13 ms·

Mac Pros, Ara, and Modularity

179 points by jjcm 13y ago

taeric 13y ago
It is always funny to see the arguments of modularity age. Consider, the idea that a car is this somewhat perfect modular thing. While there is certainly something to it having some obvious discrete parts. Typically along the lines of what wears at a different rate from other items, the idea that it is modular for the 99% consumer is laughable. And I say this as someone that changes my own brake pads. Speaking of, the "components" of most computers are more universal than the average car part. Unless you are simply talking about things which plug in what used to be cigarette lighter.
dragontamer 13y ago
Modularity is going away, not only in Mac Pros, but even in desktop space. AMD APUs are integrating the CPU and GPU together. Intel is releasing mainstream chips that cannot be physically separated from the motherboard (See the i7-4770R: it needs to be soldered on). GDDR5 RAM, the mainstay super-fast graphics RAM, is assumed to be soldered onto a board. DDR4 will only support one RAM per lane. Modularity is almost the opposite of market forces right now... as unfortunate as it sounds.
- djjaxe 13y ago
  AMD's "APU" is simply a way to join 2 different products and jack up the price on the one joined product. As such these are still a modular part. As for Intel this is the same idea they can force you to buy not only their CPU but also the entire motherboard and force you to pay for the entire board that is made by them. Modularity is not the opposite of the market forces right now. The big companies are just too lazy to spend the money to, 1. go smaller, 2. get more complex.
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    You can build an AMD APU system extremely cheaply. A ZBox Nano A4-5000 (using the "Kabini" APU) is only $300 or so for a complete computer (RAM, Hard drive, etc. etc. included). On the contrary, the AMD APUs are extreme value buys. Intel has superior CPUs, but you save a money with AMD APUs because you don't need to buy a graphics card anymore. AMD is beginning to do crazy stuff, like cache-to-cache direct transfers between CPU and GPU, because both are on the same die. Intel has been improving its integrated graphics in response of course... but they aren't at the level of AMD's APU integration yet. But to call this "price jacking" means that you completely don't understand the marketplace right now. AMD's Kabini and Temash chips are among the cheapest in the entire marketplace right now... and AMD's higher-end APUs (Codename: Richland) are sold at significant discounts in comparison to Intel chips.
  - kayoone 13y ago
    AMDs APUs are the cheapest way to built a complete system with a decent GPU right now, they perform extremely well for their price.
snoonan 13y ago
The article hits the nail on the head. Engineering for modularity will squeeze out the benefits at some point. It's not some evil conspiracy, but ever-shrinking electronics and tolerances. It's going to be the domain of robots and high res 3d printers because we just won't be able to see or touch things at this scale.
toufka 13y ago
It really startled me that the comparison was the Pro vs the Ara, and not the Pro and the Ara. The Pro is very much in the spirit of modularity. True, everything written demonstrates the different level of granularity of modularity between the Ara and the Pro. But to the consumer, the forward facing arguments are exactly the same: "Buy what you need, each separately, and link them all, as needed rather than a huge AIO - one size fits all". The Mac Pro is requires you to bring your own HDs, bring your own expansion cards, bring your own network gear. Which centers the Pro itself at the core of a modular computing center.
- atestu 13y ago
  Precisely! This is especially true with the chaining capabilities of Thunderbolt. People don't change Mac Pros like they change iPhones, the one you buy today will still be powerful in a couple of years.
  - imjoshdean 13y ago
    From the looks of it, it feels like that couple of years could be 5-7 years.
    - klodolph 13y ago
      That's just the modern PC landscape for you. My Mac Pro is on the high end of that age range and it still does what it needs to do.
    - kybernetyk 13y ago
      I recently bought a new Macbook Air. My old Macbook Pro was 4 years old. Not that the old machine stopped working - it still works perfectly fine. The Core 2 Duo CPU was up to all tasks I threw at it (compiling C++ code). I just wanted longer battery life. That's why I see no problem with the new Mac Pro being so "unmodular". Unless something revolutionary happens with CPUs that machine will be good enough for more than 5 years.
      - 13y ago
thrush 13y ago
I'm afraid you may have missed the point that Apple makes with creating "walled gardens" with their products, and also what it means that Motorola is releasing a phone with modularity. Apple provides its customers focus. Rather than worrying about how they can modify their machine to improve performance and functionality, Apple's customers can be fairly confident that their machine will be reasonably fast, feature rich, relatively safe, and aesthetically pleasing while sacrificing a higher monetary cost and faith that the previously mentioned qualities will be fulfilled. You are very right that modularity on a mobile phone is going to involve sacrifices due to space constraints, and this is what we will see with the Ara. Interestingly though, while almost all mobile phones I've been exposed to in the past, this one will have swappable options. Basically I think this is saying that mobile phone technology is at the point where we can make some of the sacrifices but still end up with a useful device with options. It will be really cool to see how this plays out and if 3rd party add-ons will cause Motorola to pull back with this offering. I'd like to point out that you highlight the benefits of modularity as improvements for speed, power consumption, size, and cost, but the use case you give is that you are writing an article on this custom machine that you've built. What else does your custome-made computer let you do that you couldn't do otherwise? And why do you think that the majority of consumers don't go down the custom route? On a side note, I feel that I have to refer this article from the Harvard Law Review. It is a bit of a philosophical discussion on the "generative" aspect of computers compared to other devices/appliances. It's headlined "The Generative Internet" by Jonathan L. Zittrain. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_Generative%20Internet.pdf?sequence=1 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_...
minikites 13y ago
