What your PC will look like in 2012

Posted on 13 Oct 2009 at 15:44

Find out what components you can expect to find powering your PC, laptop and server come 2012

Desktop

Once we reach 2012, we get beyond what companies are willing to talk about in terms of specific products, but there are still definite trends that we’re going to see come to the fore.

With smaller motherboards, hard drives and PC cases, most PCs found in businesses, lounges and bedrooms are going to be much smaller than today’s machines. We’re already seeing tiny machines such as the Acer Aspire Revo based on Nvidia’s Ion platform. However, by 2012, all-in-one PCs are likely to be much more commonplace.

That’s not to say that the traditional tower PC is going to die out. Intel’s Stephen Smith predicts that these will remain as “enthusiast PCs” for people who want add-in graphics cards and multiple storage bays. But demand from OEMs is now shifting towards “lower-power processors and physically smaller motherboards,” Smith claims.

Smith also suggests we’ll see a lot more in the way of SODIMMs being used in desktop PCs, but will memory have evolved beyond DDR3? Probably not. Smith points out that “you tend to find five-year timeframes between major memory transitions”. Even so, we should know what DDR4 is capable of by 2012.

PC storage is also likely to look very different by then. Seagate’s Liam Rainford predicts that we’ll have capacities of 6.5TB in standard 3.5in hard drives at this stage, but these sorts of capacities are only likely to appeal to niche markets.

All of the experts we spoke to agreed that extremely high capacities in PCs have now reached a plateau, particularly in mainstream PCs. People who need large amounts of storage will be able to get it, but by 2012 it’s likely that many people will be using a combination of an SSD and hard drive.

“SSD will co-exist with mechanical storage in desktops for the short term,” said Corsair’s John Beekley, “with SSDs used as performance-centric primary boot drives, and cheap mechanical drives for bulk data storage.”

By 2012, we can also expect USB thumb drives to have progressed in terms of capacity and price to the point where both optical storage and external hard drives are no longer necessary for most people. Kingston has already launched a 256GB thumb drive, and Beekley says that “it’s certainly possible that USB flash drives could render external mechanical disk backup products obsolete” within the next three years.

It’s also likely that Blu-ray writers will have overtaken the standard DVD writer in mainstream PCs, and we should also have finally seen the appearance of InPhase’s holographic storage system.