The Computer of Tomorrow?

S

seancky2

Limp Gawd
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Oct 28, 2004
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It's really fun making these posts then come back to them in a couple of years, what do you guys think will be the new computer components technology in say, 5 years. I'm talking about advancements in CPU, SSD, PCI 3, etc. Do you think there will be 20 core CPU's or do you think something "new" will come - kind of like how a decade ago it was all about how many GHz you had and today its about how many cores you have. What about system memory? It seems like RAM has kind of been ignored in terms of advancements in reality, really not much groundbreaking technology as compared to other components. Do you ever think a SSD equivalent of RAM will come about? And of course, the graphics card - where do you think that will be in 5 years.

Kind of a pointless post, I know. But would love to hear your thoughts, not only what you think could happen, but what is actually in the process of happening right now.
 
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"...I just got my box from the egg! Can't wait to put this bad boy together. I went with an Asus M23X128-Deluxe with support for PCI-e x64-x64-x64 trifire, USB5, sata4, and DDR5. I went with an AMD Ph4 x16 2955 cpu, I'd have gone with a 2965 but I figured I could save money cus I'm gonna OC it anyhow. I was hoping prices would be a bit better, but ever since Intel dropped the ball a couple years ago AMD just hasn't seen the need to drop their prices like they used too. Picked up 32 gigs of DDR5-5000 and a couple 4 terabyte SSD drives. I was gonna go with the new Holographic drives, but the cost per gigabyte is just to cost prohibitive for me right now. Gonna run 2 ATI HHD11890's in crossfire to see how it scales in my 12 array holo emitter setup. I'm thinking with this I might finally be able to run Crysis 3 at 60fps. If the reviews are good I might add another card down the road. Just go my copy of windows 10 128 bit too so I'll be throwing that in too. I'll throw up some benchies when I get it running..."

****toke****

YEAH.....


****exhale****

Cool.
 
CanesVenetici said:
...I'm thinking with this I might finally be able to run Crysis 3 at 60fps...
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^^ Good one! :D I laugh, because I can already see that happen.

Yeah, probably the advancement will be with the storage component. CPU/GPU have progressed so far -- hell, we can even buy GPUs with 8GB of onboard memory nowadays -- but the storage has lagged behind. SSD is picking up steam, but it's still an immature technology.

There is actually something like RAM being used as storage -- it's called the Gigabyte iRAMdisk -- it's a hardware that allows you to put in RAMs and use that as a storage device, with all the benefits of RAM. Only caveat is the prices of RAM.
 
Part of the reason posts like this from several years ago are hilarious is precisely because there have been such gargantuan leaps and bounds in technology across the board. I'm bored, however, so I figured I'd contribute.

Five years, huh? Well, here’s my take.

First, our current bottleneck. The biggest hurdle today in any computer is storage speeds. SSDs are the ‘big thing’ right now, but I don’t think they’ll stay that way. There’s inherent limits on performance and stability. Five years from now, I expect to see something similar to iRAMdisk style drives become more commonplace as memory becomes cheaper and cheaper (relatively, and barring the current memory price hike). Holographic storage will be the mainstay for just that, storage, but not for ‘performance,’ at least not as the technology stands now. Maybe they’ll improve it so it’s as fast as SSDs, maybe not.

Processors will change. I doubt we’ll be working on 16 or 32 core processors, for the simple reason that innovation is inevitable in this market. I expect to see a new generation in the next two years (i.e. by 2012), something that’s just new, not a buildup on existent technology. Beyond that, I don't have the knowledge to accurately (or even semi-accurately) guess.

Next is Video. Today's Video Cards are significantly more powerful than any current game requires, and (hundreds?) multiple times more powerful than they were a few years ago. Sure, there's always those one or two games that cause even the mightiest of video cards to chug, but it won't be long till we see Fermi's release, as well as ATI's response. The "next" big thing is, conceptually, true 3D gaming. There are about four different projects for producing true 3D imaging (via Holograms, Lasers, Directed LED, and some crazy idea involving plasma) in a workable environment that I've heard about in the last year. No idea when they'll complete, or when it'll become available, but think about the issues that'll cause. 1920x1200 @32bpp today, 1920x1200x1200 @32bpp when it’s released. To maintain your lovely 60fps, you would need 1200 computers, today, to render that much data, and that's assuming you could get multi-gpu processing to handle 1200 video cards (and the data transfer required to image it). By the time such 3D rendering becomes publicly available (btw, think of this as something like a small scale version of Star Trek's Holodeck, without the tactile interaction), there will need to be a video card that is 1200 times more capable, plus the standard tech inflation you see every year (so something more like 6000 times more powerful). I think 3D rendering, not just on a 2D monitor but on a 3D display of some nature, is going to be the next big thing. It’s going to be a step back, in some ways, as the video card to power it is going to have to be ridiculously more powerful than it’s competing “3D video on a 2D monitor” graphics card of today.