It's my understanding that most major appliances (washer, fridge, etc) are less repairable than they were 50 years ago. I think it's because of several contributing factors: * Cheaper manufacturing with simultaneous increase in quality control and reliability. * More complicated objects lead to more costly repairs, mechanics have to be more skilled, so wages go up. Because it's simultaneously cheaper to something and more expensive to fix something, it makes much more sense to replace than to repair. These effects feed off of each other, too. To make something more reliable and cheaper, manufacturers seal off more and more parts, making it more and more expensive to repair, and so on.
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  The price of labor has gone up also, and that likely plays a role. To wit: I lived in India for 2 years and my apartment had a window air conditioner that I'm pretty sure has been on this earth for longer than I have. During those 2 years, my air conditioner broke several times (including one time where it caught on fire). I would have thought at some point the landlord would have replaced it, but he kept sending people out to come to my apartment and repair it. In India, half a dozen house calls to repair something (most definitely not under warranty) were less than the cost of purchasing a new unit. If that happened in America, a single repair visit (parts, labor etc) would have been within striking distance of "oh I'll just go buy a new one" <generalization>India offered a glimpse into a parallel world where capital is expensive and labor is abundant.</ generalization>
- aidenn0 13y ago
  When my fridge broke and the repair person came, it was basically: Either the circuit board or the compressor needs replacement
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Yea, and it's a $400 circuit board instead of a $5 switch.
nine_k 13y ago
Obviously Ara and iPhone fill different niches and take different sets of compromises. Neither of these is better than the other by all parameters, but each offers unique advantages. Possibly the niche of Ara will be narrower, because the connectors are going to add noticeable cost. OTOH the ability to add an entirely different functional block right into the phone can be very valuable in some circumstances. Of course, CPU and RAM need tight integration; I suppose these will come as one module. But the periphery, like radios, storage, cameras, etc need much less tight coupling and can use physically narrow high-frequency serial connections. If a connector is only 4 contacts wide (like USB) or even 6 contacts (like USB3), it can be reasonably cheap an compact. Most probably a real Ara phone will have far fewer detachable blocks than currently pictured: a CPU/GPU/RAM block, a radio block, a camera block, probably an extra extension block for new devices (finger scanner? second camera for a stereo pair? projector?), and, of course, traditional detachable flash storage and battery.
aschampion 13y ago
What graphics cards are using 2 or 3 PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots?
scragg 13y ago
> We're already seeing workarounds - graphics cards are using two, or even three PCI-E slots to get that precious bandwidth they need. With 4k displays on the horizon, and textures in games being updated accordingly, we're going to need more bandwidth to graphics cards. At some point, we're either going to have to switch to two dimensional connectors like processors are using for GPUs (which will still only delay our issues), or we're going to have to move away from the 1mm build fabrication for our interconnects. If the later happens, we simply can't rely on consumers to properly line up lanes in components. They aren't actually using the slot, just potentially covering a slot right? One of the fastest desktop cards out, r290x only uses one PCI-E slot.
- oakwhiz 13y ago
  Yes, every graphics card that I have seen merely occupies additional slots to make space for the cooling devices. However, I do believe that Nvidia's SLI and AMD's CrossfireX multi-GPU interconnects are a proprietary variation on PCI-E, so in some respects that could be considered an additional slot, but it only provides bandwidth between GPUs.
  - jjcm 13y ago
    oakwhiz is correct, I was wrong in my statements about cards taking up more than one slot. The blog has been updated accordingly. Sorry for the misinformation all, I could have sworn there were cards that did, but googling turned up nothing.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- stormbrew 13y ago
  The bandwidth out of one PCI-E slot is pretty ridiculous on newer motherboards, even high end cards don't use it all. This is why things like those Thunderbolt PCI-E enclosures can even conceivably run a video card, since thunderbolt 2 is only equivalent to just over one lane of PCI-E 4.
kylec 13y ago
128Gb, not 128GB. 16GB storage on the iPhone 5s iFixit tore down.
ajaimk 13y ago
The Mac Pro is a very modular computer. The only thing set is the Cooling, Power and Case. Everything else is Modular: * Graphic Cards * Storage * Ram * CPU - In the form of the entire motherboard but that has always been Apple's approach Everything else lives outside the box and is super modular.
- tiziano88 13y ago
  Oh yeah there is one module, then it must be modular!
- wmf 13y ago
  Those "modules" are proprietary form factors that you cannot buy and Apple won't support any modification other than adding RAM.
- MrDosu 13y ago
  The fruit I am eating atm is a very modular apple. The only thing set is the core, stem, skin and the flesh. Everything else is super modular.
djjaxe 13y ago
It is more sad that people are seriously believing this person who is a designer not an engineer. "I do art and code and sometimes other things. This is my homepage, which as a rule of thumb contains nothing useful. This homepage is where I conduct experiments, which at any given time are usually broken."@ http://jjcm.org/ http://jjcm.org/ I am sorry but the only things that are non-modular are computers like the xbox360 and products of that nature that the companies do not want the user to change/upgrade the computer at nearly all cost. It is ridiculous to state that it is "inevitable" to become non-modular. Scientists have been backing the barriers of nearly every science there is in the past 50 years and as such you can NOT conclude that this is "inevitable" it is more likely that by the time we run into a space problem at the level you are implying (which by the way is ridiculous as other people stated... what graphics card uses 2+ PCI slots LOL) that we will finally figure out how to make the first bio-matter computers. Ie: a computer that has a cpu of nearly jello matter that will process data at most likely at first a slower but much cooler rate than our cpu's that we use at the moment.
- jjcm 13y ago
  I'm actually an engineer at Microsoft. Design is just a hobby of mine. As for the graphics cards, I was wrong on that account. My memory betrayed me (I could have sworn I'd seen cards that used two slots somewhere along the line, but googling found nothing). The blog has been updated.
  - revelation 13y ago
