WinHEC 2005: Day 2

Auxiliary Displays

Another item we took a little closer look at on day 2 was the auxiliary display demonstration. The premise of the auxiliary display is to provide some amount of useful content to a user while his or her computer is powered down. With the auxiliary display being tied directly into power and Longhorn providing the capability for the display to access certain content on the system, we can have email clients, schedulers, and even media players running while the system is off.



Preliminary auxiliary display drivers have already been provided to IHVs by Microsoft, and we hope to see many different implementations come out of this idea. The major use Microsoft has in mind for this technology is in the lid of notebooks in order to deliver even faster access to mobile data. If Microsoft can eventually get the auxiliary display to access wireless network interface cards, they will be able to display whether or not a wireless access point is in range as well as the signal strength.



Some of the concept designs we saw were not as interesting as we would have liked. The few that looked intriguing combined Bluetooth devices and auxiliary display technology to produce kind of interactive remotes for the PC.

Our favorite idea built around the auxiliary display is as a diagnostic tool for the server environment. The auxiliary display isn't restricted to power off usage, and it can be used as a fast, lightweight interface to headless servers in a corporate environment. Monitoring the status of a system where the auxiliary display is built as a diagnostic tool could help make system administrators' lives easier. This is especially true in cases where systems have crashed/hardlocked and the admin needs to find out what went wrong. As auxiliary displays will be tied to the SMBus and will always be powered, system designers have the opportunity to add some excellent diagnostic and management tools to their products.