I finally made the transition to a notebook as my desktop last year, a move many had made years prior. Quad-core mobile Sandy Bridge and good SSDs made the move simple for me, but Thunderbolt eventually made it near perfect. With only two drive bays in my notebook (I ditched my optical drive so I could have another SSD, something Brian Klug did back in 2010), there wasn't any room for good, high-performance, mass storage. Thunderbolt solved this problem for me.
Co-developed by Apple and Intel, Thunderbolt is a tunnel that carries both PCIe and DisplayPort traffic to the tune of 20Gbps per channel (10Gbps up and down). In the past, whenever you wanted to add a PCIe device (LAN, audio, high-speed storage, etc…) you needed to physically install that device in your system either via an ExpressCard slot on a notebook or via a PCIe slot on your desktop. Thunderbolt acts as a decoupler for PCIe devices, allowing you to put controllers that would traditionally lie inside your system outside of it, or even inside another device like a display. That's where the DisplayPort support comes in.
Apple's Thunderbolt Display is the perfect example of what Thunderbolt can be used to do. Take a DisplayPort panel, integrate Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, audio and USB controllers and you've got Apple's Thunderbolt Display. In theory, you could connect a system that had none of these things, and the functionality would be provided exclusively by the display. Decoupling hardware like this allows OEMs to build thinner and/or smaller form factor machines (think Ultrabooks/MacBook Air), while allowing for full functionality when connected to a display. By carrying DisplayPort over the same cable, you can have a single cable that both extends functionality and connects your small form factor machine to a larger monitor. Thunderbolt enables the modern day dock for notebooks.
For all of last year, Thunderbolt was an Apple exclusive. This year, starting with the launch of Ivy Bridge, Thunderbolt is coming to PCs. We'll see it on notebooks as well as some desktop motherboards. Today we have the very first desktop motherboard with Thunderbolt support: MSI's Z77A-GD80.
Read on for our full preview of the first Thunderbolt PC motherboard.
AnandTech has been covering the Home Theater PC space since those halcyon days when Windows XP Media Center was rolling out, and the era of dual-core Pentiums promised tolerable playback of DVD-quality AVI files. Despite our, and your, enthusiasm, Microsoft dropped hints throughout the product’s various iterations that Media Center’s role in Windows 8 was minimal. As the Building Windows blog was updated we saw promises that Media Center would be there, but with little in the way of details. And in their latest post, the Windows 8 team reveals the new face of Media Center.
Yeah. We know. The new Media Center is the old Media Center, wholesale. In the post regarding SKUs, the Windows 8 team announced that Media Center would not be included in any of the Windows 8 releases, but would be available for Windows 8 Pro users as an add-on. The add-on will be the same experience found in Windows 7, with no apparent additions. Why take such an apathetic approach to Media Center? Usage.
In data Microsoft published last year, Media Center was launched by 6% of Windows 7 users. For a feature to have such low usage, 10 years after it was first introduced, means that whatever efforts to gain traction have failed, and further efforts are unlikely to have great success. So, deprecating Media Center to the level of a near-orphaned feature is not surprising in the slightest. What was unexpected was the deprecation of audio codecs and DVD playback to the Media Center Pack as well. Codec licensure is something the public can generally ignore, but it’s the reason DVD players will never cost a penny, and why the original Xbox required a dongle for playback. Since Windows XP Media Center, users have been paying for MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital decode support. With Vista, the audio side was bolstered with Dolby Digital Plus, and this was maintained in Windows 7. Windows 8 will not have DVD playback out of the box, though with the addition of the Media Center Pack will gain the appropriate licensure.
mage courtesy of WinSource
News isn’t all bad on the media front for Windows 8, though MPEG-2 for the DVD containers is omitted, it is included for H.264 decoding, alongside Dolby Digital Plus support; all this intended to extend video streaming support. In the era of Ultrabooks and tablets, optical drives are on the decline, so omitting support for DVD-Video playback, and entirely ignoring BluRay support, is sensible.
We had been considering doing a quick “State of the HTPC”-style piece, with a focus on the state of MCE and what changes to expect in Windows 8. Now we know, there’s not much to expect. So, instead we’ll plan to explore what competing software has been able to accomplish, particularly MythTV; and how well the latest CableCARD experience pans out. Don’t be surprised, though, if our HTPC software of choice remains Windows 7, well into the future.