    There are graphics cards that use two slots, just not two PCIE interfaces. Humongous cooling solutions on contemporary graphics cards usually extend over two slots: http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/14-127-768-Z02?$S300$ http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/14-127-768-Z02?$S...
    - djjaxe 13y ago
      "what graphics card uses 2+ PCI slots" USES PCI SLOTS. not covers.
  - 13y ago
hershel 13y ago
Clayton christensen , the researcher behind "the innovator's dilemma", says there are natural cycles in industries between integration and modularity. Basically , when the performance of a product isn't good enough, there's a need for tight integration. So the winners usually have tightly integrated products. At some point people don't need more performance , the products are "good enough". Then a modular architecture becomes very usefull because it increased the rate of innovation, increases competition and reduces prices. At those phase the winners are usually companies who control modular products. Now if we look at the mobile market we see signs of a possible shift: for many consumers , mid level phones are good enough. And jolla unveiled in 5/2013 a modular phone[1] that achieved good reviews. Incidently , it's seems a few months after that declaration, one year ago, motorola has begun working on a modular phone. So assuming we can extract plenty of value from a modular phone(an it seems to me that way) , i believe we will see a large shift towards modularity. [1]The jolla phone is composed of two front, front and back. the front is fixed, while you can change backs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Products
- revelation 13y ago
  That seems.. wrong. Back when PCs weren't very good and you had to make real choices about what processor, hard drive and so on to get, DELLs customization and modularity business flourished. Now that performance is "good enough" for practically any computer you can buy today, the market is moving to highly integrated tablet solutions, the only choice left being disk space, and it's getting less important every day. Meanwhile, DELL is going private.
  - hershel 13y ago
    >> Back when PCs weren't very good and you had to make real choices about what processor, hard drive and so on to get, DELLs customization and modularity business flourished. The cpu/memory/chipset remained integrated , due to performance reasons. But external bus performance was good enough to separate some functionality into external cards.
    - 13y ago
quink 13y ago
Modularity is going to remain very very much alive, at least for mobile phones. Here's why. A mobile phone needs to be a certain size to hold it. There's always going to be a minimum size, beyond which it won't be sensible, it won't be usable. See this? https://www.google.com.au/search?q=panasonic+gd55&tbm=isch https://www.google.com.au/search?q=panasonic+gd55&tbm=isch When have you last seen one of those being used? People want their 4 or 5 inch screen, it's as simple as that. The most frequently sold Android devices used to be fairly dinky 320 by 240 affairs, but at the price difference becoming fairly tiny, they've now given way to devices with bigger screens, higher resolutions and more processing power. The Google Nexus 4, for instance, features a base frame that 's a fairly thick chunk of Aluminium. It's bezel features large back areas at the top and the bottom of more than a centimetre each. It features triumphs of miniaturisation within, sure, but the product itself isn't. It's designed to be used by human hands. The only thing that really requires the space is the battery and the antenna. The antenna can be built into the base frame. It could even be a sheet that sits underneath the components that could also be replaced. Or it could be a bezel, similar to that starting on the original iPhone 4, that might also double as a bumper frame for the thing. Have a bumper frame with connectors and you're there. Or maybe at some point those extra 3 or 6 dB don't matter much any longer for the majority of the market, especially if a lot of the heavy lifting will be done through WiFi. When it comes to the speed a phone can accomplish as it matters to the vast majority of the market, then size of the components to make that happen is not that much of a constraining factor. At some point, the diminishing returns of a modular phone vs. a non-modular phone will bring it to a point where the performance difference, as it matters to the average consumer, will be about, let's say, 20% or maybe even 30%. But when you can target the one aspect of performance that matters most to you and swap that out, if you can prioritise there, then you have the ability to make up for that. If you then also have the components, on average, each last twice as long for your needs than would otherwise have been the case, it's just become twice as valuable an investment. I like the size of my Nexus 4, and any performance penalties imposed by modularisation are outweighed by being able to swap out components and it being a better investment. There are diminishing returns to making mobile phones smaller. Desktop computers have reached a certain size and then they didn't really get any smaller because they had no reason to and modularisation outweighed that. Why not the same with mobile phones?
aeturnum 13y ago
I'm not sure I buy the narrative about 1mm connectors. You don't currently line up the contacts on your graphics card - the card only fits into the slot one way. What is preventing us from taking the current design and doubling the number of contacts? Manufacturing tolerances get smaller, but they're certainly going to get smaller if we start printing the same number of connections.
- chiph 13y ago
  It's a little hard to make out, but if you look at the photo of the ARA, those aren't 100-pin connectors -- they're more like USB connectors. Power + Data = 4 pins. So not all that hard to line up, especially if you have guides in the screen portion to slide in your modules. And unlike USB, there'd only be one way to orient the pluggable module. :) My chief concern would be pocket lint getting in there.
  - sirkneeland 13y ago
    and dust, and sweat, and humidity...
roc 13y ago
The bigger problem with Ara-style modularity is that as computing power shrinks (in both size and power draw) it becomes pointless to think of modules of "a" computer. There's simply no point to try to separate processing power out of any component that has other physical constraints. e.g. displays, lenses, antennae, etc. So you won't want to slap a 'better' camera onto your smartphone to leave your DSLR at home. But not because the interconnect between lens and mobile "base" will become too wasteful or inefficient. Simply because that future lens will be a stand-alone camera and it will operate within a network of things, in which your mobile phone won't be a necessary component. Similarly with any other useful components. You won't have to make any trade-off of space other than "what can you physically carry". Need more storage? Put a storage pod in your pocket. Want a rangefinder? grab a 'network of things' capable device. Need more battery? grab a power brick that can charge anything with a capacity limited only by your willingness to carry it, rather than being locked into a form-factor unrelated to (and possibly in conflict with) your power needs.
