http://tech.msn.com/products/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1043071&GT1=8706 The Future of Your PC With breakthroughs such as faster multicore processors on the way, raw PC muscle is about to return with a vengeance. And it will come in more shapes and sizes than ever. By Christopher Null, PC World The PC of tomorrow will have more competition than ever in winning a place at the heart of your technological universe. But that doesn't mean that the PC will wither away into irrelevance--far from it. Computers are shaping up to become ever more specialized, and although they'll appear in innovative new forms, even the traditional desktop system will be with us for years to come, say the senior executives and industry experts we spoke to. Nevertheless, a peek at your future PC may not reveal what you expect. Eight-core processors, huge hard drives, the prospect of external graphics cards, and bigger and more affordable displays loom on the horizon. While some of the most tantalizing elements, like 20-terabyte drives or flexible full-color displays, are still a ways out, some of the must-have technology you've had your eye on may be closer than you first thought: Next-generation notebooks with detachable mini displays, for instance, are just around the corner. Computers have been evolving into some radical designs--such as Media Center PCs and pint-size Shuttle systems--that only a few years ago would never have left the lab. From Acer's 20.1-inch "laptop" (weighing 17.3 pounds) to Dell's XPS M2010 (a 20.1-inch notebook/desktop hybrid), oddball systems are beginning to look, well, a little less odd. Still, Dell chief technology officer Kevin Kettler says that while designs like the M2010 are interesting exercises, they aren't quite the future. "[Traditional] desktops aren't going away any time soon," he notes. With emerging markets like China, demand for inexpensive PCs should stay strong. Despite efforts like Intel's Viiv initiative, which seeks to standardize media PC components, few observers are especially bullish about entertainment PCs. Notes Kettler, "The next couple of generations of wireless [standards] will allow you to access any type of media, anywhere in the house." You simply won't need an entertainment PC stuck beside a TV. Steve Kleynhans, vice president of client computing at analysis firm Gartner, says that mobile PCs will continue along the two current primary design trends: ultraportables under 4 pounds, and 15- to 17-inch desktop replacement notebooks pushing 8 to 10 pounds, and mostly meant to be used while plugged in. Scheduled for early 2007, Intel's fourth-generation Centrino notebook platform includes up to several gigabytes of fast NAND flash memory, which is expected to deliver faster boot times and application loading. And don't forget the dazzle: Vista's SideShow technology will allow laptop makers to include a display on the lid of the notebook, much like the external display on a clamshell cell phone. Want to check if you have an e-mail waiting? You won't even have to flip open the computer. PortalPlayer's Preface technology, expected in the first half of 2007, will work along with SideShow to provide a detachable display/PDA that you can use independently of the notebook. Beyond the next few years, fanciful designs rule. Jerry Bautista, director of technology management at Intel's Microprocessor Technology Labs, thinks chips could even be built into furniture or even woven into fabric: Imagine a PDA or cell phone built into your shirt sleeve. One Device to Rule Them All? The PC has been the window to the digital world for 25 years, but ways of accessing information continue to evolve. In this chart, we've taken an admittedly arbitrary crack at laying odds on which device will be your go-to gizmo in 2011. Operating Systems: Vista Arrives...and Evolves Windows Vista is now expected in early 2007. How will it change the way the Windows world works? David Siroky, a Microsoft veteran and the group product manager for Windows, says that Vista's enhancements fall into three major categories. The first, and most visible, is graphics. Unlike XP, Vista can use a computer's GPU for multiple tasks simultaneously. That's key, because Vista's Aero user interface is graphics intensive, and developers--for the first time--will be more easily able to use advanced graphics outside of games. Vista will likely change information management and data storage, as well. Says Siroky, "Now that there's no cost associated with taking a snapshot, people have a lot more photos to deal with." XP's lack of tools gave rise to a bustling market for photo software, but Vista indicates that Redmond has started to catch up. Users can tag photos with keywords or other metadata, and Vista's photo gallery simplifies locating your pictures. Elsewhere, Vista's integrated "reliability monitor" can show you a chart of how stable your system has been over time. If you experience a sudden spike in reliability problems, you can check what happened during those days and react appropriately. On the Linux front, the XGL and Compiz windowing systems, GUIs that can give Linux a pretty face, may outdo Apple OS X's Aqua interface in sheer awe factor. In Compiz the windows stretch and skew as you move them, and you can view multiple desktop environments in 3D as the cube-like workspace rotates. Apple's Leopard revision of OS X, due out next spring, will make incremental but steady improvements to the Mac operating system, adding such features as an automated backup utility and multiple workspaces. According to Gartner, both Linux and Mac OS will gain in user support, while research continues on the Web-based OS. After Vista, What's Next? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that the company "won't ever take five years to develop another version of Windows." If that's true, and if the time between previous major consumer versions of Windows is any gauge, that places the successor to Windows Vista, code-named Vienna, on course for a 2010 or 2011 release. Our timeline has more details about Windows releases. CPUs: The More Cores the Merrier Within a few short years, AMD Athlon X2 and Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs will feel decidedly quaint, because multicore technology is just getting started. Jerry Bautista, director of technology management at Intel's Microprocessor Technology Lab, says he has already built prototype chips with eight cores. "Up to eight works well for productivity applications. But thousands of cores are possible. The trick is finding what's practical," he says. While dual-CPU Xeons (with a total of four cores) have been around for a while, this kind of power is finally coming to the masses. Both Intel and AMD plan to introduce quad-core chips. Intel's Kentsfield chip will arrive by year-end, while AMD's, known as K8L, is slated for mid-2007. AMD's 4x4 technology promises a dual-socket system using two Athlon 64-FX chips that will be available in time for the holidays. The limit for multicore technologies is really a software issue, as programs must be fundamentally redesigned to take advantage of parallel processing on a large scale. In other words, splitting a task across two or even four processor cores is relatively easy, but splitting it into dozens or hundreds of pieces is most definitely another thing altogether. Still, even with eight cores, expect to see dramatic performance improvements in complex programs, from games to search technologies. Simon Hayhurst, Adobe's director of product management for digital video and audio, says that most of Adobe's video applications already have elements that can make use of many cores, because previous work optimizing programs for hyperthreaded CPUs also works on multicore CPUs. Says Hayhurst, "The beauty of this approach is that we can write one piece of code that is hyperthreaded, which will scale up or down to multiple cores. We can soak up many more cores than are available today." The great leap in simultaneous processing capability is also likely to improve artificial intelligence. According to Intel's Bautista, "A video game's AI will be indistinguishable from what a person would do," forcing the player to take cover and track opponents organically rather than following an established script. He adds that such intelligence will extend to other applications, as well: "You will be able to search through thousands of photos and videos for people, certain backgrounds, or even specific facial expressions," he says. Speed Barriers Of course, such performance advances will have to be achieved within realistic parameters. Intel's single-core CPUs experienced increasingly serious power-consumption and heat problems, speeding the demise of that architecture. Smaller, more efficient cores will continue to provide a better overall power profile than a single megachip. That's certainly positive news for notebooks, which have historically lagged behind desktop machines in performance due to heat and power constraints. AMD chief technical officer Phil Hester notes that mobility will be a major driver for the company over the next several years, and that the company's acquisition of graphics purveyor ATI will be key to this strategy. "In the 1980s, the 286 and 386 had math coprocessors separate. Eventually that was integrated into the CPU. The same thing will happen to 3D graphics...in the post-Vista time frame," he says. According to Hester, we can also expect that power management will be improved to the point where someday a device the size of a PDA should be capable of producing a PC-caliber graphics experience. The major stumbling blocks to more powerful computers, says Bautista, are elsewhere on the motherboard: Memory bandwidth must grow dramatically to keep up with the CPU, and even hard-disk input/output will have to handle faster data transfers. If you want more-realistic online gaming, "even your broadband connection may need to scale," says Bautista. And what of Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months (along with CPU processing power)? "It's still alive and well," says Bautista. He also thinks that parallel processing, which splits a workload among many cores, makes it more likely to continue. "Multiple, smaller cores are easier to build, and there's no end in sight as the manufacturing process continues to shrink. All the stars are aligned right now," he says. LCDs: Bigger, Brighter, and Priced to Move By year's end, wide screens will be on 10 to 12 percent of desktops, with up to 20 percent share by the end of 2007, according to Chris Connery, vice president of market research for analysis firm DisplaySearch. The other big trend: bigger, brighter, and cheaper LCDs. Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at iSuppli, says that 78 percent of monitors were 17 inches or smaller in 2005, but she projects that by 2010 less than 20 percent of monitors will be that small. Resolution will improve as screens grow: Though only 4 percent of today's monitors feature resolution higher than SXGA (1280 by 1024), Alexander says that figure will grow to 23 percent by 2010. Screens 25 inches and larger should also become common, says Connery. In addition, thanks to LED backlights (which are hitting the market now only in superpremium displays), buyers who are willing to pay a little extra will have a brighter monitor that displays colors more accurately. What about emerging technologies like organic LED (OLED) and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS)? Both will find homes in certain niches--OLED on tiny displays like those of MP3 players and cameras, and LCoS on projector TVs--but neither is likely to make a dent on the desktop. Expect LCD products to rule for at least the next five years because of their availability and affordability. Flexible displays that can be bent or rolled, as well as electronic-ink products (see our hands-on look at Sony's Reader), will also find a piece of the market, starting in areas like grocery-store shelf price tags that can be instantly and easily updated. Touch screens will also likely become more popular for niche uses. NYU researcher Jeff Han demonstrated an impressive advancement of the technology earlier this year, in the form of a multi-touch-screen, partially gesture-based interface. Graphics: Not Just for Gamers There's no end in sight to the PC's increasing hunger for more graphical power. As nVidia chief scientist David Kirk says, "We're years and years away from being able to do everything we'd like to be able to do." GPU manufacturers are busy preparing for DirectX 10 and its promised 8X performance improvement over DirectX 9. Expect nVidia and ATI to transition to GPUs that use unified shader architectures featuring general-purpose pipelines that can process pixels, geometry, or even physics code. Future GPUs will pile on more and more of these pipelines, enabling some truly amazing effects. Dedicated physics cards (like the Ageia PhysX accelerator), which supplement your regular graphics board, may also become more prevalent. The market will soon decide whether the GPU or a secondary processor is the best way to handle physics processing. Products like the nVidia Quadro Plex may also be a sign of the way the market is headed: The $17,000-plus device is an external graphics system that can perform up to 80 billion calculations per second, about ten times what today's top high-powered PC graphics cards can manage. Experts believe that the next generation of cards could consume up to a blazing 200 watts of power and require external components. Another emerging graphics technology, general-purpose GPU, uses the custom computing capabilities of a graphics card in a nongaming environment. Adobe has been using GPGPU for functions such as video transitions in some form since 1995. Storage: Terabytes and Beyond Hitachi senior VP Bill Healy says that if current trends hold, by 2025 a standard 3.5-inch hard drive (if any manufacturer still bothered to make models in that format) could contain up to 20 terabytes of data. Driving the immediate surge of capacity is perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which overcomes the limitations of traditional longitudinal magnetic recording and packs much more data into a far smaller physical area. The first hard drives using PMR reached market last year. Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, informed us that all of his company's upcoming hard drives will employ it. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which allows platters to be made from materials that can support a denser number of bits, is expected early next decade. Even more of a long shot is patterned media, which forgoes a uniform layer in favor of "islands" of material that do not physically touch each other. The future of optical storage is far less certain. The current battle between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, two competing and incompatible blue-laser formats, has no clear winner in sight. "As long as there are two solutions battling it out, there will never be a critical mass established, and that will keep prices high," Gartner's Steve Kleynhans says. "You need a single standard in order to get economies of scale and broad public acceptance." Meanwhile, one potential upgrade to flash media could come in the form of ultradense probe storage, which is being developed by Seagate, among others. It's based on technology borrowed from electron microscopes, and it could well cram 10GB into a device the size of an SD Card.