What are some things that make you guys mad or make you want to pull your hair in the PC industry? For me, its the fact that we do not have a or multiple standardized laptop form factor yet the desktop has multiple standards like ATX, BTX, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX. I have made a rough drawing of what I think is a very good laptop form factor that should fit any screen size. Top image is face up and bottom image is face down. I put an asterisk next to GPU because the GPU needs to be MXM.
Having recently seen several laptop makers come out with a new charger connector of the own design makes me sigh. Screw laptops in general though. I'd love to see a surge in the area of portable screens to go with whatever device one might bring along.
For me, it's Intel's dire need to do a socket change every few years. Other than for the purpose of gouging customers who have to buy a new CPU and a motherboard with a new chipset, it's a fricken annoyance.
Hardware is moving faster than the software. Much of the potential of hardware is wasted.
With regards to the OP's motherboard layout concept: CPU needs to be in a more central location because it has to communicate with nearly every other component. other components are usually located in a logical manner with regards to what other components they need to communicate with. On top of that you need to make sure there's room for all the necessary pathways/circuits and other components (caps, mosfets, etc.). It's not as important to have a standardized laptop motherboard layout because most of the components are soldered on (CPU etc.). As long as you have access to the RAM and storage, it doesn't really matter where they're located.
I want more PCI-E bandwidth. They need a major upgrade for that. But mainly, all they've been doing is trolling for cash from the mainstream consumer market, which isn't bad thing, but its all they've been doing.
How about each processor has a photonic link, allowing you to expand them by simply adding more? The speed of electrons and electric force has been the limiting factor in CPUs and GPUs, so why don't they all just have photonic bridges, so a consumer can drop in another card for more computing power? (Hehehe, don't say profit.)
Intel can't quite help it, their Tick-Tock philosophy is what causes the socket changing, a Tick is a new architecture while a Tock is a shrink of previous architecture, and the Tick is why the socket has to change.
more open source hardware designs are needed for new/latest technology (PC parts, laptops, phones, tablets, GPUs?, Sound Boards/DAC, etc...)... that way open sourced (and or free) software developers can write for these platforms and allow us to get more out of our systems and configurations.
also, with advances in 3d printing, boutique/small batch manufacture we could end up with customised (bespoke) systems (hardware/software) in ways we can only imagine now.
Also normally the CPU and GPU are near each other in laptops because they normally share a single cooler, along with the the other chips that need a heat spreader on them. So having them on opposite sides of the board doesn't make sense.
Corporate greed holding us back about 20 years.
There are a few
- Intel, for their absurd market segmentation and pricing policies, their poor recent development efforts and their constant insistance on changing sockets for every darned generation!
- Nvidia for their even more absurd pricing policies, the way they lock everything down (voltage, proprietry nonsense), and how they kept releasing GPUs slightly less cutback.
- Resolutions, 16:9 but worst of all that darned 1333x768, it's just so bad, worse DPI than 1280x1024 and I don't think there are any decent panels at this resoloution.
- Ridiculously large Bezels, especially on monitors aimed at workplace environments or profesionalls where they are often used in multi-monitor configurations, and on laptops.
- Gpus below Gx30, RX750, we all know they only stick those in to put the sticker *OVER 1GIGABYTEZ OF GRAPHICS! on.
- Laptop segmentation, the market is way too segmented, for every person in any particular use scenario you are faced with many different products, targeted at you from just one producer! It makes no sense, the optimal number of laptops from each producer for a typical use scenario is one, possibly with AMD/INTEL variants.
For example most people would do fine with something like a 15in 1680x1050/1600x900 notebook powered by a Bema or Silvermont-atom sporting 4GB of ram and a 500GB SSHD and some ridiculous battery life, say 10Hrs. WD makes SSHDs with 8, 16 and 24GBs of flash, you might even be able to do something crazy with the firmware, mess arround with the caching algoroithms, and cache all the primary OS stuff and main running applications and files, so that the hard drive rarely needs to spin up!
My design philosophy was to remove alot of the heat the comes with a single cooler design. This design allows the gpu to run cooler and/or allow the gpu to run at a higher clock.
the glory days of the LGA 775 ;( I still have one thats still alive and kicking. Has a Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 8GB DDR2 with a absolutely sad BTX form factor.
CFD/heat transfer analyst here. Stylized heat sinks, graphics cards that suck air out of the back of another graphics card, the fact that any *TX form factor commonly available puts one set of sticks (the RAM sticks) 90 degrees to common case airflow, and the idea that liquid cooling inherently means better cooling.
My design philosophy was to have a laptop that allows for a user to upgrade without worry of OEM sneakiness. Almost like the Phoneblocks thing. That is how I see it basically. I separated the cpu and gpu because of the heat that comes with a single cooler system. The caps and mosfets, I didn't think about that at the time when I was drawing it
The BTX form factor had the ram parallel to the expansion slots and the processor was rotated 45 degrees. Dell went all aboard the BTX train but then I guess they switched back to the ATX standard. BTX did have its quirks like how the CPU cooler had to be redesigned and how the motherboard was on the left hand side of the case if your looking at it from the front panel.