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  I assume these things would then be connected by some sort of hyperlocal area network (personal area network? PAN?) around you, with one cellular hub to be connecting them to the cloud? If so, sounds rad.
- Zak 13y ago
  People want cameras in their phones not because their cameras lack connectivity but so that they don't have to carry a separate camera. Of course, there will always be a niche for cameras with lots of manual controls, possibly with big lenses, and they'll work as you say. DSLRs with wireless networking are already on the market, such as the Nikon D5300.
  - daliusd 13y ago
    I own mirrorless camera with wifi. I really would love to have camera component with interchangeable lens on my smartphone just to save some clicks and own single device instead of two.
ricardobeat 13y ago
Hadn't heard of Project Ara before, sounds an awful lot like http://www.phonebloks.org/ http://www.phonebloks.org/
- resetmp 13y ago
  It was on the front page yesterday, and if you searched about it, you would quickly learn that Motorola is collaborating with Phonebloks.
ksrm 13y ago
I'd much rather see modular, standardised laptops. Mine doesn't even have a removable battery.
- dshefchik 13y ago
  But do you really need a removable battery if it lasts 14 hours per charge?
namuol 13y ago
I don't see how the two are mutually-exclusive.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> A screen has to put out enough photons that a pupil two millimeters wide can capture enough light from it half a meter away. That fundamental principle isn't going to change anytime soon, and since that's the largest piece of energy consumption in phones these days, power requirements aren't going to drop significantly in the foreseeable future The technology isn't there yet, but I would love to see the day when we can make laptop screens (and the like) out of e-ink-like displays. I don't like staring at backlit screens all day. A computer screen has about the same luminous intensity as a 40W bulb[0], which is not a pleasant thing to stare at all day. If only we could figure out a way to make e-ink remotely usable with high refresh rates, etc[1]., we could rely on external lighting (which is usually available) and get dramatically better battery life out of our laptops and/or phones. It could even fall back on "frontlighting" (what the Kindle Paperwhite does) for nighttime usage. [0] Preempting any physicists' objections: yes, I know that watts do not measure luminous intensity (that would be the candela), but a 40W bulb is a familiar reference point, and this comparison is roughly in the right ballpark. [1] Which is a big hurdle, and why I admit that the technology isn't there yet.
alebairos 13y ago
Can't wait to see the first prototype for an organic based cell phone. No modules, but software controlled morphing parts.
Aqueous 13y ago
"I'd rather make improvements to speed, power consumption, size, and cost" I think those are optimizations that you care about - but not the average consumer. We're getting to the point where phones of the same price pretty much universally operate within a standard of performance, give or take a margin of error, and can run a day or longer without recharge. At a certain point users stop caring about further optimizations and start caring more about features. And that's where modularity gives a huge pay-off.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  with the whole debate about "who wants more power/speed? They are already fast enough", i feel we are missing out on one crucial point: Our perception of hardware performance is driven by the software running on it The only time you start feeling your tech isn't fast enough is when new software comes out that is even more resource hungry. The PC's running Tomb Raider 1 seemed fast enough at the time, but can you imagine them running even apps now? Even with smart phones them selves, iPhone 3 was great! until people started making apps that needed iPhone 4 level of resources and you started feeling your iPhone 3 was too weak... So I think we're always gonna want more power. What's the point of a modular phone if it can't run any of the latest apps? PS: I still think a modular phone would be insanely awesome! But just giving my 2 cents
beloch 13y ago
I sincerely doubt interconnects are going to be the problem the OP thinks they will. First of all, individual connectors have not changed much in size, but the serial data-rate we can push through copper connections continues to rise. Fiber optical connections are already used to implement PCIe in many applications (Thunderbolt is, in part, a fiber optical PCIe link). One huge advantage of fiber optics over copper is that you can send many data streams down a single fiber using different wavelengths and/or optical modes. This is why backbone fiber bandwidth keeps growing even over fiber links that haven't been upgraded. It's a function of what you hook up to the ends of the fiber, not the fiber itself. There is tremendous room for bandwidth growth in optical fiber. Apple definitely doesn't need to use non-standard interconnects for the new mac pros just like they didn't need to use custom connectors for SSD's in their laptops. They just wanted to.
- gji 13y ago
  I'm not sure fiber optics are particularly viable in the next 5-10 years as interconnects between hardware components. Adding photonics to a hardware component increases size and cost fairly significantly, which is why you don't see many fiber optic interconnects yet, even for applications where cable size is important. Moreover, to get the kind of miniaturization you would need for a cell phone, you're talking on-chip photonics (diodes and photodetectors integrated into the IC itself), which still looks like it's in the early R&D phase. Of course, most of this is probably because copper is still doing just fine in terms of bandwidth. Though some big issues with forcing huge bandwidth over few traces are latency and the additional circuitry needed to translate the signal into the actual components needed to drive RAM chips or a CPU.
  - beloch 13y ago
    http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518941/intels-laser-chips-could-make-data-centers-run-better/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518941/intels-laser-chi... It's out of R&D and entering production.
pauletienney 13y ago
Kudos for the jjcm.org website.
WiseWeasel 13y ago
Seeing that computer running from inside the mobo box is like seeing pictures of frightened, malnourished animals in those Humane Society ads. Get a case, you cheap bastard! One coffee spill away from disaster...

