Linked by Jim Kirkley on Thu 12th Jun 2003 02:18 UTC
Back on June 9 2003, OSNews posted an article by Joshua Boyles entitled "The Edge Computing System". In that article Joshua lays out his vision, "of a new and very unique computing system". In this new article, an attempt will be made to further build on Jonathan's ideas through what can be termed, "Open Peripheral Hardware Connectivity".
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Thanks everyone for their input.
I'll just take a few lines to make a few observations.
In an early post, Rayiner Hashem pointed out that, "escape codes are merely a primitive subset of the idea of mixing control information with data, which is common to all computer protocols." Of course he caught me "red-handed". I was really using the escape sequence idea as a "straw man" to get the brain cells working regarding control information as it applies to its use in perpherial hardware devices.
More than once it was pointed out that bandwidth would preclude this as anything approaching what is possible in todays PC's. Again that is absolutely correct. I have a friend who is a big-time gamer. He says his PC sounds like a jet winding up when it's turned on. Those new cooling fans remind me of the turbo fans on that tank killer fighter jet...the warthog.
Yes, the game arena (or anything 3D video intensive) will never work. And because memory is not getting much faster all sorts of optimizations are being offered. Things like double data rate DRAM and "ever wider" front-end buses as witnessed by the latest crop of Intel CPU's and Chipsets. Even AGP 8x may at some point become the bottleneck.
But, maybe there's a work around. Say there's a follow-on to the X-box. A single board(no slots). An Intel/Nvidia whopper. No AGP at all. Just a superfast, superwide(256 bits) local bus between CPU, Video Chip, D-ram, and Video ram. Also an embedded hard drive and power supply. Two ports on the back of the box...VGA and Firewire. Your have all your bandwith to video and hard drive self contained. All your other perpherials are Firewire connected off the base station.
The best part of this is, when Johnny loads his brand new game and trashes the hard drive, or one of the turbofans blows a bearing sending everything crashing in flames, no one really cares.
Mom and the girls have their own PDA's (self contained hard drives) with all their recipes(I am NOT a chauvinst...it was stupid Johnny that caused all this!), home work, and term papers intact. Just unplug Johnny's smoking cinder from the base station...plug in the PDA and away you go. (Do you really think teenagers have the sense to do backups?)
I must admit, some of the other comments left me scratching my head...things like somehow effecting(trashing) file system and document compatability?
Finally, some said this would stiffle competition, cause companies to go out of business, people lose their jobs and homes, compainies to fail. Others opined that we already have standards...that all that was proposed was was "already here today".
My opinion is that we "aren't there yet" and this will not stifle, but will actually foster competition and new innovation. I hope to be presenting some of my thoughts in these areas in follow-on Part II.