TechInsight Magazine

The Entertainment PC Returns

Once upon a time, resellers pinned their ambitions on the home theater PC—a second system in every home that’d bridge the gap between the office and the living room. The challenge was two-fold. First, there was the issue of hardware able to blend in with more traditional A/V components. And then came the software conundrum. How do you adapt the user interface of applications designed to be used two feet away from a monitor to work just as well 10 feet away from a high-definition TV?

The home theater PC concept seems to have lost some of its luster, hasn’t it? Between hardware components that use more power, digital rights management issues that stand in the way of getting content from one place to another, and the seemingly inherent relationship between PCs and desktop peripherals like mice, it’s hard to imagine an HTPC that truly revolutionizes this sputtering segment.

But get ready for all of that to change. Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based processors are breathing new life into the hardware side of this equation. Software developers optimizing for the architecture are taking strides to improve usability. Now, it’s up to the channel to take both pieces, put them together, and sprinkle a little innovation on top to make home theater PCs a viable business once again.

Core i7-990X / DX58SO2: Two Flagships Evolve

Six-Core Salute: The most powerful desktop processor you can buy, the Core i7-990X Extreme Edition leverages the best in clock rate and core count in Intel’s product portfolio.

While Intel's second-generation Core processors continue to impress mainstream customers with unprecedented value and efficiency, the company's highest-end platform still centers on the X58 Express chipset and Core i7-900-series CPU family.

The benefits of that potent hardware combination are many. For example, the most powerful Core i7s offer six physical cores and Hyper-Threading technology, enabling 12 concurrent threads. The entire Core i7-900-series is armed with three memory channels able to serve up unrivaled bandwidth to those data-hungry cores. Moreover, X58 comes armed with 36 lanes of second-gen PCI Express connectivity. Enthusiasts with multi-card graphics configurations have enough room for not only two-GPU setups, but even more exotic three- and four-board arrangements as well.

Intel recently revamped its flagship X58 Express-based motherboard with more features and functionality than its predecessor. The DX58SO2 exposes three PCI Express x16 slots validated for three-way CrossFire and SLI. Smartly placed two expansion slots apart, these connectors have no trouble handling the fastest double-wide graphics cards available. The DX58SO2 also features more memory expansion. Six slots accommodate as much as 48 GB of DDR3 memory officially running as fast as 1066 MT/s, but also easily overclockable through Intel's BIOS.

An effort to make the DX58SO2 as modern as possible yields an additional SATA 6 Gb/s controller and an onboard USB 3.0 controller. Both add-on components contribute a pair of ports each, complementing the six SATA 3 Gb/s connectors and 12 USB 2.0 ports enabled by the ICH10R hub. Value-adds like Matrix Storage Technology (facilitating RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10), ten-channel High Definition Audio, dual gigabit Ethernet controllers, and a bundled Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module help set the DX58SO2 apart as a true enthusiast-class platform. From there, though, you need a comparably-elite processor to help flex this board's capabilities.

Made To Be Modern: After two years, the X58 Express chipset is showing its age in a couple of areas. Add-on SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0 brings it up to speed with 2011 enthusiast standards.

Fortunately, Intel makes it easy to draw in the most performance-hungry customers with a brand new flagship called Core i7-990X Extreme Edition. If you're already familiar with the company's unlocked Extreme Edition parts, then you know that these are the CPUs enthusiasts appreciate most. Flexible clock ratios greatly simplify overclocking. And the fact that Intel's 32 nm manufacturing node is so well-implemented means it's common to see operating frequencies in excess of 4 GHz.

Of course, it isn't necessary to tweak the Core i7-990X to get great performance from it. By default, the chip runs at 3.46 GHz and employs Turbo Boost technology to hit speeds as high as 3.73 GHz. Naturally, single-threaded apps scream. More parallelized programs benefit from the fact that the -990X employs six physical cores and Hyper-Threading technology, addressing 12 threads concurrently. A massive 12 MB L3 cache is shared between the cores and dynamically allocated wherever it's needed. And although the Core i7-990X Extreme Edition is significantly more complex than the quad-core i7s that preceded it, it maintains a 130 W TDP, guaranteeing compatibility with Intel's DX58SO2 and every other X58-based motherboard you've sold in the past two years. You have to love a compelling upgrade story!

