The Future of Your PC
(continued)
Speed BarriersOf course, such performance advances will have to be achieved within realistic parameters. Intel's single-core CPUs experienced increasingly serious power-consumption and heat problems, speeding the demise of that architecture. Smaller, more efficient cores will continue to provide a better overall power profile than a single megachip. That's certainly positive news for notebooks, which have historically lagged behind desktop machines in performance due to heat and power constraints.AMD chief technical officer Phil Hester notes that mobility will be a major driver for the company over the next several years, and that the company's acquisition of graphics purveyor ATI will be key to this strategy. "In the 1980s, the 286 and 386 had math coprocessors separate. Eventually that was integrated into the CPU. The same thing will happen to 3D graphics...in the post-Vista time frame," he says. According to Hester, we can also expect that power management will be improved to the point where someday a device the size of a PDA should be capable of producing a PC-caliber graphics experience.The major stumbling blocks to more powerful computers, says Bautista, are elsewhere on the motherboard: Memory bandwidth must grow dramatically to keep up with the CPU, and even hard-disk input/output will have to handle faster data transfers. If you want more-realistic online gaming, "even your broadband connection may need to scale," says Bautista.And what of Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months (along with CPU processing power)? "It's still alive and well," says Bautista. He also thinks that parallel processing, which splits a workload among many cores, makes it more likely to continue. "Multiple, smaller cores are easier to build, and there's no end in sight as the manufacturing process continues to shrink. All the stars are aligned right now," he says.
LCDs: Bigger, Brighter, and Priced to MoveBy year's end, wide screens will be on 10 to 12 percent of desktops, with up to 20 percent share by the end of 2007, according to Chris Connery, vice president of market research for analysis firm DisplaySearch.The other big trend: bigger, brighter, and cheaper LCDs. Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at iSuppli, says that 78 percent of monitors were 17 inches or smaller in 2005, but she projects that by 2010 less than 20 percent of monitors will be that small. Resolution will improve as screens grow: Though only 4 percent of today's monitors feature resolution higher than SXGA (1280 by 1024), Alexander says that figure will grow to 23 percent by 2010.Screens 25 inches and larger should also become common, says Connery. In addition, thanks to LED backlights (which are hitting the market now only in superpremium displays), buyers who are willing to pay a little extra will have a brighter monitor that displays colors more accurately.What about emerging technologies like organic LED (OLED) and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS)? Both will find homes in certain niches--OLED on tiny displays like those of MP3 players and cameras, and LCoS on projector TVs--but neither is likely to make a dent on the desktop. Expect LCD products to rule for at least the next five years because of their availability and affordability.Flexible displays that can be bent or rolled, as well as electronic-ink products (see our hands-on look at Sony's Reader), will also find a piece of the market, starting in areas like grocery-store shelf price tags that can be instantly and easily updated.Touch screens will also likely become more popular for niche uses. NYU researcher Jeff Han demonstrated an impressive advancement of the technology earlier this year, in the form of a multi-touch-screen, partially gesture-based interface.
Graphics: Not Just for GamersThere's no end in sight to the PC's increasing hunger for more graphical power. As nVidia chief scientist David Kirk says, "We're years and years away from being able to do everything we'd like to be able to do."GPU manufacturers are busy preparing for DirectX 10 and its promised 8X performance improvement over DirectX 9. Expect nVidia and ATI to transition to GPUs that use unified shader architectures featuring general-purpose pipelines that can process pixels, geometry, or even physics code. Future GPUs will pile on more and more of these pipelines, enabling some truly amazing effects. Dedicated physics cards (like the Ageia PhysX accelerator), which supplement your regular graphics board, may also become more prevalent. The market will soon decide whether the GPU or a secondary processor is the best way to handle physics processing.Products like the nVidia Quadro Plex may also be a sign of the way the market is headed: The $17,000-plus device is an external graphics system that can perform up to 80 billion calculations per second, about ten times what today's top high-powered PC graphics cards can manage. Experts believe that the next generation of cards could consume up to a blazing 200 watts of power and require external components.Another emerging graphics technology, general-purpose GPU, uses the custom computing capabilities of a graphics card in a nongaming environment. Adobe has been using GPGPU for functions such as video transitions in some form since 1995.