179 points by jjcm 13y ago

It is always funny to see the arguments of modularity age. Consider, the idea that a car is this somewhat perfect modular thing. While there is certainly something to it having some obvious discrete parts. Typically along the lines of what wears at a different rate from other items, the idea that it is modular for the 99% consumer is laughable. And I say this as someone that changes my own brake pads. Speaking of, the "components" of most computers are more universal than the average car part. Unless you are simply talking about things which plug in what used to be cigarette lighter.

dragontamer 13y ago

Modularity is going away, not only in Mac Pros, but even in desktop space. AMD APUs are integrating the CPU and GPU together. Intel is releasing mainstream chips that cannot be physically separated from the motherboard (See the i7-4770R: it needs to be soldered on). GDDR5 RAM, the mainstay super-fast graphics RAM, is assumed to be soldered onto a board. DDR4 will only support one RAM per lane. Modularity is almost the opposite of market forces right now... as unfortunate as it sounds.

djjaxe 13y ago
AMD's "APU" is simply a way to join 2 different products and jack up the price on the one joined product. As such these are still a modular part. As for Intel this is the same idea they can force you to buy not only their CPU but also the entire motherboard and force you to pay for the entire board that is made by them. Modularity is not the opposite of the market forces right now. The big companies are just too lazy to spend the money to, 1. go smaller, 2. get more complex.
- dragontamer 13y ago
  You can build an AMD APU system extremely cheaply. A ZBox Nano A4-5000 (using the "Kabini" APU) is only $300 or so for a complete computer (RAM, Hard drive, etc. etc. included). On the contrary, the AMD APUs are extreme value buys. Intel has superior CPUs, but you save a money with AMD APUs because you don't need to buy a graphics card anymore. AMD is beginning to do crazy stuff, like cache-to-cache direct transfers between CPU and GPU, because both are on the same die. Intel has been improving its integrated graphics in response of course... but they aren't at the level of AMD's APU integration yet. But to call this "price jacking" means that you completely don't understand the marketplace right now. AMD's Kabini and Temash chips are among the cheapest in the entire marketplace right now... and AMD's higher-end APUs (Codename: Richland) are sold at significant discounts in comparison to Intel chips.
- kayoone 13y ago
  AMDs APUs are the cheapest way to built a complete system with a decent GPU right now, they perform extremely well for their price.

snoonan 13y ago

The article hits the nail on the head. Engineering for modularity will squeeze out the benefits at some point. It's not some evil conspiracy, but ever-shrinking electronics and tolerances. It's going to be the domain of robots and high res 3d printers because we just won't be able to see or touch things at this scale.

toufka 13y ago

It really startled me that the comparison was the Pro vs the Ara, and not the Pro and the Ara. The Pro is very much in the spirit of modularity. True, everything written demonstrates the different level of granularity of modularity between the Ara and the Pro. But to the consumer, the forward facing arguments are exactly the same: "Buy what you need, each separately, and link them all, as needed rather than a huge AIO - one size fits all". The Mac Pro is requires you to bring your own HDs, bring your own expansion cards, bring your own network gear. Which centers the Pro itself at the core of a modular computing center.

atestu 13y ago
Precisely! This is especially true with the chaining capabilities of Thunderbolt. People don't change Mac Pros like they change iPhones, the one you buy today will still be powerful in a couple of years.
- imjoshdean 13y ago
  From the looks of it, it feels like that couple of years could be 5-7 years.
  - klodolph 13y ago
    That's just the modern PC landscape for you. My Mac Pro is on the high end of that age range and it still does what it needs to do.
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    I recently bought a new Macbook Air. My old Macbook Pro was 4 years old. Not that the old machine stopped working - it still works perfectly fine. The Core 2 Duo CPU was up to all tasks I threw at it (compiling C++ code). I just wanted longer battery life. That's why I see no problem with the new Mac Pro being so "unmodular". Unless something revolutionary happens with CPUs that machine will be good enough for more than 5 years.
    - 13y ago

thrush 13y ago

I'm afraid you may have missed the point that Apple makes with creating "walled gardens" with their products, and also what it means that Motorola is releasing a phone with modularity. Apple provides its customers focus. Rather than worrying about how they can modify their machine to improve performance and functionality, Apple's customers can be fairly confident that their machine will be reasonably fast, feature rich, relatively safe, and aesthetically pleasing while sacrificing a higher monetary cost and faith that the previously mentioned qualities will be fulfilled. You are very right that modularity on a mobile phone is going to involve sacrifices due to space constraints, and this is what we will see with the Ara. Interestingly though, while almost all mobile phones I've been exposed to in the past, this one will have swappable options. Basically I think this is saying that mobile phone technology is at the point where we can make some of the sacrifices but still end up with a useful device with options. It will be really cool to see how this plays out and if 3rd party add-ons will cause Motorola to pull back with this offering. I'd like to point out that you highlight the benefits of modularity as improvements for speed, power consumption, size, and cost, but the use case you give is that you are writing an article on this custom machine that you've built. What else does your custome-made computer let you do that you couldn't do otherwise? And why do you think that the majority of consumers don't go down the custom route? On a side note, I feel that I have to refer this article from the Harvard Law Review. It is a bit of a philosophical discussion on the "generative" aspect of computers compared to other devices/appliances. It's headlined "The Generative Internet" by Jonathan L. Zittrain. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_Generative%20Internet.pdf?sequence=1 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_...

