What your PC will look like in 2012

Posted on 13 Oct 2009 at 15:44

Laptops

By 2012, SSDs with decent capacities will be a common sight in laptops. “I would be surprised if SSD hadn’t taken over from mechanical storage in the high-end notebook segment in that timeframe,” said Corsair’s John Beekley.

By the end of the year, Seagate’s Liam Rainford claims that we’ll be able to get 1.5TB onto a 2.5in laptop drive. However, by this time these drives will only be found in top-end laptops, and we’re far more likely to see smaller hard drives and SSDs in mainstream portables.
It’s also worth asking whether we can expect multitouch to become a standard feature on laptops in this timeframe?

Windows 7 will bring integrated multitouch features by the end of 2009, and companies such as N-Trig have already developed multitouch devices that will fit in front of a standard LCD (as seen in HP’s current TouchSmart machines), so it’s certainly a possibility.

“Touch is not a novelty,” said HP’s chief technology officer, Phil McKinney. “It’s a long-term play for a broad set of users.” However, even McKinney is circumspect of touch becoming the predominant method of interacting with PCs, claiming that it’s most likely to succeed in several well-defined niches.

“People are mounting them [touchscreen PCs] in kitchens, and in areas where they can quickly check the weather, and so on. They’re also very popular in [university] dorm rooms,” he said.

Laptops could be receiving data at well above today’s 3G speeds by 2012. Ericsson recently demonstrated Long Term Evolution (LTE), a potential successor to today’s HSDPA. Ericsson has achieved transfer rates of 150Mbits/sec in lab tests, although the company claims there’s plenty of room for improvement.

“Our roadmap will see us move from 150Mbits/sec to 300Mbits/sec, and then 600Mbits/sec during the first phase of LTE,” John Cunliffe, Ericsson’s chief technology officer told us. “Advanced LTE will top 1Gbits/sec, that’s the real 4G technology, but that’s a long way off.”

Servers

As with desktops and laptops, no concrete facts are known about what 2012 holds for servers, but it’s highly likely that Intel’s move to a 22nm process at the end of 2011 will result in significant advances. 16-core server processors may well have become standard, and the core count may even go beyond this.

With demand for parallelism increasing, it’s also worth considering whether GPGPU computing could make a significant impact on the server industry. AMD’s FireStream cards and Nvidia’s Tesla cards are already making their way into parallel computing clusters in standard-sized racks, and although the server industry is currently CPU-orientated, this may change by 2012.

On the storage front, Seagate predicts that 2.5in hard drives will hit the 1.5TB capacity mark and SSDs will start to become standard in servers.

PC 2010 and beyond

What your PC will look like in 2010

What your PC will look like in 2011

Author: Ben Hardwidge