The recent Blade.org announcement heralds that IBM and Intel are looking to standardize blade hardware designs, allowing blade systems from multiple vendors to work together. It's no surprise that Intel is interested in this -- its own ATX standard has been a massive success. This article looks at the history of ATX and some of the lessons learned about power supply and chassis standardization.
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2005-07-06
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ATX standard applied to tower design is absolute nightmare from thermphysics point of view.
With more reasonable and strict design we could run even x86-based systems, which are rather heat than performance generater by definition, to run without coolers (heatsink only) up to 1 GHz.
Also it is absolutlely ugly from end-user point of view, regarding peripherals plugs. You see it in nowadays PC cases which are permanently inventing wheels with ugly design hacks to bring all that sound, USB and other connectors to front or side of PCs, while Mac-s for example, almost always had convinient placement of those connectors.
Member since:
2005-07-07
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Member since:
2005-07-06
ATX does not specify the location of USB / Firewire etc headers, as far as I'm aware. It's motherboard manufacturers who insist on putting them all, for reasons best known to themselves, as far away from the front panel of a standard case as possible.
As for heat, ATX is not the ideal design, but even so, there are fanless ATX cases which can take up to 3GHz CPUs. They cost up to and even more than $1,000, of course, but if you want 'em, they're out there.
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I've always been amazed at the creativity at the user level while following the ATX standard. Some of the mods are incredible.Apparently ATX was a bit more flexibly than most are giving it credit for.
The test of time has proven it expandable, easy to customize, and simple to assemble. Not bad for a spec draw up before some of you were born.
I'd say they did very well, they got most it right.
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I build my own systems for years and it work well for me to carefully watch the specs of the case, the motherboard I'll be using. Now, as cpu's get more powerful, power supplies and heat management are to be considered carefully. Power supply and chassis standardization will
not only lower the cost of building systems but also will
assure us the the components are compatible.
Member since:
2005-07-06
In the time of 486's IDE controllers were seperate. Disabling the on board is not good enough. if they were never integrated people would have had a choice of upgrading from a UDMA33 controller to a UDMA133 controller or SATA etc.. I am not a huge fan of integrated Audio or network either but its getting harder to find a mobo that doesn't have something integrated. The PC design is not the best but intergrating things screwed it up even more. Hopefully someone has the forsight to totally redesign PC's for future generations.
