Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
requirements in these guides were part of Microsoft's “Designed for Windows” logo re-
quirement. In other words, if you produced either a hardware or software product and you
wanted the official “Designed for Windows” logo to be on your box, your product had to
meet the PC
XX
minimum requirements.
Following are the documents that have been produced in this series:
• “Hardware Design Guide for Microsoft Windows 95”
• “Hardware Design Guide Supplement for PC 95”
• “PC 97 Hardware Design Guide”
• “PC 98 System Design Guide”
• “PC 99 System Design Guide”
• “PC 2000 System Design Guide”
• “PC 2001 System Design Guide”
These documents are available for download from the Microsoft website
Note
These guides do not mean anything directly for the end user; instead, they were meant to be
guides for PC manufacturers to design and build their systems. In some ways, they were a
market-control tool forIntel and Microsoft to further wield their influence over PC hardware
and software.
The “PC 2001 System Design Guide” is the most recent design guide produced by Mi-
crosoft and Intel together. Since then these companies have produced individual whitepa-
pers and other resources for this purpose. For updated system-design information, see the
following websites:
• The Microsoft Windows Hardware Developer Central site at
http://microsoft.com/
• The Intel Developer Center website at
http://developer.intel.com
System Types
PCs can be broken down into many categories. I like to break them down in two ways: by
thedesignorwidthoftheprocessorbus(oftencalledthe
front side bus
,or
FSB
)aswellas
by the width of the internal registers, which dictates the type of software that can be run.
When a processor reads data, the data moves into the processor via the processor's ex-
ternal data connection. Traditionally this connection has been a parallel bus; however, in
