News Nehalem and X58 show up in Taipei

Why the attachment to PS/2? All the stuff that it can do can be done with other interfaces just fine. If you have problems with a specific feature from a company like Asus not working, that's not the falt of the interface, it's that the manufacturer does not have the robust software support you as a customer need.

I'm curious as to your experience with USB in embedded systems. My experience is that a solid software stack is needed. But if you are dealing with severely limited firmware storage space and memory, then I can see the appeal of legacy ports.

Did MSI have it running? The photos seem to indicate that they didn't have it running. I was curious as to what they would run for bios, regular or EFI.

 

Just to add my own 2c about the legacy ports debate:
Floppy port:
I use a floppy drive once in a while, mainly for running HDD diagnostic tools on bootable floppy disks, but also for BIOS updates. I could probably get around this if needed, as long as the BIOS let you use a standard usb stick for its update. The port also uses a lot of mobo real estate.
PS/2 ports:
I use a PS/2 keyboard from 1989 (IBM Model M), and I see no attraction for moving to USB keyboards - I've still yet to see one made as well as my almost 20 year old IBM. Mice are a different story - they have certainly got better over time, and anything worth using has been for a few years. Solution? use the mouse port space for 2 USB ports, keep the keyboard - I believe ASUS or someone does this already.
Serial/parallel ports:
I use these a LOT, being an electrical engineer who fools about with microcontrollers. The parallel port is very usefull for programming microcontrollers on a budget, and the serial ports I use for talking to said microcontrollers and also to interface IR recievers. USB converters are never as good as a proper port, and simply dont work sometimes in these applications - the move towards killing these off (and the fact I can't get more than one onboard serial) is a big problem for me when choosing a motherboard, and I'll probably end up needing to buy add-on cards in the future and waste precious PCI slots. The headers for these ports are even disappearing from boards which dont have them on the I/O panel - this SUCKS.

 

If MSI makes it so you can flash over usb, you do not need an internal floppy, just because Asus needs it does not mean MSI does. It is not like you need the MSI board to have a floppy drive to flash the Asus bios...

I could say that is a waist of room if you wanted to use pci for other things and they have little 1.5" converter things that go from ps/2 to usb, but the adapter takes up room on the outside of the case and could fall out. if pci card is not included with the mobo, it is still pretty cheep to get some adapters.

For memory, I would really like to see how much better TDR is to DDR, or even if is really going to be TDR.

Someone else said that having two colors is confusing and not shows the channels very well. I know some boards have colors for channels and some just have them separated, this board that is shown has the sticks separated and the channels color coded, so red could be the first set is red and you put three dimms in it. And if you want to use the second channel, you put three into blue.

they are pretty cheep by comparison...
Why do you have to worry about so many legacy devices when almost no one uses them any more. Even my cd drive that I bought recently had a cd as drivers... I thought it odd, but it still worked. I would much rather have a better system than have to worry about my 20 year-old keyboard when I can just go buy an adapter for <$7.

the real thing comes out later and I am expecting it to be a 45, I think that the 65 is just just a test to show what they can do atm.

I just love this post... although I am still with xp atm...

that is the only bad part about new tech is that some times software cannot fully use it. our os's have been years ahead of their time as far as hardware is concerned, but it seems like this time, the next os is going to be late for the hardware upgrade...(I hope!!!)

the only thing I disagree with is the IDE drives, I still have a few that have backups from a while ago. I do like the idea of having more sata drives, but IDE drives are still used a lot today.

 

i did a small data transferring system from EERPOM to the PC using AVR's. it wasn't so hard with a USB controller, but the USB controller takes a lot of space on my PCB, and doesn't always work. whereas RS232 always works

i seriously don't understand why people so hate legacy stuff, it's not like they will kill you if you keep it.

 

For me, in my line of work, (EFI engineer) legacy implies DOS support. The problem is that we do a LOT of tricks to make the system work beyond legacy. As a result, we overflow into a lot of other system areas. For example, BIOS was originally limited to the F000 segment because 64K should be enough right? Nope, and some time ago, BIOS was allowed to spill over to E000 too. But this didn't happen before we got the EMM specification.

I've seen behavior where an EMM program will blindly assume that if a certain range of addresses in e000 are uninitialized, then e000 is not in use. But, at least on stuff I've worked on, we lock e000. So the system will crash.

So my major beef with legacy is that it means there is the assumption that everything will work fine with a 15 year old program when in reality, the new stuff and the old stuff are in conflict.