablet PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and powerful workstations and servers based on multiprocessor or blade designs and new 64-bit processors from Intel and AMD.

But Platforms Group Vice President Jim Allchin warned the hardware and software engineers in the audience that maintaining the successful trajectory of the PC architecture and keeping customers buying their products will take real innovation, not just changing small details of the PC's case or the shape of icons on the desktop. "Innovation to me isn't changing just the color of some bezel," Allchin said. Key innovations he identified included the following:

• Batteries that can power a mobile computer all day
• Computers that can turn on and boot instantly
• Peripheral devices that are Internet-addressable
• Software support for customer-driven, end-to-end scenarios (like the end-to-end support for digital photography in Windows XP).

Wireless, IPv6 Top Agenda

Two wireless technologies were at center stage throughout WinHEC: WiFi (802.11b wireless) and Bluetooth.

Microsoft promotes WiFi as important for mobile computing and wireless appliances in the home. (For example, Microsoft and GE-Smart demonstrated WiFi-based audio speakers playing six-channel audio streamed to the speakers across the wireless protocol.) WiFi support is already included in Windows, but Microsoft wants to simplify its setup and configuration and ensure that the wireless roaming experience is seamless. To encourage the rapid adoption of WiFi, Microsoft will provide a software implementation of part of the protocol in the same manner that it did with the "WinModem" (a modem implementation that uses bare-bones hardware, with software emulating the missing hardware). Microsoft’s proposed "SoftWiFi" technology should make devices such as the WiFi Access Points (base stations) cheaper and reduce time to market, but it will result in devices that are "Windows-only."

Microsoft is promoting Bluetooth, a short-range wireless protocol, to hardware and software designers as the key technology for removing the clutter and confusion that accompany the process of connecting peripherals to PCs. Bluetooth is already supported in Windows CE .NET, and it will be added to XP in the first service pack due before the end of 2002. Additionally, Microsoft’s hardware division will begin to ship mice and keyboards based on Bluetooth in 2002.

Microsoft was also promoting Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which is the latest level of the Internet Protocol from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). A shortage of current IP (version 4) addresses, particularly in Asia and Europe, will make it difficult for hardware manufacturers to make devices Internet-addressable (for example, the speakers from GE-Smart require IP addresses). Current methods for stretching IP addresses over more devices, such as Network Address Translation, are complex to configure and bar the use of some key network protocols, such as Kerberos authentication. (For more detailed technical background, see "Microsoft Pledges Support for IPv6" on page 11 of the May 2000 Update.)

In promoting IPv6, Microsoft faces a Catch-22 that could hamper adoption: developers and hardware manufacturers do not want to develop applications and devices that need IPv6 because the technology is not widespread, and organizations are not adopting the technology because there are few compelling applications and few, if any, ISPs that offer IPv6 service today. To try to resolve this issue, Microsoft is supporting IPv6 in Windows XP (with Service Pack 1) and in Windows .NET Server (due late 2002).

Faster I/O

Microsoft also presented information on two technologies it is backing for high-speed I/O buses and channels, which are needed to move data faster between the PC and storage devices. The two technologies Microsoft will support are

• PCI Express (formerly known as third generation I/O, or 3GIO), which provides a high-speed general-purpose interconnect that would be compatible with the existing Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) architecture but overcomes limitations of its current implementation. It would typically be used to connect devices to workstations or servers and for graphics I/O, replacing the accelerated graphics port (AGP). The PCI SIG mechanical group is also working on an implementation of PCI Express to replace PCCard and other plug-in cards for portables.
• InfiniBand, which is a high-speed I/O channel (a high-bandwidth connection) between a network of processors and storage devices created by attaching hosts, such as PCs, with targets, such as storage devices, via channel adapters and InfiniBand switches. The interconnection of the PC with multiple devices via the switch creates an InfiniBand fabric, so-called because of the fabric of connections constructed between hosts, switches, and targets. (For more information on how these connections might affect workstations and servers, see the illustration "Future High-Speed Connections".)

Microsoft is a member of both the PCI Express and InfiniBand organizations and will support both technologies in future versions of Windows.

Resources

More information on WinHEC can be found at www.microsoft.com/hwdev/futurepc/winhec2002.

The PCI Special Interest Group, responsible for the PCI Express specification, is at www.pcisig.com.

More information on InfiniBand is available at www.infinibandta.org.

More information on GE-Smart is available at www.gesmart.com.