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Ten techs to watch in 2009

Posted on 2 Jan 2009 at 12:29

3. FIBRE BROADBAND
Britain has waited a long time for the first green shoots of a fibre network to appear, but 2009 is the year it could happen. BT will begin trials of its fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology next summer, which will form the cornerstone of its plans to bring fibre to ten million homes by 2011. Two lucky locations - Muswell Hill in London and Whitchurch in Cardiff - will be the first to benefit from broadband speeds of up to 40Mbits/sec over the BT network.

BT is restricting the faster and more expensive fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) for new builds, offering speeds of up to 100Mbits/sec. But wily competitors such as H2O will be offering similar speeds to Britain's soon-to-be-crowned Broadband Capital: Bournemouth. How? By running fibre through sewer ducts, saving on the enormous cost of digging up roads. The Bournemouth rollout won't be complete until the end of next year, but the company claims it should be able to switch on customers as it goes, giving us a firm indication of whether such innovative builds could work. If only BT was prepared to show such boldness...

Meanwhile, Virgin Media's cable network will be connecting more people to its 50Mbits/sec service over the course of 2009, heaping more pressure on BT to accelerate its fibre rollout, and perhaps encouraging other telcos to consider competitive fibre networks of their own. We live, as ever, in hope.

4. GPGPU/HYBRID SLI
Graphics cards have previously been gaming territory, with hardly any desktop apps making use of the ferocious power on offer from Nvidia and ATI's latest chips. Next year, however, could see a huge shift in the way discrete graphics cards are used across a vast range of apps.

GPGPU is the process of using a discrete graphics card for tasks that previously would have been handled by the CPU, thereby allowing the huge number of stream processors on modern cards to handle operations that a processor's two or four cores would struggle with.

Nvidia's CUDA and ATI's CTM are just two technologies that should allow for
a huge range of apps to run using the GPU. Photoshop CS4 already takes advantage of CUDA, allowing even integrated graphics chipsets to spin 3GB images like a coin. Intensive calculation tasks, such as Folding@Home, complex grid computing and HD video processing all benefit from GPGPU and, in the coming year, it's easy to see why this could become an important technology.

Hybrid SLI is another area where graphics are becoming more versatile - this time in laptops. Apple's new MacBook Pro sees Nvidia's surprisingly powerful GeForce 9400M integrated chip partnered with the discrete GeForce 9600M GT - so you can use the powerful GPU for intensive tasks at the expense of battery life, and fall back to the integrated chip when you don't need so much graphical grunt.

This arrangement is set to be introduced by more major manufacturers before long, and is certainly a better solution than having to choose between a feeble integrated chip and a battery-devouring discrete card.

5. SSDs
Solid-state drives are increasingly showing up as options on laptops and netbooks, and with major companies including SanDisk, Samsung and Intel launching increasingly capacious consumer drives it's clear the technology is in the ascendant.

SSDs offer a host of advantages over regular platter-based drives. The most obvious benefit is speed: memory chips never need to spin up, and they can locate a piece of data in nanoseconds, rather than the milliseconds we're used to from even high-speed desktop units. In real-world usage a good SSD can deliver twice the performance of a typical hard disk, letting the host PC run faster and more smoothly.