Predictions...

those are some pretty crazy predictions. the only thing i am predicting is well, i don't know. i mean, hard drives are fine for me, flash memory is nice, e.g. using it on PDA's so you have instant on possibilities, my display is fine, unless i want a tablet pc, my cpu fits my life just fine, maybe in a few years i'll have that new one conroe er whatever, BUT what i really want is:

WATER COOLING! sure, heat pipes work great, but let's take it a step further with something like a micro water cooling system. that's what i'm interested in

Why don't you pick me some loto numbers while you're at it.

Water cooling, yea sure, then when the tubes burst because you accidentally dropped your laptop or just happen to be insecure, you have a new moist paper weight!

lol, i remember i did a search for a water cooled laptop and found one. it had the reservoir in the display. it looked pretty neat. idk, i guess it's gonna be heat pipes for awhile.

Not to mention you'll need a dolly to cart it around.

Water cooled desktop makes alot of sense. No need for noisy fans. It would have made sense that the XB360 used water coolers because I heard that the fans can get noisy.

I know the future. Not because I have magical abilities, but because everything on the world has been made by an inventor and I am one of them.

In the future (I'm talking about 4-5 years from here) all computers will be laptops. At least mainstream systems.

Laptop computers are the next logical step in computing evolution. They offer today almost all the performance and certainly all the functionality of a desktop computer, but requiere far less energy to do so. Energy is an important concern in the modern world.

But laptops are portable and is a feature that no desktop can offer, for any price. They come with an integrated battery that not only powers the system when not plugged, but reduces data loss due to power failure. This is, an integrated UPS.

Laptop computers come with flat screens as default. Flat screens are geometrically perfect and don't flicker. It's just a matter of time until they find a way to represnt the full color spectrum, provide same viewing angles as a CRT and offer a low response time.

All current drawbacks of laptop computers will be worked out. For example:

Batteries degrade today and need to be replaced, but on the future, there will be batteries that will not only not degrade, but will hold much more energy also. Combined with a reduced power consumption, most laptops will remain on for at least 12 hours, maybe a whole day with power saving techniques. However, the most important advantage will be that batteries will charge much quicker, making battery life a small concern.

Laptop screens dim out with time, but new technologies will come out to solve it. Current screens have CCFL lamps inside, but in the next year they are going to introduce led backlights and screens will no longer dim, at least not in a reasonable time. CCFL requiere inverters wich are very inneficient and produce heat. LEDs work on direct current and are far more efficient, so power consumption and heat will be reduced dramatically.

About screens, there are more technologies around. Some people around the world has been working on screens wich don't requiere any power to show a picture, only when you want to modify it.

But here comes something that you will not hear from anyone else.

Laptop computers aren't widespread yet because they suffer from two drawbacks: they are expensive and they are generally not upgradeable.

I've found a way to increase the processing power of a computer by at least ten times, and still make it possible to build a laptop CPU (CPU = the whole base, not only the processor) that consumes about 5 watts. I will not disclose details here, but I will tell you some important information.

It doesn't matter how fast your processor, graphics card and memory is. If, at the end, you have a slow storage device (hard drive for example) your computer WILL slow down. A computer always runs at the speed of it's slowest component.

So the core of the platform I'm working on is a new storage device that is neither a hard drive nor flash memory. Yet it provides bandwidth similar to current RAM (1GB/s).

That will make systems well rounded again and those computers, despite their true processing power, will seem instantaneous, like working in a THz system.

The second platform goal will be upgradeability. Let me tell you that I once heard a joke from someone about "downloading" a X850XT. He was downloading a X850XT BIOS to flash it on a X800GT02 and get "free performance". Well, that time has come true.

If you have a system that has so much processing power, so much memory bandwidth, so much storage performance, why in this hell you need dedicated hardware? Isn't it better to create virtual, software devices and let them run on the system? When a technology gets "old", instead of throwing your system away, you simply put a newer software on it a gain both performance and functionality.

It will be focused on software development, rather than hardware upgrades. That is not only cheaper, but is ecologically correct. World resources are finite and it doesn't matter how stupid or arrogant are we to admit it; no money will allow us to remain at the same level of consumption for a long time. It will be open source.

Also, the technology is so simple that it will make it possible to build such systems for, say, $500.

I'm not willing to proove this to anyone; it's up to you to belive me or not. Once Marconni was called mad because he wanted to radio trough the ocean, and we all watch TV today.

Quantum Computer - something the size of a laptop and faster than the IBM Blue Gene! But thats 10 - 15 years away.

For 2011:

22nm process and multicore ultra low voltage processors
Solid state hard drives via sata 4 (1200mbps) and "well into terrabyte capacity" Not sure why you need that capacity but hey.
oled screens perhaps holographic
Fuel cell batteries or something better than that current rubbish today. I am told to expect 24 hour life!
Not too sure about RAM, may be done away with - completely different architecture than today
Optical drive. Probably wont be there, if there is it will be holographic or blu-ray2 (2160p - 2x 1080p)
Wireless USB

There will be a lot more changes in the next 5 years than the previous 5 we have had since 2000. Change is exponential.

Forgot wireless: Only know about 4g - coming online late 2010. Update to 3g's hsupa in 08. Speed, 100mbps moving or 1gbps still!
Wimax, maybe 2 or 3rd gen.
Successor to dvi, cant remember the name of it! but no doubt it support insane resolutions whuxga (7680×4800 and 37m pixels!!)
Graphics cards, dont have a clue.

Don't be too overzealous in your predictions -- the real word has a tendancy to not be so smooth.


I'll admit i didnt read everyword of all the above posts but i did catch this:

This statement is only half true. Yes, your performance will be bottlenecked when performing actions dependent on that device. Hard drives, in your particular example, are the _loading_ (Opening programs, loading levels in games, booting up XP etc.) bottleneck. In brute performance, if im using a 4300 RPM 15 gig drive or a 15,000k 140 gig Fujitsu Cheetah (like $1,000 a drive) in superPI (or compiling a program, or finding prime numbers etc.) i'll get the same performance. Why? Because it uses the processor and ram -- no HD required. Thus, the statement the computer will have "ten times the processing power" may be true, I don't know the specifics of your invention -- however it will not be because of your new storage device.

It was once said, that the man is the measure of all things.

There are many kinds of computing systems and personal computers are a kind that is meant for user interaction. So, while raw data processing power is important, the real measure for it's performance is the latency; in the sense of how much time it takes to obey a given order.

PCs, as we know them today, posses various asymetric layers in wich data is processed. They are progresively slower. Here is a simple example to illustrate it:

Altough it varies, a processor is theroically able to peform 3.5 GIPS if it runs at 3.5 GHz. However, it never happens because it cannot be feed with enough data to process it. This is, most of the time the processor is idle.

Bandwidth is a good measure to show the bottleneck:

CPU: 28 GB/s
L1 cache: 10 GB/s
L2 cache: 2.8 GB/s
RAM: 1.5 GB/s
HD: 80 MB/s

It is often said that a processor has "sophisticated data prediction units that keep the cache with useful data 95% of the time". However, what they don't tell you is what happens when you hit that 5%.

In the example above, RAM is 20 times slower as the processor. So if the processor depends on the RAM 5% of the time, it means that the real wait time is 5x20 = 100%...? Just imagine what happens with a layer that is nearly 500 times slower.

So you start to see the difference between "machine time" and "user time". That's why most benchmark results are useless: they focus on data crunching and nothing more.

Altough my storage device DOES make the platform faster, it is not ten times faster due to it. It's the whole platform what is capable of processing data faster, and perhaps even much more than ten times.