The PC as the enabler for the true Internet driven economy

[Jibey Jacob]

I've been reading some reports about Intel and AMD both lowering their outlooks for the next quarter, and possibly the next year. Why would PC sales drop off? There's no reason for this - the PC can serve as the entertainment hub in the home and as the defacto choice as hardware for virtualization in the datacenter. What about knowledge workers in offices? Well, knowldedge workers don't necessarily have to travel to offices if the PC is rearchitected.

All hardware components on the PC, such as discrete motherboard components like capacitors, resistors, microchips, etc., and CPUs, memory modules, hard drives, PCI Express cards, and everything else must have unique serial numbers. Those components must have embedded RFID tags that transmit hash values computed from the components' serial numbers to authenticated RFID readers. A compound hash value must be generated from all serial numbers on the PC and this hash value must serve as the basis for forming those unique asymmetric keys used in encryption by software running on the PC. If your PC has such credentials based on this architecture, the PC can replace cars. We would pollute the environment less, ease a lot of burden on government spending, which means less taxes.

We must also rearchitect the Internet. In my opinion the Internet really doesn't exist. BGP, the protocol that ISPs purportedly use to route between themselves is a charade, as it doesn't even happen over the real Internet. A new routing protocol must be developed that enhances IPv6 and it must biometrically authenticate human users and determine that the person being authenticated cannot be at more than one place at the same time. In addition, all IP routing logic must be based on GPS coordinates. This new protocol must be implemented by enhancing IPv6 and must run at Layer 3 in the OSI model. With the PC rearchitected as above and the Internet enhanced this way, we wouldn't have to be physically present anywhere in order to conduct business transactions that stringently demand our presence. This obviously also offers advantages to disabled people.

RFID tags and readers must only communicate among each other over IPv6, they must use XML for data interchange and in addition, both devices must have embedded GPS.

In the home, the PC - and the Mac - can serve as the entertainment hub if Microsoft, Apple, and other companies work with CE companies to enhance HDMI so that it can be routed over IPv6, or even be transported over HTTP over IPv6. The advantage of using IPv6 is that it has the ability for fine-grained QoS. PCs at this time don't reallly have any real HDMI capability, but the potential exists, since we do support the video resolution for HD, but we don't have HD audio capability. I've seen product Web pages on www.ati.com that claim capabilities like DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD for their video cards, but they have no mechanism to get HD audio out of those cards, since they don't have real HDMI jacks that can output HD audio. The solution is to get HDMI to be routed over HTTP over IPv6. This would spur the development of a whole market that distributes real HD content over the Internet. If transported over HTTP, it would be best if HDMI is packaged using XML. The XML overhead is easily compressible and HDMI content can itself be compressed with the PC doing the decompression before the content is sent to output devices for viewing or listening. I believe those Wireless HD and HDMI products use compression as well this way, otherwise they would have to support the full 10+Gbps bandwidth that's required by HDMI, which they don't.

PCs absolutely require to be rearchitected for the datacenter. I have no idea why, but major virtualization vendors such as Microsoft and VMWare have chosen to tone down the capability of OSes hosted within their hypervisors so that those hypervisors offer no more than 4-way SMP for VMs that they host. I believe that these vendors must instead rearchitect their hypervisors so that VMs they host can sprawl across physical machine boundaries over the network. We should be able construct such VMs by pointing those hypervisors at CPUs hosted on multiple physical machines. This would also shatter those baseless limits imposed on PC hardware so that PCs have no more than 16-socket motherboards. Some Itanium machines can host more sockets, but Itanium is only a dual core CPU at this time. In addition PC motherboards must have one or more integrated InifiniBand HCAs that offer as much bandwidth as that used by CPUs to communicate with PC memory controllers and motherboard chipsets, if not more. These InfiniBand HCAs must be interconnected directly with PC memory controllers and motherboard chipsets, rather than use a PCI-Express solution.

[Jibey Jacob]

By the way, wouldn't it be great if the Internet used compression for all IP/IPv6 packets? So, the new protocol that I've suggested above, that would enhance IPv6, must compress the payload on every IPv6 packet.

Why didn't they do this for IPv6, it has encryption, which is great, but not compression.