The Future of Computer

Last year was pretty healthy for us techies. The laptop mania took over unlike anything before. The price of laptops have gone down from being gazillions (figuratively, considering the fact that we teens are almost always broke), to a reasonable price of 30 to 40 grand. Previous year have also seen the rise in popularity and fall in the prices of Dual core CPU's. Not to mention the availability of numerous entertainment devices and digital imaging devices in Bangladesh. So now we are going to look forward to some of the new innovations that maybe unveiled in the world of computer, both hardware and software.

The rise of multi-core CPU.WE have had our honeymoon with the Core 2 Duo and the Athlon FX dual cores. But expect something more, radically powerful in 2009. Later last year, Intel unveiled the core i7 line of CPU. Although initially it featured 4 cores (similar to Core 2 Quad), you can expect this baby to pump up with more cores. The experts are saying that as much as 32 cores can be put into a single chip, especially with some new nano-scale technology knocking on the door. The i7 also has a brand new architecture that increases its throughput by as much as 5 to 8 times a previous generation CPU.

Time to trash that computer .......... Again Kill'em All graphicsIn the beginning of last year, I have talked about the inclusion of physics engines in graphics cards that will add a new dimension in gameplay. The latest generation ATI and nvidia cards have done just that. So what is next for the gaming hardware industry? You guessed it, it is bringing the game processing closer to super-computing capabilities and add virtual realism in it. Already, scientists have started using some of these graphics cards for massive parallel computing like super-computers (called CUDA technology).

2009 will also see the unveiling of DirectX 10.1. Although it is a small increment to hugely successful DirectX10, but you can expect all kinds of bells and whistles and really rich high end graphics on your screen. The latest ATI 4000 and Nvidia 9000 series cards contain hundreds of stream processors to allow parallel processing of specialized graphics instruction. Talking about high end graphics, make sure you have saved enough to shift to an HDMI monitor, cos that is the future of display that these new generation cards are going to support.

Go Solid.There has been a revolution in storage devices. Modern day laptops no longer come equipped with some rotating disk inside, but comes shipped with a high capacity solid state disk. Industry giants are researching on a new ground breaking technology called memristors that can store terabytes of information for the fraction of electricity consumption and a several hundred times faster than traditional HDD or memory. These chips will be become commercially available and will be far cheaper than existing storage technologies when it hits the market.

Another story in the storage frontier is the implementation of USB 3.0 standards. It is said that USB 3.0 will have transfer rates of Gigabytes. The market is expecting the first of these USB 3.0 protocol devices to come by middle of 2009.
And other tiny-miny things that will happen to your PC
I have talked about the major changes that will be implemented by this year.

Scientists are almost also ready to say goodbye to your handy dandy mouse as new technology such as expression and gesture recognition are coming soon. Already HP released a tablet PC that will respond to your finger gestures (similar to iPhone, but a lot more capable).

In addition to that, experts are also planning to say goodbye to your old DVD drives and writers as Blu-Ray is expected to be the de-facto transfer device for digital entertainment. Although some experts are saying that the whole need for media devices will disappear within a few years as more and more people are downloading media from internet. Too sad we are nowhere near that happening to us anytime soon.

In the next part I will bring forward to some of the changes you can expect in world of entertainment technology.