minikites 13y ago

It's my understanding that most major appliances (washer, fridge, etc) are less repairable than they were 50 years ago. I think it's because of several contributing factors: * Cheaper manufacturing with simultaneous increase in quality control and reliability. * More complicated objects lead to more costly repairs, mechanics have to be more skilled, so wages go up. Because it's simultaneously cheaper to something and more expensive to fix something, it makes much more sense to replace than to repair. These effects feed off of each other, too. To make something more reliable and cheaper, manufacturers seal off more and more parts, making it more and more expensive to repair, and so on.

sirkneeland 13y ago
The price of labor has gone up also, and that likely plays a role. To wit: I lived in India for 2 years and my apartment had a window air conditioner that I'm pretty sure has been on this earth for longer than I have. During those 2 years, my air conditioner broke several times (including one time where it caught on fire). I would have thought at some point the landlord would have replaced it, but he kept sending people out to come to my apartment and repair it. In India, half a dozen house calls to repair something (most definitely not under warranty) were less than the cost of purchasing a new unit. If that happened in America, a single repair visit (parts, labor etc) would have been within striking distance of "oh I'll just go buy a new one" <generalization>India offered a glimpse into a parallel world where capital is expensive and labor is abundant.</ generalization>
aidenn0 13y ago
When my fridge broke and the repair person came, it was basically: Either the circuit board or the compressor needs replacement
- bluedino 13y ago
  Yea, and it's a $400 circuit board instead of a $5 switch.

nine_k 13y ago

Obviously Ara and iPhone fill different niches and take different sets of compromises. Neither of these is better than the other by all parameters, but each offers unique advantages. Possibly the niche of Ara will be narrower, because the connectors are going to add noticeable cost. OTOH the ability to add an entirely different functional block right into the phone can be very valuable in some circumstances. Of course, CPU and RAM need tight integration; I suppose these will come as one module. But the periphery, like radios, storage, cameras, etc need much less tight coupling and can use physically narrow high-frequency serial connections. If a connector is only 4 contacts wide (like USB) or even 6 contacts (like USB3), it can be reasonably cheap an compact. Most probably a real Ara phone will have far fewer detachable blocks than currently pictured: a CPU/GPU/RAM block, a radio block, a camera block, probably an extra extension block for new devices (finger scanner? second camera for a stereo pair? projector?), and, of course, traditional detachable flash storage and battery.

aschampion 13y ago

What graphics cards are using 2 or 3 PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots?

scragg 13y ago

> We're already seeing workarounds - graphics cards are using two, or even three PCI-E slots to get that precious bandwidth they need. With 4k displays on the horizon, and textures in games being updated accordingly, we're going to need more bandwidth to graphics cards. At some point, we're either going to have to switch to two dimensional connectors like processors are using for GPUs (which will still only delay our issues), or we're going to have to move away from the 1mm build fabrication for our interconnects. If the later happens, we simply can't rely on consumers to properly line up lanes in components. They aren't actually using the slot, just potentially covering a slot right? One of the fastest desktop cards out, r290x only uses one PCI-E slot.

oakwhiz 13y ago
Yes, every graphics card that I have seen merely occupies additional slots to make space for the cooling devices. However, I do believe that Nvidia's SLI and AMD's CrossfireX multi-GPU interconnects are a proprietary variation on PCI-E, so in some respects that could be considered an additional slot, but it only provides bandwidth between GPUs.
- jjcm 13y ago
  oakwhiz is correct, I was wrong in my statements about cards taking up more than one slot. The blog has been updated accordingly. Sorry for the misinformation all, I could have sworn there were cards that did, but googling turned up nothing.
deleted 13y ago
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stormbrew 13y ago
The bandwidth out of one PCI-E slot is pretty ridiculous on newer motherboards, even high end cards don't use it all. This is why things like those Thunderbolt PCI-E enclosures can even conceivably run a video card, since thunderbolt 2 is only equivalent to just over one lane of PCI-E 4.

kylec 13y ago

128Gb, not 128GB. 16GB storage on the iPhone 5s iFixit tore down.

ajaimk 13y ago

The Mac Pro is a very modular computer. The only thing set is the Cooling, Power and Case. Everything else is Modular: * Graphic Cards * Storage * Ram * CPU - In the form of the entire motherboard but that has always been Apple's approach Everything else lives outside the box and is super modular.

tiziano88 13y ago
Oh yeah there is one module, then it must be modular!
wmf 13y ago
Those "modules" are proprietary form factors that you cannot buy and Apple won't support any modification other than adding RAM.
MrDosu 13y ago
The fruit I am eating atm is a very modular apple. The only thing set is the core, stem, skin and the flesh. Everything else is super modular.

djjaxe 13y ago

It is more sad that people are seriously believing this person who is a designer not an engineer. "I do art and code and sometimes other things. This is my homepage, which as a rule of thumb contains nothing useful. This homepage is where I conduct experiments, which at any given time are usually broken."@ http://jjcm.org/ http://jjcm.org/ I am sorry but the only things that are non-modular are computers like the xbox360 and products of that nature that the companies do not want the user to change/upgrade the computer at nearly all cost. It is ridiculous to state that it is "inevitable" to become non-modular. Scientists have been backing the barriers of nearly every science there is in the past 50 years and as such you can NOT conclude that this is "inevitable" it is more likely that by the time we run into a space problem at the level you are implying (which by the way is ridiculous as other people stated... what graphics card uses 2+ PCI slots LOL) that we will finally figure out how to make the first bio-matter computers. Ie: a computer that has a cpu of nearly jello matter that will process data at most likely at first a slower but much cooler rate than our cpu's that we use at the moment.