What I do more likely expect, however, is that at some point in the near future, we'll start to see real-time rendering of graphics of the quality you saw in, oh, the Final Fantasy movies. Imagine gaming at that quality. It's not far off. The main character, Aki, had 60,000 individual hairs that were separately and fully animated and rendered. Each individual frame took 90 minutes to render, spread out on 960 Pentium III 933 MHz workstations, and the model, on average, was made up of roughly 400k polygons. Consider, now, that your average high end gaming machine today could render that same frame, as a single machine, in probably one to two hours, if not less, given the right circumstances (that's a complete guesstimation, btw, but the point stands). Without the concept of a “3D Display,” I think this type of graphics is more than possible in gaming (and gaming hardware) in the next 3 to 5 years.

PCI Express will last until the next generation of Graphics Cards come into existence needing more bandwidth than a new PCIE can handle, and not just a new iteration of the same. I think we’ll see PCI Express 4.0 before it’s a technology made stale by other improvements, and we’ll have some other type of interface.

RAM really hasn’t been ignored, but technology is quickly catching up to physics in that department. We’ll see some significant improvements in the future, notably on a single stick of memory (I hesitate to use the word DIMM as it may not apply). We’ve had improvements to DDR, sure, but the underlying technology hasn’t changed. It hasn’t needed to, either, given the current state of processors. As we get further into what processors can do, Memory will of course improve.

I foresee a point at which we don’t have memory separate from hard drives, but a single “performance storage block” that can be used by the computer in question as both a hard drive AND memory, and an exponentially larger “slow storage block” for storing data files that don’t need speedy access. Realistically, for example, a movie only needs X amount of read speed, ever. That’ll increase with different video formats (VHS -> DVD -> Blu Ray for example), but is a ‘known’ amount. Operating Systems, and Games to a larger degree, need that performance, however. Theoretically, store your game on your large block until you run it, ‘load’ time is copying the entire game, including data files, to the performance block, and then run the game till you’re done, as it shuts down it could then copy back any changes to the large block, all behind the scenes.

This is being done today in small scale. I know of a system, not 200 miles from where I live, that was used in an experiment about four months ago. This was a server class system with 128 GB of Ram. They loaded up a linux distro (I think it was Ubuntu) that would boot from a usb-plugged-SSD drive that was mirrored into a RAMdisk made at boot time. The SSD drive was then promptly shut off by the system. The system ran with 32 GB of ram and 96GB of "hard drive." This was probably the most ridiculously fast system, from a storage perspective, ever seen. Sure, it took 30 minutes to boot, and 30 minutes to shut down (writing everything back onto the SSD with changes), but performance was ridiculously fast.

Hell... given memory technologies, it could be done today if someone like Gigabyte would do it. Make a RAM drive that's, oh, a 10.5" enclosure to resemble three stacked hard drives, and pair it with a standard 3.5" physical hard drive. Fill the RAM Drive appropriately with enough memory to match the size of the physical drive. Do as above. You'd need a case that could handle four hard drives, but whooptee do. Boot time would be slow, shut down would be slow, and the huge caveat of "you lose power, you lose everything since the last shut down," but for performance why not?

Of course, the eventual (hopefully) release of either quantum or photonic computing would completely destroy any kind of measurement we might today understand. We can dream.

As an aside: Pardon my rambling, I'm half awake as I've been up a little over 28 hours.
 
Also for gamin have you guys heard of onlive? its a subscription service (i think 15 dollars a month) and the stream video games to your computer or tv. makes buying video cards for the standard consumer pointless (those who use their comp for hidef vids and games)
http://www.onlive.com/service.html
 
I don't see that working.
People bitch and moan about controller lag at times now.
What do you think is gonna happen when you throw internet ping into the mix?
No thanks.
 
