Your future PC

Let’s have a look in the crystal ball and predict how your future PC will look like in a few years.

Your CPU has 16 cores, runs at 3 GHz and embeds 128 MB of memory. You’ve packed 32 GB of memory, which reaches peak transfer rates of 20GB/s.

Integrated on your mainboard are 256 GB solid-state memory, providing throughput of more than 1.5 GB/s. In addition, you have two more 1 TB solid-state PCI Express II cards, which reach about 1 GB/s.

You plug your 128 GB USB-stick into your PC via USB 3.0, with transfer rates above 600 MB/s, copying its complete content in less then four minutes.

Your display is connected via DisplayPort, giving your a resolution of 4 four times Full HD, finally getting you the quality of the original movie tapes. The display is also only half an inch thick – handy.

What does your crystal ball show? What did I miss?

-Jörn

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  1. AMIGrAve

    Yes but, will it run Linux ? 😉

  2. alektraunic

    why have built in storage at all?
    http://www.dpreview.com/news/0901/09010803sdxc.asp

    I think my PC will have more in common with a modern game console than a desktop computer, i will carry a few SDXC in my wallet and work on whatever machine i happen to be sitting at

  3. @AMIGrAve: Sure, why not?

    @alektraunic: Thanks for the link. Though just like solid-state disks won’t replace your RAM (throughput and access time are still much better), I don’t think an SD card with up to 300 MB/s can completely replace built-in storage approaching 1 TB/s.

    Anyway, its also easy to imagine having a netbook run on a single SDXC card only.

  4. Well, predicting hardware development is pretty obvious isn’t it? But what are we going to do with all that power? Yes – speed – yes – quality – higher resolutions – smaller PCs – nice – can’t wait :-).
    But where do you see the software development? Higher speed – more bandwidth – that also means more information! I remember Marrissa Meyer from Google talking about being able to carry around all the music available on your iPod. I had two things going through my mind that time – “wow – how cool” and “what the f..k am I going to do with all that music?” Right now I own probably a couple thousand songs – I store thousands of digital pictures on my PC that I’m probably not able to look at again – at least most of them. So what I’m curious about is how the increase of hardware capabilities enhances software development. How can software help us to deal with all that information?

    By the way – thanks for your great work with jQuery – luv it!

  5. @togis: I didn’t claim I’d be any good as a prophet, so I’m taking small steps. Someone who isn’t up-to-date with the latest developments, which happens quite fast, should find something interesting here.

    Predicting the future of software is somewhat harder. I consider games and multimedia applications (Photoshop, 3D Studio MAX, Cubase etc.) the ones that will profit the most of these hardware developments. Those will probably pave the way for less resource-hungry applications to get faster, like browsers.

  6. Only i want a normal PC/Mac with OLED 22″ Monitor…thats all i want.

  7. I’d like my future laptop to come with a built in projector, prefarably hires. About software, I think the OS needs te become self learning, so it will present me with the items or programs that I use most, based on time of day, day of week, et cetera. Also (a bit off topic), when looking at my three kids, I think the users will evolve and the PC will have to adapt to that. I think they will be chatting on MSN or such, while at the same time typing an email and still at the same time speaking commands to the PC. In between they will have a corner on their second (or 3rd?) screen with music clips. I think it means that the software/OS must become leading an d the hardware following, instead of the current reverse situation. The software needs to provide the functions that future users want and for that to work I think open source is the only way to go.

  8. Hyder

    the future is not soo far away!!