What caught my eye was the new spec includes side channels for the PSU to communicate with add in hardware. Specifically to report the PSUs capabilities.
This looks like a red flag to me. This could be used as a way to vendor lock certain features of hardware to certain brands or capacities of PSU. Get ready for DRM that checks your system all the way down to the PSU level.
I prefer a dumb PSU that just gives up the magic smoke rather than narc out the fact that I'm pushing it over is limit.
Nono!Think about the added value of integrating that with your smart-meter, to have power plan prices communicated via proprietary protocols, and integrated with Office 365 for terrific teams, or something like that.
Very interesting. So it says what each rail can handle.
I wonder if there is any wiggle room in the spec to piggyback a proprietary signal. For example, do you think a PSU that toggled the output of one rail between two specific values between spec polling intervals might be able to indicate to proprietary software the specific brand or model of PSU?
I have zero interest in hardware that isn't by the book and within spec. Most consumers and all IT pros don't either.
It could be used to vendor lock, but more likely it will just check available power and throttle or shut down as needed. A big improvement vs silent unreliability for DIYers who might use the wrong parts, and a nice convenience if it can run using less power by disabling high power stuff dynamically.
All of this can be done client side though. A PSU delivers current until it can't, and doesn't deliver current when there isn't a load. Ohms law, I=V/R
It's a naturally self balancing system. Additionally, computer power supplies aren't made to be "reliable". In fact, they are made much like hard drives; so cost effective that it makes more sense to achieve reliability with quantity and redundancy rather than quality.
That's why servers have multiple PSUs in parallel. So you don't have to rely on them.
Home computers don't have redundant supplies. Or at least, not commonly. Digital communication is cheap and probably more appropriate for consumer use cases than redundancy. Especially since you should be able to get temperature and input power ratings.
Computers are not subject to ohm's law, they are not resistive loads, and thankfully power supplies are not just voltage sources.
What actually happens is that when something tries to draw more power than the supply, it limits power by reducing voltage or just shutting off, or it breaks if you somehow found a craptastic supply with no protection.
Randomly shutting off is not ideal, and a brownout could be even worse. instead, the supply could actively tell the computer things like "Don't try to run full GPU power, I only have 300 watts to give" or "The switching reg chip is at 70C, throttle to avoid a sudden shutdown".
Maybe the supply could even count 60Hz cycles to keep the host clock synced in the absence of NTP(At least as long as the grid stays accurate).
And the user could be aware of all this. Power supplies are a common failure mode and really everything, even usb phone chargers, could probably benefit.
No reason to still make so many dumb devices when costs are so low.
Uhh the red flags were there in 1997 when you all started buying client-server software. Intel and the industry know you are idiots at computers.
MMO's/steam are signs of idiocracy, aka you are bad at understanding you are getting robbed. That's why we have TPM and client-server crapware in windows 10/11.
If you buy any client-server SaaS you are a moron, everyone was expecting local applications forever until 1997. Even EA would have never imagined you'd all be dumb enough to buy incomplete programs where they take files hostage on a 2nd computer half a world away.
So no the time to be alarmed was over 20 years ago, since there is no software or game that requires an internet connection, there was no steam, no stupid fucking login screens, nothing. The public has told the tech industry it is chimp factor five levels of stupid over the last 23+ years. So they are locking us out of our PC's, windows 10/11 is building copyright enforcement into the cpu so future applications won't run and your bios can be remote updated like a console to disable any pirated software or cracked exe's that are found on your PC.
You all gave them this access to your PC, so why wouldn't intel and the rest just keep going?
See here on EA and ultima, and the death of games as local applications:
However, while I agree that SaaS is a really dangerous trend that Steam definitely contributed to, I can't agree 100%. Specifically, out of all the SaaS products out there Steam is probably one of the best. And I run most games on Linux with Proton and all my games have local binaries. I have even replaced them with no ill effects. Steam has the capability to hash the file but under normal situations it just calls the exe by name. And it's offline mode is pretty legit also (although it's up each games to respect that setting for their own analytics).
EA is completely untrustworthy. I will not use Origin.
As far as Windows goes; as a professional domain administrator my opinion is this; it is literally the only realistic way to apply users, groups, and policies to a domain. It is impossible to run a successful medium-large scale non-tech company without a Windows environment simply because it is a ubiquitous and easy to maintain system. At home I am a strictly Linux neckbeard like the rest of you, but when it's time to make money at the office you need a Windows environment. That doesn't mean you need to setup Azure AD and offload all your infrastructure. You can do it all on premises and even use your own KMS activation servers if you really want to. But honestly windows is a good product that is worth the price if you're trying to make money with non-technical people.
Man I'm sorry to tell you, but your post is not even wrong. There are no good reasons for broken applications, when you have any client-server exe running on your PC you've lost your privacy and they've hacked your PC because you can't audit the code.
Game companies have been exfiltrating data on massive scale and gives them 100% access to everything we say and do, I'm sorry to tell you but we live in a global panopticon that you idiots enabled.
There's zero reason for any application not to be local on your PC, you don't grasp in an internet enabled world your PC is a chip in a global sized motherboard that content companies and intel and AMD want replaced and turned into a dumb locked down consumer device.
TPM is about putting copyright cops on your PC's, and all your beautiful local exe's will be signed binaries in the future, no more dumping MP4's from netflix because they will be end to end encrypted and signed.
Windows 10/11+ is them changing how binary executables work going forward.
From 1960 to roughly 2010, all cpu's were using plaintext binaries, microsoft and the media and content industries desperately want to change this to defeat piracy. They will not give up on locking down your PC, they can finally turn files and give them rivalrous qualities by way of encryption, internet and digital signing. Just like consoles.
You don't seem to grasp we've lost the battle and are too stupid to realize, the future of hardcore gaming on the PC was supposed to be level editors, dedicated servers and local applications, not logon screens, user acccounts and stolen videgames.
Because every "software as a service game" is entirely downloaded to your PC making a mockery of the concept, if Dota 2 and league require a $2000 computer with the latest 3D video card.
If I didn't live with morons these games would be normally coded PC games like we had in the late 90's and early 2000's before the stolen RPG apocalypse (Mmmo's).
MMO's were just rpg's with their networking code stolen out of the game and sold back to you as some "new type of product" the whole thing was a scam, to defraud gamers out of game ownership because the game industry desperately wanted to kill the local infinitely copyable binaries. You don't seem to get this was part of the game plan to kill "piracy" buy literally stealing the game from their customers. Can't easily pirate it (during its period) without the files that used to come inside the game.
That' why modern multiplayer that used to be embedded in the exe is stolen out of most modern games while games from the 90s' you can still play multiplayer because its embedded inside the program.
Includes a revision on the 12V only one that I'd dearly love to take off. Running a PC on a misc 12V supply instead of also having to cobble together 5/3.3/etc at much lower wattage seems much better.
Seems like 20v might be a better choice. Then you have 20v available for USB-C monitor ports.
You could give every device its own modular swappable mini PSU that takes 20v and gives whatever the card requests, so if the onboad converters go bad on a GPU you can swap them.
At least it seems like negative voltages are mostly on the way out!
The actual specifications do not seem to be published, but Intel has published some design guides for ATX 3.0 and for ATX 12VO, which contain most of the information about these:
This looks like a red flag to me. This could be used as a way to vendor lock certain features of hardware to certain brands or capacities of PSU. Get ready for DRM that checks your system all the way down to the PSU level.
I prefer a dumb PSU that just gives up the magic smoke rather than narc out the fact that I'm pushing it over is limit.