Easy Overclock

There are different ways to improve the performance of the PCs you build. You can install a faster processor. You can upgrade the graphics subsystem. You can even add more memory if your customers’ workloads demand it. The key is to do it all in a way that maintains balance. Too many tier-one machines ship heavy on one specification, leaving performance on the table. Your job is to pick the components that best complement each other. We show you how. We all take them for granted, but the PC is really quite amazing. Just think about it—a single machine lets you communicate globally, play games, watch movies, pay bills, write software, and render 3D models. You can earn a living with it or waste all of your time on it. We all use the PC for different tasks. But there’s one constant, no matter the job—your machine has to be fast enough. If you’re ever used a dilapidated PC, then you’re fully aware of the effect old hardware can play on productivity. A workstation that used to make money suddenly stands in the way of expansion. A server once capable of running custom line-of-business software in the background now trips over itself under the latest version. Five-year old desktops still up to the task of playing back MPEG-1 video files simply can’t cope with the demands of Blu-ray movies.

Money For Nothing. Want to show your customer some value? Overclock Intel’s Core i7-875K and watch it outperform more expensive CPUs. The quad-core processor boasts serious muscle.

The natural inclination is to upgrade, of course. Maybe your customer wants to retrofit his existing IT infrastructure. Or maybe time has taken its toll, making replacement a more economical position. Either way, you have to resist the temptation to only address today’s problem, ignoring the performance implications of leaving older technologies in place or building new systems with imbalanced parts. That’s not to say every PC you build has to be a screamer. There’s more budget to divvy up when you get an order for a high-end workstation. But even a mainstream box, built well, can impress the most seasoned hardware aficionados.

It Starts With A CPU

We do a lot of benchmarking here at Tech Insight.From synthetic bottleneck-inducing routines to the latest games, productivity apps, and workstation-class workloads, the goal is invariably to determine which components have the greatest impact on performance. That’s never an easy question to answer, if only because certain types of software show a proclivity for different hardware subsystems. Games usually favor powerful graphics cards—no surprise there. Heavily-virtualized servers need lots of system memory. But in a majority of the applications that your business customers use, CPU muscle is unquestionably the biggest performance determinant. Quite frankly, this hasn’t always been the case (at least to the effect it is today). Back before dual- and quad-core CPUs were commonplace, the only way companies like Intel could augment processing capacity was cranking up clock rates. And in some cases, achieving higher frequencies necessitated architectural revisions that sacrificed overall efficiency.

High Speed, Low Drag. Intel’s Core i5-655K employs two die—one dual-core 32 nm processor and a separate 45 nm chip sporting graphics, memory control, and PCI Express connectivity.

Multi-core chips altered the landscape in a major way. Additional on-die resources allowed application writers to focus on parallelism, parsing through demanding workloads by splitting the task between available cores. As the aboveline suggests, this effort was enabled via hardware, but it depended on the software development community’s embrace. Today, the fruits of those efforts are apparent in image rendering, video transcoding, and file compression utilities, the most popular of which take full advantage of physical cores and logical processors enabled by Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology.

As a result of the processor’s evolution, business-class software benefits more than ever from multi-core CPUs. The good news is that there really aren’t any single-core chips left to buy. Customers stuck on those older platforms have tons to gain by upgrading to a more modern configuration, and you have any number of upgrade options to make that an affordable possibility.

Intel’s complete portfolio—from its ultra-low voltage mobile parts to its fastest server processors—sport anywhere from two to eight cores. The emphasis on parallelism is quite clear. But the threading “revolution” isn’t happening in the enterprise space. Servers and workstations have supported multi-socket configurations for a long time, and the software written for those markets is largely already well-optimized to take advantage of today’s Xeon 5600- and 3500-series CPUs. Rather, the customers buying workstations for the office, media-oriented machines for home, and notebooks to carry between the two stand to gain most from threading optimizations. It’s a good thing, then, that Intel has a lot of attractive hardware ready to address each of those segments.

Stronger Servers

Businesses don't need thousands of employees to have enterprise-class technology needs. Small firms working with massive amounts of data and powerful platforms wind up in the same boat as large organizations running the same applications. Thus, you should be in tune with all of Intel’s professional products if you hope to guide your customers toward the right servers and workstations. We cover everything from the company’s single-socket Xeon 3400-series CPUs to the dual-socket Xeon 5600s and the four/eight-socket Xeon 7500-series processors, giving you the full scope of what Intel’s current-generation architecture can do.

