What PC? - in 10 years

Hi Guys, I just thought I'd get some information from people on what the specs of their PC will be in 10 years. How much Ram will you have? What size will the Harddrive be? Will GFX cards offer true to life realtime rendering?

I expect to have:

Intel Zeus 50GHZ QuadCore
10GB Ram
1 Petabyte Hardrive
ATI GOD 2GB DDR8 GFX
etc etc.

I havn't been keeping up on technology so if anyone has any insight in to what would be available please post specs here.

:)

You'll have more than 10GB of RAM and the graphics card will probably be over 2GB by then.

You can't go up to 50 GHz, nor is there any point.

If regular PCs don't have UMA by the year 2016, Computers are only going to be marginally more powerful than they are today.

In ten years there will (hopefully) be no distinction between Memory and Storage.

Well 10 years ago I had DX4 100MHz now 3.2GHz, so I've got 32x faster CPU; I had 4MB ram now got 1GB thats 250x; and 500Mb HD now 410GB (well there's two) that's x820! Oh yeah and 4x CD-ROM now 52x which is 13xfaster, plus instead of 700Mb on CD you can now easily get 9GB Dual Layers (I know bigger is just around the corner but I'm talking what I have now) that's hmm also 13x more. Oh and grpahics card was crap probably only 1-4Mb, now 256Mb = up to 256x RAM.

So my predictions are:
CPU: 100GHz, 250GB RAM, 336TB Hard Disk, Optical Read speed not sure worth prediciting, optical storage 117Gb per disc, graphics card 66GB, Speed um ... unknown!

Also I had a 14.4 modem, now I'm on 2MegaBit (could get 8Mbit in a city) so that's 160x. So we could expect Internet of around 280MegaBit to 1.3Gigabit if that's possible for home use.

So there are some estimates of course things may change radically, there may be some limits and thus some things slow down or breakthroughs and thus some things speed up. Perhaps there won't be enough electricity in the future or we'll or be underwater or dead from bird flu, who knows?

Well only if you're a bird.

Well, they way they are going with copyright, goverments wanting keys, TCPA and other nasty stuff... I'll probably still have this one! :D

Dabz

FS: :-) OK pedant, dead from human contageous mutated bird flu.

> You can't go up to 50 GHz, nor is there any point.

Of course there will be, the latest version of Windows will need that in order to render it's DirectX 20 cell shaded 3D mouse cursor, icons and windows.

Hopefully in ten years there will at last be the COMMODORE 65 that was promised to us! ;)

There's nay sayers who think 50Ghz machines are impossible, there's people who say processors cannot physically get any faster ... They've been saying that since the 100Mhz chips.

What they're forgetting is you can already buy a microprocessor based computer with over 8000 dual core CPU's installed. Sure you cannot fit it into your bedroom right now but if there's one thing you can rely on in technology it's that things get smaller.

There's also not much hope of being able to afford one for the time being because i'm talking about a machine manufactured by Cray - all the same the point is technology exists and there will always be a financial reward for the company who can build a faster computer.

If manufacturers really cannot get any more speed out of machines they'll simply double them up, as evidenced by the fact we've long since been able to buy multi-processor machines and now we can get multi-processor processors...

Cooling is the big constraint at the moment, and yet the mainstream solutions still dont have dedicated cooling units - just a traditional heatsink and fan not much more advanced than we had in the 486 days. Overclockers have been doubling/tripling processor performance for years and if their methods go mainstream the solutions will become both more elegant and cheaper.

It's more than likely we'll start thinking of computer performance in a different measurement than Ghz before long, as more expanded commandsets bring speed boosts for specific tasks by delegated circuitry we're likely to see processor speeds measured by benchmarks, subdivided into tasks.

Networking speeds will see the biggest boost in the next 10 years, the internet will reach the state where it is faster to save your document to a server in Taiwan than it is to write to your floppy disk ... oh wait we've already gone past that point ... :)

As the internet gets faster and more secure* (Microsoft dependancy here, the internets reputation and consumer confidence depends upon the outcome of Vista's malware defences more than ever before as continued security breaches are currently somewhere beyond the description of "epidemic") more non-computing technologies will be internet reliant.

We'll likely loose broadcast television within the next decade or two - supply on demand is the future there and I expect improved networking will make it far more powerful than the current "Sky+" we get offered in the UK. The commercial sucess of true supply on demand will depend more than anything on who buys the rights, the only people who can afford Sky+ at the moment are Managing Directors and council flat tennants.

i'm just hopin' i'm still alive in 10 years...

--Mike

Ha. And I thought I was the only one who wondered why the sheeple will be queing up to buy Cray super computers just to run an operating system.

Taking Beckys internet comments further ...

With the internet getting faster and cheaper I can envisage people sitting at home with terminals (LCD+Keyboard/Mouse) accessing the WWW. All data will end up out of your hands and in control of the service providers. Your personal docs, pictures, music, program code, game settings, blardy blah, will be stored at the server side.
Then, one day, *pooof*, the server crashes and all your data goes bye bye.
Of course, everything you do will be tracked and recorded. The sites you visited, the files you wanted to access, anything typed into the search engines.

