Wasn’t she in the Crystal Maze?!? Never mind that! 2012 is firmly upon us now, but what do the experts think will happen this year in tech world?
Well this year will see the release of the third generation of i3, i5 and i7 Intel chips, called Ivy Bridge. The big tech advance this time was covered in a post earlier in 2010 by myself, but basically means faster computers using less power (77W instead of 95W from the second gen Sandy Bridge). To make it a double barrelled shotgun of good news to the face, the apparent socket for this new chip will remain the same LGA1155 meaning upgrading is only as much as buying a chip. However with support for the new PCI-E 3 for this year’s GPU battle, you may want to go full hog!
AMD look set to leave the high-end desktop CPU market. Don’t worry though, as their GPU arm won’t go. Instead they look to focus on GPGPU (General Purpose computation on Graphical Processing Units) and low-power CPU markets. This means that their ‘Bulldozer’ processors, whose performance was less than desirable, will be the last of their high-end CPU to be released. GPGPUs will be used not only to display graphics on screen but perform all the computation of a CPU at the same time. While these wont be practical for high-end gaming platforms, it does mean that we could see better performance from laptops that will be much thinner as they wont require an additional graphics adaptor.
Left: CPU - Right: GPU - GPGPU's will be more like the right.
WINDOWS 8 will be released and the world will be torn, some will say it’s the second coming of XP and all our computing sins will be forgiven, and others say it’ll follow Microsoft’s age old business model of “shit OS, great OS, shit OS, great OS”. Whatever the case we know that, with the exception of XP, every time Microsoft has tried to re-write their OS from the ground up, the code has gone TITS-up. This version of Windows is heavily reliant on the sale of touch-screen devices (such as the all-in-one PCs on the market, tablet-PCs and touch monitors) the tile based app style layout is pretty much identical to that seen on Windows Mobile 7 and the new Xbox 360 layout. Don’t fret though as the original desktop IS there, it’s just not enabled by default. The questions still remain though whether there will be any good news for the gamers, as no mention of a new DirectX has been made yet.
The world of Hard Drives are set to be shaken up as the recent floods in Thailand are set to have lasting consequences on production of HDDs, with prices of HDDs soaring to over 250% than just a few months ago it wont be long before we see a change in how PCs are built.
Soon these two devices will go head to head!
And this will be the major deciding point says IT Researcher Gartner, the magic $1 (~60-65p) a Gigabyte for SSDs. Predicted for the middle of the year, Gartner predicts that SSDs will start to become the standard for primary storage systems in new PCs. Kingston Tech made similar predictions for a little later in the year but everyone seems quite keen that $1 per 1Gb will happen this year bringing the price of an average 240Gb SSD to about £150. Sexy!
The Wii U may start technological revolution in the gaming industry! Yep sounds crazy I know, but think of all the PC games last year. Now think of the PC only games and PC games then ported to other platforms. What makes them different? Well a game that’s coded for a console first will have to comply to DirectX standards for that GPU. The rumour mill says that the GPU of choice for the Wii U will be a spruced up version of AMD’s R700 architecture that powered the 4000 series, this is good news as it will push DirectX 10.1 into console computing, pushing the Wii U far ahead of the Xbox 360 and PS3. For PC users, you can rest ease knowing that games will start to be developed with DirectX 10.1 from the start, taking advantage of extra computing power in PCs.
Well that’s the predictions for 2012, with the exception of the sure-fire prediction that Mass Effect 3 will be released and we will all require multiple changes of underwear when it happens.
~Stewart “Mystic Stu” Loudon