Storage: Terabytes and BeyondHitachi senior VP Bill Healy says that if current trends hold, by 2025 a standard 3.5-inch hard drive (if any manufacturer still bothered to make models in that format) could contain up to 20 terabytes of data.Driving the immediate surge of capacity is perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which overcomes the limitations of traditional longitudinal magnetic recording and packs much more data into a far smaller physical area. The first hard drives using PMR reached market last year. Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, informed us that all of his company's upcoming hard drives will employ it.Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which allows platters to be made from materials that can support a denser number of bits, is expected early next decade. Even more of a long shot is patterned media, which forgoes a uniform layer in favor of "islands" of material that do not physically touch each other.The future of optical storage is far less certain. The current battle between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, two competing and incompatible blue-laser formats, has no clear winner in sight. "As long as there are two solutions battling it out, there will never be a critical mass established, and that will keep prices high," Gartner's Steve Kleynhans says. "You need a single standard in order to get economies of scale and broad public acceptance."Meanwhile, one potential upgrade to flash media could come in the form of ultradense probe storage, which is being developed by Seagate, among others. It's based on technology borrowed from electron microscopes, and it could well cram 10GB into a device the size of an SD Card.
LCDs: Bigger, Brighter, and Priced to MoveBy year's end, wide screens will be on 10 to 12 percent of desktops, with up to 20 percent share by the end of 2007, according to Chris Connery, vice president of market research for analysis firm DisplaySearch.The other big trend: bigger, brighter, and cheaper LCDs. Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at iSuppli, says that 78 percent of monitors were 17 inches or smaller in 2005, but she projects that by 2010 less than 20 percent of monitors will be that small. Resolution will improve as screens grow: Though only 4 percent of today's monitors feature resolution higher than SXGA (1280 by 1024), Alexander says that figure will grow to 23 percent by 2010.Screens 25 inches and larger should also become common, says Connery. In addition, thanks to LED backlights (which are hitting the market now only in superpremium displays), buyers who are willing to pay a little extra will have a brighter monitor that displays colors more accurately.What about emerging technologies like organic LED (OLED) and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS)? Both will find homes in certain niches--OLED on tiny displays like those of MP3 players and cameras, and LCoS on projector TVs--but neither is likely to make a dent on the desktop. Expect LCD products to rule for at least the next five years because of their availability and affordability.Flexible displays that can be bent or rolled, as well as electronic-ink products (see our hands-on look at Sony's Reader), will also find a piece of the market, starting in areas like grocery-store shelf price tags that can be instantly and easily updated.Touch screens will also likely become more popular for niche uses. NYU researcher Jeff Han demonstrated an impressive advancement of the technology earlier this year, in the form of a multi-touch-screen, partially gesture-based interface.Graphics: Not Just for GamersThere's no end in sight to the PC's increasing hunger for more graphical power. As nVidia chief scientist David Kirk says, "We're years and years away from being able to do everything we'd like to be able to do."GPU manufacturers are busy preparing for DirectX 10 and its promised 8X performance improvement over DirectX 9. Expect nVidia and ATI to transition to GPUs that use unified shader architectures featuring general-purpose pipelines that can process pixels, geometry, or even physics code. Future GPUs will pile on more and more of these pipelines, enabling some truly amazing effects. Dedicated physics cards (like the Ageia PhysX accelerator), which supplement your regular graphics board, may also become more prevalent. The market will soon decide whether the GPU or a secondary processor is the best way to handle physics processing.Products like the nVidia Quadro Plex may also be a sign of the way the market is headed: The $17,000-plus device is an external graphics system that can perform up to 80 billion calculations per second, about ten times what today's top high-powered PC graphics cards can manage. Experts believe that the next generation of cards could consume up to a blazing 200 watts of power and require external components.Another emerging graphics technology, general-purpose GPU, uses the custom computing capabilities of a graphics card in a nongaming environment. Adobe has been using GPGPU for functions such as video transitions in some form since 1995.Storage: Terabytes and BeyondHitachi senior VP Bill Healy says that if current trends hold, by 2025 a standard 3.5-inch hard drive (if any manufacturer still bothered to make models in that format) could contain up to 20 terabytes of data.Driving the immediate surge of capacity is perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which overcomes the limitations of traditional longitudinal magnetic recording and packs much more data into a far smaller physical area. The first hard drives using PMR reached market last year. Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, informed us that all of his company's upcoming hard drives will employ it.Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which allows platters to be made from materials that can support a denser number of bits, is expected early next decade. Even more of a long shot is patterned media, which forgoes a uniform layer in favor of "islands" of material that do not physically touch each other.The future of optical storage is far less certain. The current battle between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, two competing and incompatible blue-laser formats, has no clear winner in sight. "As long as there are two solutions battling it out, there will never be a critical mass established, and that will keep prices high," Gartner's Steve Kleynhans says. "You need a single standard in order to get economies of scale and broad public acceptance."Meanwhile, one potential upgrade to flash media could come in the form of ultradense probe storage, which is being developed by Seagate, among others. It's based on technology borrowed from electron microscopes, and it could well cram 10GB into a device the size of an SD Card. Content by:
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