Admit it. You thought that when Windows 8 shipped, it’d come in eleventy-two different versions ranging from Windows 8 Everything Decent’s Disabled Edition to Windows 8 Premium Super Professional Enterprise Edition On Ice. But no! There will only be three, and by three we mean two!
In a rare burst of common sense, the tech giant has decided that desktop Windows will only come in two versions: Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro.
As Mary Branscombe explains, "The features you do and don’t get mostly make sense; joining a domain, encrypting your disk with BitLocker and being able to log into your PC remotely are business features."
However, one of the bigger omissions is rather odd: if you want Media Center, that’s an "economical media pack add-on" that’s only available in Windows 8 Pro. Some of its features have been moved into the Music and Video apps that you do get, but it seems odd to put the consumer-oriented Media Center in the version of Windows aimed at business users.
Although there are only two versions of Windows 8 for Intel and AMD PCs, there is a third version: Windows Arty, or RT as Microsoft insists on calling it. Windows RT (it’s short for RunTime. If you ask us, Windows FunTime would have been a much better name. Remember Vista’s "the wow starts now"? We could have had "Funtime is nowtime!") is the version that will come pre-installed on ARM-powered hardware such as tablets.
A plethora of Windows 8 tablets
When it comes to Windows Arty tablets, it looks like we’ll be spoilt for choice: according to the never-wrong news site DigiTimes, there will be some 32 Windows 8 tablets on sale by the end of 2012, and some of them will be good.
Some of them, clearly, won’t be: DigiTimes reckons that we’ll see some tablets costing less than 0, which is £187 in real money.
If the rumour mill is correct, those tablets will be going up against not just the Kindle Fire, massed ranks of Android tablets and the new iPad, but also a newer, smaller, cheaper iPad.
An iPad mini is "inevitable", says analyst Shaw Wu, who says that Apple’s tested all kinds of sizes and plumped for a 7.85-inch, 1,024 x 768 screen that will be "the competition’s worst nightmare".
If the rumour’s true, it looks like this’ll be a busy year for Apple: rumours of this year’s iPhone 5 are swirling, with some reports suggesting a massive redesign, new "liquidmetal" tech and a bigger screen.
Another major phone update due this year is Apollo, which is version 8 of the Windows Phone operating system. Unfortunately Apollo seems to be surrounded by confusion: according to a Verge source close to Microsoft, phones that currently run Mango (Windows Phone 7.5) won’t be able to upgrade to Apollo.
We asked Microsoft to clarify, and they didn’t: "We have stated publicly that all apps in our marketplace today will run on the next version of Windows Phone. Beyond that, we have nothing to share about future releases."
Exciting new cameras
Best compact camera 2012: 27 reviewed and ratedIt’s not all tablets, phones and tight-lipped spokespeople this week, though: there’s been a cavalcade of new cameras too. There’s the new and rather exciting Nikon D3200, the new and rather exciting Samsung NX20, NX1000 and NX210, a brand new Nikon lens and a rather pricey but rather good Panasonic camcorder.
They’re all very impressive, but they won’t satisfy anybody who wants to strap a camera to their face. Fresh from last week’s Google Glass reveal, Oakley says they’ve been working on the tech for more than a decade.
Oakley boss Colin Baden reckons that it’s got something Google definitely hasn’t: style. Having looked at photos of Google Glass headsets in the wild, we have to agree.
Windows 8 versions
With only two versions of Windows 8 to be available to consumers, plus one for ARM devices (pre-installed only), what you get ought to be straightforward.
But, as is usual with a new version of Windows, there’s still room for confusion because what you get with each version overlaps slightly.
Windows 8 (yes, just Windows 
is the home version for x86 Intel and AMD PCs. The features you do and don’t get mostly make sense; joining a domain, encrypting your disk with BitLocker and being able to log into your PC remotely are business features.
You can connect to a PC at work from a Windows 8 system, with Remote Desktop or a VPN, you can combine multiple hard drives into one storage ‘pool’ that has multiple copies of your files and you can mount VHD and ISO images as if they were hard drives – but you can’t boot from a VHD file.
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And anyone who speaks more than one language or travels between countries will be delighted that you can switch not just the keyboard but the Windows interface from one language to another without paying extra.
What doesn’t immediately make as much sense is that not only is Media Center not included with Windows 8; it’s "an economical media pack add-on" that’s only available for Windows 8 Pro, which is otherwise for business users (or enthusiast users). Again it’s for for x86 Intel and AMD PCs.
