What are the big technologies/changes coming (or need to come) for computers?

[GWestphal]

What are some technologies or changes coming to computers in the coming years?


I'll start:

Memristors and storage-10x lower power consumption and higher bit density with faster frequencies.

I've heard that x86 is kind of kludgy in it's implementations, lots of hacks apparently, and legacy 16 bit stuff. I wonder how much performance could be improved by updating x86. I don't know how much about that so someone enlighten me.

Multicore/GPU-computing of course is starting to take off.

EFI- getting rid of the legacy BIOS would be a great step towards modernizing and cutting legacy out of hardware.

Integrated SSD chips with integrated SATA controllers like those announced by Sandisk. Having built in SSD storage on motherboards would be great.

I'd like to see lower thermal profiles in both cpu's and gpu's because these dual slot solutions are getting ridiculous.

Couldn't motherboard connectors be shrunk? I see no reason why a PCI-Express slot needs to be 3 inches long. I understand the logic and ram on the pcb takes space, but make the connector smaller and maybe think of a new format instead of the current slot/card system. Then there is more room for integrated storage etc, new specialized mutlicore co-processors etc. Maybe some sort of module based system with integrated cooling and sound damping.

Longer battery life using super caps or the like would be interesting.

LightPeak/general purpose optical interconnects- having a single cable standard that could be used for everything that can't be wireless.

New RAID formats-RAID 5 is starting to hit limits of the intrinsic error rates during a rebuild. Some new safe parity method is needed.

 

[Ben90]

Integrated SSD chips with integrated SATA controllers like those announced by Sandisk. Having built in SSD storage on motherboards would be great.

I'd like to see lower thermal profiles in both cpu's and gpu's because these dual slot solutions are getting ridiculous.

Why would having integrated flash chips be a good thing? Flash memory isn't going to magically get cheaper because its included with the motherboard. Also SSDs require multiple flash chips to reach the speeds they are. Unless you dedicate a crapton of room on the motherboard, the integrated flash is just going to slow down a real SSD and cost money doing it.

I personally wish the 130W TDP "limit" from the CPU camp would be removed. If you don't want to have the cooling to dissipate 250W from a CPU, then just get the 130W slower processor.

 

[Modelworks]

One is power supply format. It is going to become one voltage output instead of the 12V, 5V, 3.3V we have now . Switching circuits have matured to the point that it isn't necessary to provide all those voltages anymore except for legacy use. There really is nothing in the pc now that uses those voltages except fans, everything is converted to something else.

The problem with the PC is its need to support legacy items. Doing away with anything considered the slightest bit useful is viewed as bad no matter how small the percentage of people that would use the feature are.


Look for more task the pc performs to move to dedicated devices. Gaming is primarily consoles now. HTPC was a pc strong point but is moving rapidly to set top boxes with over 30 of them on the market in last two years. People are now able to do more with phones and tablets that before required the pc.

ARM could be a huge player in the pc market and their design and format could change the pc way of doing things . ARM believes in letting dedicated hardware perform functions vs having a general purpose cpu do all the work using software. On a pc to process sound in an editing application we use software and the cpu. On ARM it would be some software running on the cpu but mostly a hardware DSP doing the work. On PC we run java on the cpu, on ARM the cpu has a dedicated module for it.

 

[gevorg]

- hurry up with USB 3.0 and Displayport

- redesign BIOS, its ancient

- cloud computing for casual users (i.e. just monitor + keyboard/mouse)

 

[GWestphal]

I don't see why integrating an SSD onto the motherboard would affect another drive?

I was referring to this.

http://www.sandisk.com/about-sandis...ve%E2%80%94first-in-new-embedded-ssd-category

 

[bryanl]

None of those changes will bring large improvements in performance.

We need much higher levels of parallel processing and ways to implement it well.

 

[Eeqmcsq]

I'd like to see a push towards the "silent PC". Today, SSDs eliminate the crunching sound of the HDD, but there's still the CPU fan, PSU fan, and case fan. I'm sure there are ways to build the silent PC if you put enough energy into researching for the right parts, but I'd like the use of quiet and silent components become a trend.

There's always the need to improve the storage density of SSD flash to drive down the $/GB.

Looking at my micro ATX and mini ITX boards, I see a lot of integrated components: video, audio, gigabit LAN. Anything else we can integrate into the motherboard? Wifi? Bluetooth? Hardware RAID? Hmm, how about an integrated TV tuner?

CPUs are plenty fast today with lots of cores to handle parallel tasks. Where to next? I guess an improvement in low power CPUs like the Intel Atom, VIA Nano, and the AMD Bobcat. I'd like to see the performance of today's Athlon IIs at much lower TDPs and power draw.

 

[Jeff7]

I've heard some good things about graphene-based processors, though that stuff seems to be in the early experimental stages. They're talking about things like traces only 1 atom thick.

...
CPUs are plenty fast today with lots of cores to handle parallel tasks. Where to next? I guess an improvement in low power CPUs like the Intel Atom, VIA Nano, and the AMD Bobcat. I'd like to see the performance of today's Athlon IIs at much lower TDPs and power draw.

I'd like to see some software that can actually use those cores. I use Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4.0 at work on a dual dual-core Xeon system. It can only use one core, so the best I see is 25% CPU usage. From what I've seen, Wildfire 5.0 offers very minimal improvements on multicore systems, maybe around 5%, so it sounds like it's still not truly multicore capable.

My experience has been that lot of software was never written or compiled (or whatever needs to be done to it) for it to make use of multiple cores.

New RAID formats-RAID 5 is starting to hit limits of the intrinsic error rates during a rebuild. Some new safe parity method is needed.

I was reading this thread about that problem.
Kind of sucks, I've got a RAID5 setup with 4 1TB drives, and was considering upping the things to 2TB.
You'd think that something might be done about this by the manufacturers, particularly considering that this card specifically advertises that it works with drives >2TB.
It sounds like it'll work just fine - until you need to rebuild the array.:\ That's one of those tiny things that kind of severely breaks the product.

 

[dfuze]

Besides things that others have stated, I can't wait for Cat5 to replace HDMI; much more flexible, slimmer, and easy to make custom length.