The Future of NT-Compatible Hardware

In and Out
"Squeezing Play-Doh through a sifter" is how one Intel engineer described the limitations of the current PCI I/O bus. With bandwidth-hungry technologies (e.g., IEEE-1394 FireWire) around the corner, Intel and Microsoft are looking at the current PC architecture. What they're seeing doesn't inspire confidence. "The PCI bus can't deliver the necessary bandwidth to 1394 devices," said Carl Stork, general manager for Windows hardware platforms at Microsoft. "It's out of gas."

Stork and his Wintel comrades want to replace PCI with something better. However, they must first do away with the ISA bus. Getting rid of ISA has proved difficult, but Microsoft is trying to make PCI the only approved bus in the PC99 specification. If vendors want the Designed for Windows 98/NT logo, they must comply.

Of course, Microsoft's reach is limited. Despite its near-omnipresence in the computer industry, Microsoft can't force-feed a new specification, especially when vendors can still make money by violating the letter of the law. Multimedia hardware vendors continue to be the most frequent offenders. Popular hardware devices (e.g., the ISA-based SoundBlaster AWE-series audio cards) continue to sell well, so many vendors are reluctant to force the PCI specification on their customers. The result is a lack of competitive PCI-based offerings, which creates a price-premium for PCI devices.

Will NT 5.0 be the first OS for the PC to outpace the underlying hardware? Stranger things have happened. However, until the industry can boost the PC's I/O bus performance, your Digital Video Disc (DVD) player and high-speed optical devices will continue to run at a fraction of their potential performance.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Microsoft devoted much of WinHEC to topics such as power management and Plug and Play (PnP) for mobile users. Not all the revelations were positive. NT 5.0 will provide only limited support for Advanced Power Management (APM) systems. In addition, the company has done a poor job handling third-party APM migrations (e.g., NT 5.0 beta 2 still chokes on Softex drivers).

To take advantage of advanced features (such as hot docking), mobile NT 5.0 users will have to rely on ACPI. This requirement is not necessarily bad: If Microsoft continues to delay NT 5.0 and enough users swap legacy APM-based notebooks for ACPI-based models, Microsoft might escape unscathed. However, NT 5.0 users caught with APM-based systems will suffer.

Microsoft's predilection for ACPI is understandable. Unlike the BIOS-based APM, ACPI is a register-level implementation. With ACPI, the OS talks directly to the underlying chipset's power-management capabilities and perform tasks such as turning off specific pins on an I/O device and powering down part of the PCI bus. As a result, ACPI part more granularity than APM.

Still, Microsoft is gambling that users won't need comprehensive APM support. Both Softex and SystemSoft have committed to providing a solution for users who want to use NT 5.0 on APM-based systems. In the meantime, start budgeting for a new notebook. For a few more potential hurdles to migrating to NT 5.0, see the sidebar, "NT 5.0 Gotchas!"

You Ought to Be in Pictures
In terms of multimedia drivers, features, and performance, NT has always lagged behind Win95. Few multimedia devices come with NT drivers, and those that do include these drivers only as a token acknowledgement. The code is often buggy and incomplete, or supports limited device functions.

The tide is turning. One by one, multimedia peripheral vendors are learning that technology-savvy client NT users exist. The result is a new crop of NT-aware devices with fully functional drivers that deliver state-of-the-art performance and features. One vendor creating these new NT-aware devices is Creative Labs. Although the company dragged its feet early on, Creative Labs has aggressively pursued NT users in recent months and now ships stable and capable SoundBlaster drivers for NT.

Still, some notable NT holdouts exist. For example, ATI Technologies ships its top-of-the-line All-in-Wonder video card with Win9x-centric drivers. Although you lose this graphics card in NT, you can use several features, such as the built-in TV tuner and Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) decoding.

Connectix is another offender. Its popular QuickCam product line is for Win95 only. The company doesn't provide NT drivers, which is frustrating for NT users wanting to use these product.

According to Microsoft, NT 5.0 will solve these problems through its support for PnP devices. However, NT 5.0's success as a mainstream multimedia platform hinges on the availability of new Win32 Driver Model device drivers. Although Microsoft has been pushing these new drivers (NT-specific DirectX 6.0 multimedia will be entirely Win32 Driver Model-based), the company is fighting against a peripheral vendor community that's reluctant to rewrite drivers for a low-volume platform.

A Bright Future
Powerful new CPUs, high-bandwidth I/O, new technology standards such as PC99, and a friendlier vendor community are all in NT's future. After finishing second to Win9x for so long, NT Workstation in particular is gaining ground in driver support and deployment flexibility. Now, more than ever, NT makes sense on the desktop. From IntelliMirror to DirectX 6.0 to Intelligent Input/Output (I2O), Microsoft is positioning NT 5.0 as the platform to host cutting-edge technologies.

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