AMD Announces DTX Open Standard for SFF PCs

AMD Announces Development of DTX Open Standard to Help Enable Broad Adoption of Small Form Factor PCs — Specification Is Intended to Help OEMs and ODMs Innovate and Deliver Smaller, Quieter, Desktop-Friendly PCs

AMD has announced development of DTX, an open standard specification designed by AMD to enable the broad adoption of small form factor PCs.

The DTX standard will take advantage of the existing ATX infrastructure and benefits, including cost efficiency, system options and backward-compatibility, to allow for ground-breaking PC design. A review copy of the DTX specifications is planned to be made available by AMD in Q1 2007.

“As a customer-centric company, AMD is constantly evaluating platforms and working with its ecosystem partners to bring innovation to the market in a way that minimizes disruption,” said Bob Brewer, corporate vice president, Desktop Division, AMD. “To help meet this need, AMD is taking the initiative to define an open standard for small form factor designs. The DTX specification will be designed to allow the broad ecosystem to develop small form factor solutions and deliver new, innovative and cost-effective systems to both businesses and consumers.”

OEMs will also be able to enjoy the inherent cost benefits of standardization. With the DTX open standard specification, the potential exists for the small form factor market to reap the similar benefits to what the ATX standard has done for the desktop market in recent years.

DTX will be designed to provide improved motherboard layout standardization, while being sensitive to the needs of OEMs, ODMs, and component vendors. As the desktop market moves to lower thermal design power (TDP) processors and works to lower costs, an eye to balancing interchangeability of components with small form factor products becomes critical. In addition, DTX chassis vendors can help mitigate the financial risk associated with proprietary small form factor designs by offering DTX-standard products to the channel, in either component form or as bare-bones systems. The general DTX specification will only define a minimum set of parameters necessary for interoperability, freeing vendors to innovate.

* DTX, which will allow up to four motherboards – for low cost – per standard printed circuit board manufacturing panel sizes; and
* Mini-DTX, which will allow up to six motherboards – for low cost – per standard printed circuit board manufacturing panel sizes;
* DTX motherboards can be manufactured in as few as four-layers of printed circuit board wiring for motherboard cost savings.
* By leveraging backward-compatibility with ATX infrastructure, vendors may gain a low-cost DTX product offering with little development expense.

“ASUS is pleased to work with AMD again to bring more innovation on desktop solutions, leveraging production efficiencies that will be available with the open DTX standard,” said Joe Hsieh, Vice President of ASUS MB Business Unit. “Together with ASUS’ excellent design and manufacturing ability, end users will enjoy a sleek and cool desktop computing experience using our motherboards.”

“We applaud AMD’s commitment to open standards in developing specifications that enable powerful system options and is backward-compatible with the existing ATX infrastructure,” said Norman Tsai, EPS Sales vice president, MSI. “MSI is dedicated to enabling customers to deliver innovative systems with minimal requirements or disruptions.”