jjcm 13y ago
I'm actually an engineer at Microsoft. Design is just a hobby of mine. As for the graphics cards, I was wrong on that account. My memory betrayed me (I could have sworn I'd seen cards that used two slots somewhere along the line, but googling found nothing). The blog has been updated.
- revelation 13y ago
  There are graphics cards that use two slots, just not two PCIE interfaces. Humongous cooling solutions on contemporary graphics cards usually extend over two slots: http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/14-127-768-Z02?$S300$ http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/14-127-768-Z02?$S...
  - djjaxe 13y ago
    "what graphics card uses 2+ PCI slots" USES PCI SLOTS. not covers.
- 13y ago

hershel 13y ago

Clayton christensen , the researcher behind "the innovator's dilemma", says there are natural cycles in industries between integration and modularity. Basically , when the performance of a product isn't good enough, there's a need for tight integration. So the winners usually have tightly integrated products. At some point people don't need more performance , the products are "good enough". Then a modular architecture becomes very usefull because it increased the rate of innovation, increases competition and reduces prices. At those phase the winners are usually companies who control modular products. Now if we look at the mobile market we see signs of a possible shift: for many consumers , mid level phones are good enough. And jolla unveiled in 5/2013 a modular phone[1] that achieved good reviews. Incidently , it's seems a few months after that declaration, one year ago, motorola has begun working on a modular phone. So assuming we can extract plenty of value from a modular phone(an it seems to me that way) , i believe we will see a large shift towards modularity. [1]The jolla phone is composed of two front, front and back. the front is fixed, while you can change backs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Products

revelation 13y ago
That seems.. wrong. Back when PCs weren't very good and you had to make real choices about what processor, hard drive and so on to get, DELLs customization and modularity business flourished. Now that performance is "good enough" for practically any computer you can buy today, the market is moving to highly integrated tablet solutions, the only choice left being disk space, and it's getting less important every day. Meanwhile, DELL is going private.
- hershel 13y ago
  >> Back when PCs weren't very good and you had to make real choices about what processor, hard drive and so on to get, DELLs customization and modularity business flourished. The cpu/memory/chipset remained integrated , due to performance reasons. But external bus performance was good enough to separate some functionality into external cards.
  - 13y ago

quink 13y ago

Modularity is going to remain very very much alive, at least for mobile phones. Here's why. A mobile phone needs to be a certain size to hold it. There's always going to be a minimum size, beyond which it won't be sensible, it won't be usable. See this? https://www.google.com.au/search?q=panasonic+gd55&tbm=isch https://www.google.com.au/search?q=panasonic+gd55&tbm=isch When have you last seen one of those being used? People want their 4 or 5 inch screen, it's as simple as that. The most frequently sold Android devices used to be fairly dinky 320 by 240 affairs, but at the price difference becoming fairly tiny, they've now given way to devices with bigger screens, higher resolutions and more processing power. The Google Nexus 4, for instance, features a base frame that 's a fairly thick chunk of Aluminium. It's bezel features large back areas at the top and the bottom of more than a centimetre each. It features triumphs of miniaturisation within, sure, but the product itself isn't. It's designed to be used by human hands. The only thing that really requires the space is the battery and the antenna. The antenna can be built into the base frame. It could even be a sheet that sits underneath the components that could also be replaced. Or it could be a bezel, similar to that starting on the original iPhone 4, that might also double as a bumper frame for the thing. Have a bumper frame with connectors and you're there. Or maybe at some point those extra 3 or 6 dB don't matter much any longer for the majority of the market, especially if a lot of the heavy lifting will be done through WiFi. When it comes to the speed a phone can accomplish as it matters to the vast majority of the market, then size of the components to make that happen is not that much of a constraining factor. At some point, the diminishing returns of a modular phone vs. a non-modular phone will bring it to a point where the performance difference, as it matters to the average consumer, will be about, let's say, 20% or maybe even 30%. But when you can target the one aspect of performance that matters most to you and swap that out, if you can prioritise there, then you have the ability to make up for that. If you then also have the components, on average, each last twice as long for your needs than would otherwise have been the case, it's just become twice as valuable an investment. I like the size of my Nexus 4, and any performance penalties imposed by modularisation are outweighed by being able to swap out components and it being a better investment. There are diminishing returns to making mobile phones smaller. Desktop computers have reached a certain size and then they didn't really get any smaller because they had no reason to and modularisation outweighed that. Why not the same with mobile phones?

aeturnum 13y ago

I'm not sure I buy the narrative about 1mm connectors. You don't currently line up the contacts on your graphics card - the card only fits into the slot one way. What is preventing us from taking the current design and doubling the number of contacts? Manufacturing tolerances get smaller, but they're certainly going to get smaller if we start printing the same number of connections.

chiph 13y ago
It's a little hard to make out, but if you look at the photo of the ARA, those aren't 100-pin connectors -- they're more like USB connectors. Power + Data = 4 pins. So not all that hard to line up, especially if you have guides in the screen portion to slide in your modules. And unlike USB, there'd only be one way to orient the pluggable module. :) My chief concern would be pocket lint getting in there.
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  and dust, and sweat, and humidity...

roc 13y ago

The bigger problem with Ara-style modularity is that as computing power shrinks (in both size and power draw) it becomes pointless to think of modules of "a" computer. There's simply no point to try to separate processing power out of any component that has other physical constraints. e.g. displays, lenses, antennae, etc. So you won't want to slap a 'better' camera onto your smartphone to leave your DSLR at home. But not because the interconnect between lens and mobile "base" will become too wasteful or inefficient. Simply because that future lens will be a stand-alone camera and it will operate within a network of things, in which your mobile phone won't be a necessary component. Similarly with any other useful components. You won't have to make any trade-off of space other than "what can you physically carry". Need more storage? Put a storage pod in your pocket. Want a rangefinder? grab a 'network of things' capable device. Need more battery? grab a power brick that can charge anything with a capacity limited only by your willingness to carry it, rather than being locked into a form-factor unrelated to (and possibly in conflict with) your power needs.

