quick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
I
f you witnessed the arrival of 1-kilowatt
PSUs and rolled your eyes, we have
some bad news for you—you’re gonna
need one when the next-gen videocards
from nVidia and ATI arrive. PSU birdies
have informed us that next-gen cards
from both graphics manufacturers’ will
suck down as much as 300 watts—per
card. Today’s top-of-the-line cards guzzle
around 115 watts under load.
Though no specs have been revealed
for these top-secret GPUs as of yet, it’s
clear they will be insanely powerful. Thereare even rumors circulating that one of
these next-gen videocards may come
water-cooled from the factory!Beefy PSUs and Videocards on the Way
1-kilowatt power supplies to be required for SLI?
W
e all know that protein is good for us, even vegetarians. But a
researcher at Harvard has found out that protein is good for data
storage as well. By coating a disc with a thin layer of proteins, he claims
he’ll be able to create a recordable disc with a 500 gigabyte storage
capacity. Eventually, he says, the protein coating will be able to hold up
to 50 terabytes, completely eliminating the need for magnetic storage in
industries such as defense, medicine, and of course, movie-making.
Current optical storage has pits stamped (or burned) on the disc’s
surface. The resulting raised and lowered areas on the surface cor-
respond with binary ones and zeroes. The new technique uses a light-
activated protein that
can capture and store
sunlight in unique
shapes and col-
ors, in areas
much smaller
than today’s
disc pits.
These shapes
can represent
the ones and
zeroes needed
for data storage.50 Terabytes...on a
Single Disc?
Protein-based optical storage could spell the end of hard drives,
or at least that’s what one U.S. researcher thinksPreview
Beefy PSUs and Videocards on the Way
W
hen a columnist takes a stand that enrages
many of its readers, there’s only one thing for
a responsible journalist to do—poke harder!
I warned my editor that my previous column
(“The Myth of Net Neutrality,” July 2006) against
network neutrality might be controversial. What an
understatement. I didn’t realize how many people
actually believe that tiered Internet service will drive
small businesses into bankruptcy, turn email into
snail mail, and endanger global democracy.
Ironically, many alarmists subscribe to broad-
band services like DSL or cable, so they’re already
familiar with the concept of paying more money for
faster packet delivery. For some reason, they can’t
extrapolate the concept to the core of the network.
They accuse me of sucking up to the big telecom
corporations, but they’re OK with subsidizing big
corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo,
which consume huge amounts of Internet band-
width at no extra charge to you or me.
Worst of all, I know that many network neutral-
ists will soon be subscribing to services such as
Internet telephony, streaming video and audio on
demand, and live teleconferencing. Without prior-
ity packet handling, all those services suffer from
annoying dropouts and stalled connections. Mark
my words: The same folks who object today to
tiered Internet service will someday scream for it.
Consider this: Since 1999, I’ve been writing
about network processors—specialized micro-
processors designed for packet processing in
routers and other network equipment. Guess
what? All these chips have special hardware for
quality-of-service (QoS) processing, which means
identifying certain packets that should receive
priority handling. From the beginning, virtually all
network processors have been designed to sup-
port tiered service.
In some places, tiered service is already a
reality; it’s just invisible. Soon it will be the norm,
whether you like it or not. The only question is
whether Congress lets the telecoms charge the
bandwidth hogs premium rates for priority service,
or whether the hogs get a free ride, subsidized by
the Little People.
Don’t be a neutrality nut. Do you really believe
that the big companies betting billions on real-time
Internet services will allow your tiny text-messag-
ing packets to interrupt their gigabit data streams?
Dream on. They will get priority service, whether
they pay for it or not.OCTOBER 2006 MAXIMUMPC 09
Nut
Neutrality
FAST FORWARD
TOM
HALFHILLTom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine
and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.