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What your PC will look like in 2011

Posted on 13 Oct 2009 at 15:18

Find out what components you can expect to find powering your PC, laptop and server come 2011

Desktop PCs

In 2011, we’ll have the next generation of Intel’s 32nm products after Westmere, which have the umbrella codename of Sandy Bridge. It’s likely that they’ll include mainstream six-core CPUs, and possibly a 4GHz eight-core high-end desktop CPU.

The company is also on track to produce its first 22nm CPUs by the end of 2011, which could mean that even more components are integrated into the CPU, maybe even adding a cluster of basic x86 cores for graphics such as those found in Larrabee.

AMD hasn’t yet revealed a concrete timeframe for its CPUs with integrated graphics. However, if we haven’t seen them by the close of 2010, then we’d be surprised if they didn’t arrive in 2011.

Integrated graphics aren’t expected to play games at high resolutions, but a proper GPU, even if it only has a comparably low number of stream processors, could offer a big speed boost in apps optimised for GPGPU computing. By this time, OpenCL and Microsoft’s DirectX Compute API will have been doing the rounds for a year or so, so by 2011 we expect GPGPU computing to be more widely used in mainstream apps. Unless, of course, Intel’s Larrabee proves to be a runaway success...

2011 is also when Seagate’s senior engineering manager for Northern Europe technical support, Liam Rainford, predicts that the hard drive business is likely to switch from 512 byte to 4KB sectors, which means hard drives will have to access fewer sectors in order to access bigger files, possibly resulting in faster speeds and less noise.

Hard disks will also be growing in capacity thanks to a series of new technologies, such as discrete track recording. “It’s using chemicals rather than magnetic recording, so they’re doing some special things in the disk manufacturing process before the drive is assembled to lay down the tracks, which allows a far higher track density to be achieved,” Rainford claims.

Interestingly, by 2011 Rainford also sees 2.5in hard drives becoming standard in desktop PCs: not only because they’re small, but because their tiny platters require fewer revolutions per minute to achieve similar data transfer rates. By this time, 2.5in drives will likely have hit the 1TB mark, so capacity won’t be so much of an issue.

Laptops

By 2011, Intel’s grip on the laptop CPU business may have loosened, particularly when it comes to netbooks. We’re already starting to see netbooks with ARM processors, courtesy of Nvidia’s Tegra platform, and the announcement of ARM support in Google’s new Chrome OS will give the Wintel duopoly further cause for concern.

This might also encourage Nvidia to make a more powerful Tegra platform, as it wouldn’t have to worry about having an x86 licence to compete in the mobile CPU business.