Like many an aging celebrity trying to stave off obscurity, the PC is about to get a face-lift. With a nip here, a tuck there, a speedier processor, an improved system bus, better displays and seamless wireless connectivity, next-generation PCs aim to help enterprises make the leap into IT’s new world. But will IT even care?

Heart Transplant

To renew the venerable PC, vendors are starting at the heart of the matter: the processor. Back in 1981, the original IBM PC featured an amazingly modest?at least from today’s perspective?4.77MHz CPU. Twenty-three years later, the two leading PC processor makers?Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)?are relentlessly pushing processor speeds toward 4GHz on both desktop and laptop models.

Yet raw speed isn’t the only processor attribute that separates the latest PCs from their underpowered predecessors. New chip-oriented infrastructures, such as Intel’s Hyper-Threading and the AMD-promoted HyperTransport, promise to give PC users added power and convenience beyond a processor’s basic clock speed.

Hyper-Threading brings virtual parallel processing to a single CPU, allowing PCs to handle multiple tasks faster and without interruption. "You have one logical processor servicing whatever you’re doing and one in the background taking care of the maintenance tasks, such as virus scanning," says William Siu, general manager of Intel’s desktop platforms group. Hyper-Threading debuted on the Xeon processor, and Windows XP and some distributions of Linux both support it. Although applications that take direct advantage of Hyper-Threading remain relatively rare, Intel claims that users running two standard CPU-intensive applications simultaneously can expect up to 25 percent faster execution.

AMD’s HyperTransport, on the other hand, is a high-performance interconnect that allows a computer’s key components to communicate with each other at speeds of up to 50 times faster than the PCI bus currently used in most PCs. "It’s designed to increase the speed of communication between the integrated circuits in computers, telecom equipment, networking systems and so on," says Deepa Doraiswamy, a semiconductor industry analyst with technology consultancy Frost & Sullivan. According to the HyperTransport Consortium, more than 45 HyperTransport products are already available, including CPUs, security processors, core logic and bridge devices, IP cores and test equipment.

Other significant PC architecture improvements include PCI Express (a faster and simpler version of the PCI bus that promises to reduce the size and cost of both plug-in cards and motherboards), Serial ATA (a high-speed storage interface that cuts down on the cabling within PCs), Serial-Attached SCSI (a speed-scalable and less power-hungry version of the familiar SCSI storage device interface that also allows for physically smaller drives) and ExpressCard (a new PC expansion card standard, based on PCI Express, that aims to replace older PCMCIA cards with smaller, faster and cheaper plug-in modules).