NVIDIA Introduces ESA - Enthusiast System Architecture
by Wesley Fink on November 5, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Who Is Supporting ESA?
The list of ESA supporters will always be in development, but the list of companies who have agreed to support the new ESA standard is already impressive.
The fact that both HP and Dell - the top two PC makers in the world - have already signed on for support of ESA will certainly go a long way to ensure its success. Supporters also include top enthusiast PC makers like Falcon Northwest and Alienware. Tier One motherboard manufacturers ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI are also ESA supporters, as well as a wide cross section of power supply manufacturers and cooler companies.
This level of industry support bodes well for the future of ESA as a standard for the computer enthusiast. Time will tell if the standard becomes even more widely adopted. If it does, you will see the supporter list grow exponentially.
Industry Comments
"The industry-standard device communication protocol provided with ESA enables a rich set of tools for tuning PC hardware performance. These tools offer PC enthusiasts more flexible and granular control over primary system support components. For example, the ESA standard communication method is used in Dell's unique LightFX architecture, and will help accelerate development of deeply immersive ambient lighting in PC games."
- Kevin Kettler, PhD (CTO), DELL
"ESA is a communication protocol that ties together all the key aspects of a system. But more significant to HP is the fact that we can potentially use ESA enabled technology to create a unique and immediately noticeable experience benefit to our customers."
- Rahul Sood, CTO HP Global Gaming Business, HP
"Falcon Northwest has been bullish on the ESA concept from the start. Tying together information and control from disparate PC components has never been possible until ESA. We're looking forward to building ESA-enabled systems that will give our tech-savvy clientèle a new level of feedback and tweaking for Falcon PCs."
- Kelt Reeves, Falcon Northwest
"In addition to the awesome capabilities provided to hardware enthusiasts, ESA also offers system builders an efficient mechanism for debugging the hardware inside systems. In the past, this has been an arduous and almost Herculean-task. ESA is proving to be instrumental in helping us reduce overall support costs."
- Wallace Santos, Maingear
The list of ESA supporters will always be in development, but the list of companies who have agreed to support the new ESA standard is already impressive.
The fact that both HP and Dell - the top two PC makers in the world - have already signed on for support of ESA will certainly go a long way to ensure its success. Supporters also include top enthusiast PC makers like Falcon Northwest and Alienware. Tier One motherboard manufacturers ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI are also ESA supporters, as well as a wide cross section of power supply manufacturers and cooler companies.
This level of industry support bodes well for the future of ESA as a standard for the computer enthusiast. Time will tell if the standard becomes even more widely adopted. If it does, you will see the supporter list grow exponentially.
Industry Comments
"The industry-standard device communication protocol provided with ESA enables a rich set of tools for tuning PC hardware performance. These tools offer PC enthusiasts more flexible and granular control over primary system support components. For example, the ESA standard communication method is used in Dell's unique LightFX architecture, and will help accelerate development of deeply immersive ambient lighting in PC games."
- Kevin Kettler, PhD (CTO), DELL
"ESA is a communication protocol that ties together all the key aspects of a system. But more significant to HP is the fact that we can potentially use ESA enabled technology to create a unique and immediately noticeable experience benefit to our customers."
- Rahul Sood, CTO HP Global Gaming Business, HP
"Falcon Northwest has been bullish on the ESA concept from the start. Tying together information and control from disparate PC components has never been possible until ESA. We're looking forward to building ESA-enabled systems that will give our tech-savvy clientèle a new level of feedback and tweaking for Falcon PCs."
- Kelt Reeves, Falcon Northwest
"In addition to the awesome capabilities provided to hardware enthusiasts, ESA also offers system builders an efficient mechanism for debugging the hardware inside systems. In the past, this has been an arduous and almost Herculean-task. ESA is proving to be instrumental in helping us reduce overall support costs."
- Wallace Santos, Maingear
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nullpointerus - Tuesday, November 6, 2007 - link
I know this is off-topic, but off-hand I do not know of any other way to reach AT staff.Most people in the Video forum were optimistic and open-minded about DirectX 10 and the performance/IQ claims made by Microsoft, yet most of the new games and demos introduced this year have a huge performance hit with little or no perceived IQ improvements. Hellgate London is the only game I've heard of where the performance benefits are said to be realized. Every other DX10 game/demo has been disappointing.
Unfortunately, every game seems to have different sets of issues related to DX10, leading to a variety of conflicting theories with no solid evidence.
It would be great if Anandtech published a realistic DX10 article describing the cause of the performance hit and highlighting any IQ improvements in upcoming/shipping games.
kobymu - Monday, November 5, 2007 - link
Fixed :)
erwos - Monday, November 5, 2007 - link
The return for nVidia is:1. Prestige.
2. Major influence on a new standard.
It's hard to write negative things about new standards, generally because they're invented to solve problems. Criticizing them for not having the software/hardware stack completely lined-up and out the door is ludicrous - these things take time. Would you prefer to be completely blind-sided by a new stack of things you've never heard of before coming out tomorrow?
Have you ever been involved with formulating a new standard for anything? There's nothing unusual going on here.
Regs - Monday, November 5, 2007 - link
I don't care about the graphics.I do care if the interface is easy to use and the program is written and supported accurately enough that it won't make my system unstable.
We all have different systems, drivers, software, and Os's. If they still struggle to uniform games to work stable enough on all our systems, then I have major worries about programs that intend to plug-in and control such vital operations such as cooling, voltage control, and others.
defter - Monday, November 5, 2007 - link
Read the article, ESA is an open platform. You are free to write an own small, fast, non-bloated application that utilizes ESA.mlau - Monday, November 5, 2007 - link
"open" can mean anything these days -- just look at Microsofts "OpenXML": it's theusual binary dump of their office formats with XML tags wrapped around (and the name
is pure marketing genius: combine two of the most recognizable buzzwords in the IT
industry and voila!)
emboss - Monday, November 5, 2007 - link
Indeed. PCI is an "open standard" yet you have to pay four figures to (legally) get a copy of it. Not to mention that there are many other "open standards" that have licencing fees.Given that NVidia only have a "contact us" link for getting hold of it, and given NVidia's history of secrecy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one or both of these situations applied here. I've fired off an email but I'm not holding my breath ...
emboss - Thursday, November 8, 2007 - link
FWIW, NVidia have still not gotten back to me about it. Seems to indicate that their "open" standard is as open as Windows. What a surprise.