Essentially, what Windows does now. However, there will be no way for you to delete the stuff.

That 50GHz is extremely unlikely -- CPU speeds have been leveling off tremendously lately, we've been hovering around the 3.something GHz for a lot longer than 'usual'. The increase in transistors (what is what Moore's law is prediting, nog operating frequency) is now going more towards multiple cores than increasing the operating frequency. We're starting to get pretty close to the physical limitations of the silicon chip designs as well. I'd be surprised if we've broken 5GHz 10 years from now, it's probably more likely to have a dozen cores running at 4GHz each.

Stuff like optical chips, holographic RAM, etc. are perpetually 5 years in the future, and have been for a long time now.

Use linux? :p

And dont use the WWW, use a custom made global network that uses the GHTTP, QU2 AND HRSSN protocols.

Of course, if the entertainment industry gets their way, there won't BE a PC anymore. No more 'general purpose' computer, but everything revolving around 'trusted computing' platforms with end-to-end encryption, preventing you from running or viewing anything the entertainment industry doesn't approve of. There really is some pretty scary stuff just around the corner, and it doesn't look likely that it 'won't happen'.

Microsoft, Intel, AMD, NVidia, ATI, etc. have all been working content controls in their latest & upcoming product lines, and sooner or later you won't have a choice anymore.

We'll all have cell processors ... duh!

My Specs:

- 3-4 Ghz 16x core (don't think they can get faster even with the targeted 20nm size, silicon just heats too much. But parallelisation will speed the thing extremely compared to today because programs are written for parallel not linear as today)

- 128 GB 1T like highspeed RAM (today only in few hardware like GameCube as extremely expensive but unbeatable fast)

- 16 TB of Optical Storage (HD with todays RAM speed)

- Quad-Oct Core Circle GPU (ATI X1000 alike) with 4 GB VRAM (actual are already 256->512)

Parallel computing units for GPU and CPU will be there for sure. CPUs already did the step, ATI is preparing it with their ring structure on the X1000 generation and its parallel computing pipeline. When they get to 65nm they can start to combine several GPUs this way and get speeds NVIDIA with their linear pipe will never be able to reach.


My actual specs:
- 1,5Ghz P-M Banias (first generation)
- 768 RAM + 60 + 60 + 250 GB HDD
- ATI Radeon 9700 mobile with 64MB VRAM

I expect that 10 years from now my computer would be exactly the same as my permanently "upper-mid-range" PC right now, except crammed into a small palm-sized device.

I hope among other things they figure out components that don't get hot - therefore no cooling needed. Also batteries that last ages.

It only takes somebody to accidentally microwave some creosote or something and *poof* ... a whole new technology appears that changes everything.

10 years is a long time for the inventiveness of human brains to A) improve things, B) invent new things and C) use all the new things to make bigger guns.

Well I'll met you back here in 2016 so we can all see what really happended. Deal?

hm, what about an FPGA revolution? Everything, the whole PC (cpu, gfx, audio) into 1 big programmable chip. Download the latest intel VHDL via internet and upgrade your FPGA, et voila.. the latest intel.
One type o' FPGA chip -> mass production -> cheap.

Best situation: everyone can plug-in additional FPGA chips for more power.. and just that, plug 'n play. Something like a small machine with slots where you can plugin some classic cartridge containing an FPGA chip, just like the o' 80's homecomputers..

By then the major chip manufacturors cooperate in creating FPGA chips.

I see a 1 chip solution i.e.

CPU has such a high clock speed and multiple parallel processing capability that it can handle all graphics/sound/processing and also contains 1-200GB of 'ram' which is non volatile and acts as permanent storage too.

If RAM and mass storage are merged there's just one snag... How many times has restarting your computer solved so many problems? Computers+Software+users = 1 great big dirty charlie up waiting to happen, rebooting temporary screw up space - sorry RAM - is an essential component of modern computing. We'd have to seriously rethink computing before we could do away with the concept of RAM.

More importantly, you're talking 2-3 editions of Windows into the future - will Microsoft be able to bring such a fundamental change of concept to market in only 3 major releease stages? It took them until XP to get Windows 95 right.

In 10 years we'll all be sat here saying, "I'm sticking with Vista, I dont like the idea of renting software applications when I want to use them."

Also in 10 years there will also be some speculation over when Max3D is coming out, and DBPro users will be moaning about bugs.

yeah that renting software apps or storage space is gonna be a real stinker, just another way to bleed us all dry.

640k should be enough for anybody.....

I predict that one day there will be a telephone in every major city in America.

Better yet the computer will be implanted directly into the brain.

In 10 years Windows will grow to be so large that all computers will need a 500+ GB RAM to just run plus a 10000 GB HD to just install it on....

In ten years I will have become a being of pure information and energy, existing only on the internet.

That or I'll be living essentially the same as I am now, but with more furniture.

Dunno about harddisk-growth. What would we store on it?

What do we store on it now? MP3's, movies. I doubt a lot of ppl really would like to have broadcastquality movies on their HD or full wav-files. Tho there're always exceptions, most ppl are perfectly happy with movies of 700MB or 160kbps mp3's. And 'most ppl' are the ones who define standards..