Once upon a time, server taxonomy was fairly simple. Each processor had a single execution core, making it relatively easy to gauge the approximate horsepower of single-, dual-, and quad-socket machines. Professional software was threaded, but not nearly to the extent it is today. And heat was a problem, even in roomy pedestal form factors with two processors side-by-side.

That’s of course not the case today, as Intel ships a single-socket processor with six physical cores and the ability to operate on 12 threads at a time. At the other end of the spectrum, the Xeon 7500-series employs as many as eight physical cores with Hyper-Threading, addressing 16 threads in parallel on a platform designed for four- and eight-way configurations. That’s a staggering maximum of 128 threads in play at any given time. Naturally, the software development community has stepped up big-time, optimizing popular operating systems and applications for the degree of parallelism currently available.

Xeon 3400-Series: Familiar Tech

The entry-level platform you'd sell into an SMB is Intel’s Xeon 3400. But we use the term entry-level loosely here to indicate the processor’s single-socket capability. In reality, you’ll find 3400s with up to four physical cores and Hyper-Threading support, allowing them to operate on eight threads at a time. There are currently two sub-categories within the Xeon 3400 family: Xeon X34xx and Xeon L34xx—the former indicative of a quad-core, standard-voltage design and the latter indicating low-voltage parts. All of the standard-voltage SKUs center on Intel’s “Lynnfield” core. They’re all quad-core models featuring 256 KB of L2 cache per core, a shared 8 MB L3, and a 95 W TDP rating. Clock rates between 2.4 and 3.06 GHz are what set these chips apart, along with slightly different Turbo Boost implementations (the highest-end Xeon X3480 can throttle up to a breakneck 3.73 GHz with a single core active).

Low-Power Server Muscle. Intel’s Xeon L3406 centers on the 32 nm Clarkdale core, making it an ultra-efficient dual-core design. This 30 W part is great for customers running lightly-threaded software.

You’ll also find one low-voltage Lynnfield-based processor, the Xeon L3426. Though it only operates at 1.86 GHz base, ultra-aggressive Turbo Boost settings get the CPU running at up to 3.2 GHz when the 45 W TDP rating allows for it. One other (newer) low-voltage part, the Xeon L3406, employs Intel’s Clarkdale core. The 32 nm dual-core design enables a step down to 30 W—and that’s with a 2.26 GHz base clock and Turbo Boost up to 2.53 GHz. A pair of 256 KB L2 caches and a shared 4 MB L3 helps ensure this part maintains solid performance, too. Look to it for applications that aren’t yet optimized for threading, and instead benefit from the chip’s higher clock rate.

Intel complements the Xeon 3400 processors with a rich ecosystem of motherboards, enclosures RAID controllers and management solutions. In talking about this story with representatives at Intel, the S3420GP motherboard surfaced as one of the best-fit platforms to help drive Xeon 3400-based servers. It’s armed with six slots able to take DDR3-1333 memory and, depending on the specific SKU, six RAID-enabled SATA ports with options to upgrade via an I/O expansion module. Additionally, dual-gigabit Ethernet controllers are standard; though there’s a quad-gigabit Expansion Module you can use to broaden the board’s horizons, too. Finally, two of the four S3420GP variants boast support for Intel’s Remote Management Module—a hardware-based upgrade that gives a remote VAR access to the server, even allowing an operating system install through the local machine.

Intel turns around and installs the S3420GP into a number of built-up server systems, making integration an even easier (and more thoroughly-validated) process. The company lets you choose between storage configurations (fixed/hot-swap, SATA/SAS, and either 3.5” or 2.5” drives), the option for redundant power, and upgradability through the aforementioned I/O modules.

In businesses where the S3420GP fits well, check out Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2008. The integrated server suite includes Exchange Server 2008, SharePoint Servers 3.0, and a 120 day trial of Forefront Security for Exchange, among a number of other capabilities that make it easy for SMBs to set up and manage a well-connected office. In fact, the latest versions of SBS, code-named Aurora and SBS 7, and based on Windows Server 2008 R2, just hit beta status. Small Business Server 7 includes Exchange Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, and Windows Server Update Services. It should help enhance online collaboration, management, and data backup. If you’re interested in testing either suite internally, sign up at microsoft.com/sbs.