- Windows 8 (for x86, Intel/AMD)
- Windows 8 Pro (for x86, Intel/AMD)
- Windows RT (for ARM)
Although Media Center has dedicated fans (around 50 of whom wrote to Windows head Steven Sinofsky to ask about the feature), only 6% of Windows 7 users ever launch it and only 25% of those use it for more than ten minutes at a time.
Microsoft has to pay licences for the codecs used in Media Centre, including Dolby technology. When the Developer Preview came out last September, Sinofsky commented that "the feedback about Media Center was predominantly "we will pay extra, just include it" based on the input directly to me," so it looks like Microsoft is taking users at their word.
All three feature Windows 8 Metro
All three versions of Windows 8 run Metro-style applications written in WinRT, the new Windows RunTime programming framework, which is also what Windows RT is named for. Windows RT will come pre-installed on ARM devices, you won’t be able to install it yourself.
This is what we’ve previously been calling Windows on ARM. It has both the Metro Start screen and the Windows desktop, with Task Manager and Explorer and support for multiple monitors (remember Windows RT devices won’t be just tablets and they’ll have connectors like HDMI).
But even though you get the desktop on Windows RT, you can’t install desktop applications. It comes with ARM-specific versions of Office apps – but just Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, so if you want Outlook you need a PC with an Intel or AMD processor.
Windows RT doesn’t include Media Center, or Windows Media Player; it will have updated version of the Music and Video apps we’ve seen for the Consumer Preview.
But it will have the Play To feature that’s only been in Media Player so far; this is now something any software can use to send the music or video you’re playing to a DLNA-connected device like a smart TV, Xbox or Sonos music player and we expect to see that show up in the Metro Music and Video apps.
It doesn’t have BitLocker, but it does have its own form of device encryption, which is based on a Trusted Platform Module like BitLocker. That’s not the same hardware TPM you find in Intel PCs today, it’s part of the firmware in the system, but that’s the same way that System on Chip x86 PCs running Windows 8 will implement the TPM, to keep power and hardware costs down.
The main difference between device encryption and BitLocker seems to be that BitLocker can be managed by an IT administrator in a business using group policies and a domain; with no group policies or domain support that won’t work on Windows RT. If you can manage device encryption it will be through Exchange Active Sync – the way you sync email and calendar appointments – which can already make you use a strong password on a smartphone or a Windows 8 PC.
Windows 8 power consumption
Running desktop apps on a tablet would be a bad idea. Although there will be Ultrabook-style thin notebooks running Windows RT rather than just tablets, tablets with just a touch screen aren’t the best way to use the tiny icons and toolbars of the average Windows program.
Even if you could run x86 instructions virtually on an ARM processor they’d be slow, and with all the background services and startup apps and power-hogging tools built into Windows app, they’d run down your battery.
But if you want a thin, light, low power Windows 8 tablet that does run desktop applications, that’s still on the cards using low-power System on Chip (SoC) processors from Intel and AMD.
Like ARM-based Windows RT devices, Windows 8 PCs with x86 chips can give also you Connected Standby (where your PC turns off when you turn off the screen but leaves the Wi-Fi or mobile broadband running and receiving only the notifications you’ve asked for, so your Metro-style email stays up to date and you can get VoIP calls, but apps aren’t running and neither is Windows).
Connected Standby needs specific hardware that’s not available yet, including Wi-Fi and mobile broadband hardware that can stay awake while the system is asleep, and a new level of ACPI power settings as well a new version of the NDIS network interface standard.
Backwards compatibility vs streamlined UI
And while any Windows 8 or Windows 8 Pro PC can have Connected Standby according to Microsoft’s feature list, it’s only going to be low-power SoCs that can meet the requirement for only using 5% of battery if you leave them on Connected Standby for 16 hours overnight.
If you want the best of both Windows 8 and Windows RT, SoC PCs will give you that. But running Windows apps also means they need antivirus software and they’ll come with all the crapware OEMs like to ‘enhance’ their PCs with; Windows RT tablets might come with extra Metro apps form OEMs but they’ll be easy to remove and they can’t run in the background.
When you come to pick a Windows 8 PC, you’ll have to weight up compatibility versus losing some of the deadweight of the Windows environment. That’s what the different versions of Windows 8 are really about.
Users will have a choice of Windows and Windows Pro with the new version of Windows 8 due out later this year.
ComputerWeekly: IT hardware
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