In the future, we don't need to store information locally anymore as we're *really* on internet 24/7, no household without it. I hardly store info atm already, GIYF.

Lotsa ppl just do email, some internet, bit o' Word, bit o' Photobrowsing from the camera. 20GB would be sufficient, but these days, harddisks that small become rare.

>Hi Guys, I just thought I'd get some information from
>people on what the specs of their PC will be in 10 years.
>How much Ram will you have? What size will the Harddrive
>be? Will GFX cards offer true to life realtime rendering?

I think that our perception of the PC will change. It won't have a CPU as such, but rather a system of operating unit's, where processing power is no longer an issue.

I also believe that all subsystems in a computer will be accessing the same memory. There really is no need for separate memory. As for memory size, again, I believe that it won't be an issue anymore. Perhaps both processing power and memory will be centralized... Interesting thought - after having broken free from the mainframe of the 60's, we'll be going back to them again in the future, based on both technical and commercial reasonig.

Andy

CS_TBL raises an interest point in that mass storage (hard disks) are already larger in capacity than most people need. This however is based upon current technology and trends.

What if we start streaming television over the internet as a matter of course? There is a market for supply on demand television this we already know, what we lack is the infrastructure to deliver it and large hard disk capacities may well serve as the interim content tool along with something like iMovies or whatever the film equivellent of iTunes gets called.

Eventually we'll end up with streaming delivery - but only once internet connection speeds are sufficient to support it.

Yeah right, like the media companies would be cool with movies being stored locally on people's hard drives.

Referring to "watch TV @ p2p-networks" ?

Dunno whether the RIAA and clones like all that, I also wonder whether ppl will have their "computer" switched-on 24/7 in the future just to let others watch TV from their HD.

Computers may advance at a certain speed, but society might not do that equally as fast. Plenty o' people will stick to the ordinary TV.

I mean, futurists have been wrong all the time (except Jules Verne perhaps, who wrote a story about, well, about what today actually looks like :P). According to Bladerunner we'd have flying cars, humanoids and trapezoid buildings within 2 decades from now! (and also still have quirky computers that generate annoying blibs to zoom in/out on a picture and show text with the typewriter-effect :P)

Extrapolating our current harddisk-content into future-content might be quite wrong. :P

In 10 years..all systems will be unified everything runs perfectly on everything. The world is at peace :)

you are playing the leaked beta of Duke nukem forever? still no realease date in 10 years...

Mike nearly completes the Subsim...only find a new "better" engine... ;)

and ofcourse...we all travel in TUBES!

But...None of this ,really happens . In a few years Noel starts a murderous Rampage around the globe, the "Blitz cleansing" as it is known by his followers (this is one reason for the delay in Mikes Game)

Not happy with just killing us, Noel steals a Time machine to travel back into the past,to erradicate us from ever existing.(Also to erradicate many of the 70's/80's super groups from history itself, this I Support).
But its a sloppy operation, finnaly brought to a stop by Halo..whom say s and I quote "what would you do without me?"
We evenutally end up having slower/older computers than we do now, But we are happy out 8bit power houses.

We ofcourse know nothing about this , because it never happend...

So in 10 years you be running a Zx81 or a C64


Sam

This made me laugh!

Well, we never really know what a computer will be like in 10 years except for using examples and predicting (like Grey Alien said). A new discovery could completely throw off any prediction said here.

Either way, it's nice looking into the future! I wonder what HL4 will be like...

Actually Red's game should be called Sub Sim Forever!

A shallow commercialisation of what was originally a cool concept, but is now just more of the same with more stuff working within the physics engine, "less limits on gameplay" will translate into two routes through a sewer level, oh and shader 5 support for realtime acne growth on the hero.

Imagine what could be achieved with "TODAY'S" hardware and processors on PC if they were running as efficiently as hardware for consoles.

Instead of running the bloatware upon bloatware all thanks to windows that we do today.

HL4 features real bobbing physics on the waste matter in the sewers. Futhermore people react like you stink when you finally emerge.

ROTFLMAO @ ZMatrix... good one Sam... i'll get you for dat :)

hey, to go a lil off topic, and seeing that you all seem to have some free time on your hands... i wonder if i could get a few of you to look at a component of the sub sim (done in 3DRAD) and comment (either on the RAD forum, or message me)...

this darn 3DRAD is really getting to be a pain... anyways, if you have time... go here --> http://www.3drad.com/forumphp/index.php?topic=4097.0 and get the lil demo thing, run it (be sure to follow the directions or you'll be lost, and return a comment on what you got...

also... don't miss the Blitz lil sub thing i just did http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=56660 over on the showcase... this may be where the sim ultimately winds up... maybe in about 10 years, hopefully sooner, the way recent events are going maybe not at all...

thx

--Mike

And of course everyone around here will be whining that they can't possibly make a game without that feature.

This is what ASUS thinks...
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/23/asus_concept_shelf_pc/

I think there's a world market for maybe five computers -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM (1943)

well... this is what i'm looking forward to...

--Mike