Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 4

Lecta - The '03 PC

We introduced you to the Lecta platform in our Day 3 coverage of IDF and now we're able to bring you some pictures from inside the case.

First and foremost you can tell that Lecta isn't a big design at all; the chassis is designed to be very compact and you can already tell that it's not as small as it could possibly be. With innovations such as a reduced size power supply with a greater power density the design could be reduced even more. That will come in due time but the fact that this is a 2003 concept design is definitely impressive. Seeing this brings an appreciation of exactly how far innovation has taken us in the past decade, remember the cases our 286s and 386s came in?

The rear of Lecta also tells a story we've been waiting to hear - it's truly legacy free. There are no serial ports, no parallel port and no less than 8 USB 2.0 ports; this achieved using a USB 2.0 hub in conjunction with Intel's ICH4 that's present on the motherboard (ICH4 features an integrated USB 2.0 controller that supports 6 ports).

There's an onboard 10/100 Ethernet port and the antenna sticking out of the case is an 802.11a wireless receiver.

Inside this '03 concept PC is a flash memory card reader as well as a Serial ATA hard drive. By 2003 the transition to Serial ATA should be in full force.

You can see by the profile of the Lecta concept PC that there aren't many cables running around. Remember that in the keynote where Lecta was demonstrated the CPU was moved to the front of the chassis which isn't the case (no pun intended) here. By the time the Lecta prototype is complete you can expect that along with many other modifications to be made.

Delving a bit deeper into the case we see two things: ICH4 on the left which will be making its public debut later this year in Intel chipsets, and a Silicon Image Serial ATA controller which is driving the Serial ATA hard drive. The DVD-RW present in the system isn't Serial ATA mainly because of a present lack of Serial ATA devices that should change by 2003.