sirkneeland 13y ago
I assume these things would then be connected by some sort of hyperlocal area network (personal area network? PAN?) around you, with one cellular hub to be connecting them to the cloud? If so, sounds rad.
Zak 13y ago
People want cameras in their phones not because their cameras lack connectivity but so that they don't have to carry a separate camera. Of course, there will always be a niche for cameras with lots of manual controls, possibly with big lenses, and they'll work as you say. DSLRs with wireless networking are already on the market, such as the Nikon D5300.
- daliusd 13y ago
  I own mirrorless camera with wifi. I really would love to have camera component with interchangeable lens on my smartphone just to save some clicks and own single device instead of two.

ricardobeat 13y ago

Hadn't heard of Project Ara before, sounds an awful lot like http://www.phonebloks.org/ http://www.phonebloks.org/

resetmp 13y ago
It was on the front page yesterday, and if you searched about it, you would quickly learn that Motorola is collaborating with Phonebloks.

ksrm 13y ago

I'd much rather see modular, standardised laptops. Mine doesn't even have a removable battery.

dshefchik 13y ago
But do you really need a removable battery if it lasts 14 hours per charge?

namuol 13y ago

I don't see how the two are mutually-exclusive.

chimeracoder 13y ago

> A screen has to put out enough photons that a pupil two millimeters wide can capture enough light from it half a meter away. That fundamental principle isn't going to change anytime soon, and since that's the largest piece of energy consumption in phones these days, power requirements aren't going to drop significantly in the foreseeable future The technology isn't there yet, but I would love to see the day when we can make laptop screens (and the like) out of e-ink-like displays. I don't like staring at backlit screens all day. A computer screen has about the same luminous intensity as a 40W bulb[0], which is not a pleasant thing to stare at all day. If only we could figure out a way to make e-ink remotely usable with high refresh rates, etc[1]., we could rely on external lighting (which is usually available) and get dramatically better battery life out of our laptops and/or phones. It could even fall back on "frontlighting" (what the Kindle Paperwhite does) for nighttime usage. [0] Preempting any physicists' objections: yes, I know that watts do not measure luminous intensity (that would be the candela), but a 40W bulb is a familiar reference point, and this comparison is roughly in the right ballpark. [1] Which is a big hurdle, and why I admit that the technology isn't there yet.

alebairos 13y ago

Can't wait to see the first prototype for an organic based cell phone. No modules, but software controlled morphing parts.

Aqueous 13y ago

"I'd rather make improvements to speed, power consumption, size, and cost" I think those are optimizations that you care about - but not the average consumer. We're getting to the point where phones of the same price pretty much universally operate within a standard of performance, give or take a margin of error, and can run a day or longer without recharge. At a certain point users stop caring about further optimizations and start caring more about features. And that's where modularity gives a huge pay-off.

xerophtye 13y ago
with the whole debate about "who wants more power/speed? They are already fast enough", i feel we are missing out on one crucial point: Our perception of hardware performance is driven by the software running on it The only time you start feeling your tech isn't fast enough is when new software comes out that is even more resource hungry. The PC's running Tomb Raider 1 seemed fast enough at the time, but can you imagine them running even apps now? Even with smart phones them selves, iPhone 3 was great! until people started making apps that needed iPhone 4 level of resources and you started feeling your iPhone 3 was too weak... So I think we're always gonna want more power. What's the point of a modular phone if it can't run any of the latest apps? PS: I still think a modular phone would be insanely awesome! But just giving my 2 cents

beloch 13y ago

I sincerely doubt interconnects are going to be the problem the OP thinks they will. First of all, individual connectors have not changed much in size, but the serial data-rate we can push through copper connections continues to rise. Fiber optical connections are already used to implement PCIe in many applications (Thunderbolt is, in part, a fiber optical PCIe link). One huge advantage of fiber optics over copper is that you can send many data streams down a single fiber using different wavelengths and/or optical modes. This is why backbone fiber bandwidth keeps growing even over fiber links that haven't been upgraded. It's a function of what you hook up to the ends of the fiber, not the fiber itself. There is tremendous room for bandwidth growth in optical fiber. Apple definitely doesn't need to use non-standard interconnects for the new mac pros just like they didn't need to use custom connectors for SSD's in their laptops. They just wanted to.

gji 13y ago
I'm not sure fiber optics are particularly viable in the next 5-10 years as interconnects between hardware components. Adding photonics to a hardware component increases size and cost fairly significantly, which is why you don't see many fiber optic interconnects yet, even for applications where cable size is important. Moreover, to get the kind of miniaturization you would need for a cell phone, you're talking on-chip photonics (diodes and photodetectors integrated into the IC itself), which still looks like it's in the early R&D phase. Of course, most of this is probably because copper is still doing just fine in terms of bandwidth. Though some big issues with forcing huge bandwidth over few traces are latency and the additional circuitry needed to translate the signal into the actual components needed to drive RAM chips or a CPU.
- beloch 13y ago
  http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518941/intels-laser-chips-could-make-data-centers-run-better/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518941/intels-laser-chi... It's out of R&D and entering production.

pauletienney 13y ago

Kudos for the jjcm.org website.

WiseWeasel 13y ago

Seeing that computer running from inside the mobo box is like seeing pictures of frightened, malnourished animals in those Humane Society ads. Get a case, you cheap bastard! One coffee spill away from disaster...