I don't see that working. People bitch and moan about controller lag at times now.
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Exactly, that can only work low resolutions or low framerates or with high latency. Not what a gamer wants.
 
Two of you have mentioned "new technologies" which would replace what we consider a CPU right now. I disagree this will happen in 5 years.

New technologies don't occur very often and the only thing you can rely on is improving on existing stuff.

I do see 16-32 core cpu and a complete rework of software to truly be multi-threaded. We need to remove the concept the "current running application" or else we never break out of this shell. Keyboard and mouse input don't scale beyond single apps so there will need to be a hardware change along the road.

Check out 10gui.com to see what I mean. Even they are "stuck in the present". They need to remove the concept of the "local" application as well or else they are just stuck in a multi-touch single application world.
 
drescherjm said:
Exactly, that can only work low resolutions or low framerates or with high latency. Not what a gamer wants.
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but the thing is that you dont need a good vid card to run their games at max because its run off their servers. the only thing you have to worry about is having a good internet connection. this would definably apeal to numerous people due to the fact that they dont need a top of the line vid card and the game to play it at some good settings. they just need to pay 15 a month to be able to play games at top settings. i was on the beta and its awesome. Ran every game with highest settings and AA on with no lag. and resolutions on a 22" screen (like 1920x1080) sure the 100 members on this forum who can afford a 3000 dollar computer wouldn't care about this but everyone who is on a budget will love this. all they have to do is pay 15 a month with a relatively fast internet connection, and with how fiber optics is becoming very common (at least in California) fast internet speed is normal almost everywhere you go.
 
the only thing you have to worry about is having a good internet connection.
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I agree about the not needing high end hardware on the local machine.

However, have you ever used remote desktop?

I have and even on a gigabit connection its too slow to game.

I know this will not be as heavy as remote desktop but something will have to be sacrificed to go through the typical 5 megabit internet connection.

Also have you watched videos on hulu ..? These can do HD but there is buffering and a few second lag, not what you want with a game.
 
Pyrolistical said:
Two of you have mentioned "new technologies" which would replace what we consider a CPU right now. I disagree this will happen in 5 years.

New technologies don't occur very often and the only thing you can rely on is improving on existing stuff.

I do see 16-32 core cpu and a complete rework of software to truly be multi-threaded. We need to remove the concept the "current running application" or else we never break out of this shell. Keyboard and mouse input don't scale beyond single apps so there will need to be a hardware change along the road.

Check out 10gui.com to see what I mean. Even they are "stuck in the present". They need to remove the concept of the "local" application as well or else they are just stuck in a multi-touch single application world.
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I really like the 10GUI concept. Found that video a few months ago and when I first saw it I was really impressed. I really hope it catches on and improved upon.
 
drescherjm said:
Is there a special hardware device used to decode the signal?
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for the TV there is but not for the computer. im not sure how they did it, but after reading the description on their website now (beta is over) it seems they change things. the "hd" wasn't there before. it was just the game and the user could adjust settings. i dont know if that has changed but i hope they give a trial just to try it out. i personally wont be getting it because i love owning a game, but i want to be able to recommend it to my friends confidently
 
10 years ago I had dual P3 650 FCPGA's and a TNT2 Ultra 256 MB video card...I think about 120 Gig drive array too. Q3 was awesome back then...almost as awesome as Q2 was a few years before that.
Oh, and my internet was better, had 10 MB up and down for $40/month (LanCity opened up).

IMO, comparing the past to present: Some things are better but a lot of things are worse. For one, internet really hasn't gotten any better, just more congested. Shopping online has gotten way better but online gaming is way worse, There are too many idiot punk kids that don't know how to behave and gaming/lan party businesses have all but closed down because they can't afford to stay open).
Games have become more technical and less fun and the console market really took a lot out of the PC gaming LAN party environment.

So, there has been about a 5x CPU performance increase, so in ten more years we will probably be at 64 core and 12-15 GHz, base OS will take 32 GB drive space, but we will have 4 TB SSD's and 100 GB onboard video memory, removable media will be non-moving optical using holographic/crystal media formats. Games will have maps the size of continents with true lighting and particle textures you need to magnify 100 times to see the pixels. Monitors will have 1900 DPI resolution SED elements.
 
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DPI does not scale well. You'll need a lot more computational power for 1900 DPI.

I think we'll get to the "good enough" DPI around 300 DPI for large screen and 600 for small screens
 
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