Where is technology going??

popinfresh

I was just thinking about the fact that PCs double in power evry 18 months and it got me thinking. In like 6 years the standard pc should be approximetely up around the 10 ghz specs. HArd drives will be approaching 1 tera heart and so on and so forth. but was i was wondering is what will people need computers this fast for. Yeah I know trhat's what they said 10 years ago and all but what else have PCs got to expand for. I mean pcs now a days can more than cope with music files playing them etc.. and now peoples hard-drives are able to download and store movies, and 120 gig hard drives are able to cope with movie files with ease. But what comes next?? The same with internet connections. If you had a 50 meg line you could download files the size of a dvd in a reasonable amount of time. What files would people need to download that couldn't fit on a DVD. Like what's the point in a home user having a gig line (I'm awear that that's literally not gonna be in our life-time in ireland )I'm not saying pcs won't get faster I'm just not sure why they'd need to get faster?? I mean what could an average home user use a 1 tera heart hard drive for. Some sort of Vertual reality programme? Does any body else predict a serious crash in the whole computer industry like 10 yrs or less down the line??

tman

traditional hard drives can't go over 200gb afaik... so we're going to see some groovy new type replacing the magnetic disk soon enough.
try reading a few images of dvd's onto a 120gb drive & watch the space dissapear.
most game installs are at least 700 mb these days.
soon enough all this newer & faster bs is going to come to an end though, i'd say 10 years is about right

sceptre

Originally posted by tman
so we're going to see some groovy new type replacing the magnetic disk soon enough.

Still likely to be magnetic for the forseeable future though. Seek times on optical drives are too slow, non-volatile memory is too expensive for a while yet.

BoB_BoT

Well give it time. Games, Programmes, Software are all becoming more resource hungry. Internet sites are becoming more interactive, people are using the net for large file transfers, home movies, images, personal software. Just thing 56k/cable/dsl is all cheap and fast in america/canada, it's obviously being used. just think Unreal Tournament takes up 1gig in the install then you add the patches and it becomes much more. Just think in 2 years, graphics and games are becoming very movie like, almost like real characters in games, AI is becoming more advanced. in the near furture they might scrap ordinary cds for dvd disks. VR is out there, it's still very much so in it's infant stage, but if it is developed for the consumer market you can only imagine the size and resources such a program and it's enviroment will require. so maybe we don't need a tera hert drive just yet, but you never know when you'll need it. only around 1 year/1 and a half ago a 40 gig hard drive was considered huge! but is it now?

yes i know i repeated some of the stuff i said over and over :P

Yavvy

""traditional hard drives can't go over 200gb afaik... so we're going to see some groovy new type replacing the magnetic disk soon enough.""

This is incorrect. terabyte hard disks are on the way. Seagate have developed the technology and now they just need to make it stable. basically the differance in the way the laid onto the disk paltter with increasing laser technology the hard drive wont disappear anytime soon. But you are also correct in saying the new optical storage technology is on the way. Blue fin seems to be headding to the 30gig make along with UDO which are both DVD/CD size and format.

as far as technology is going. you must not think in terms of consumer PC. All their technology comes form business applications and there is a need for more powerful storage and processors. the bandwith requirements need to get up to 50meg eventually to enble real time application failover and sync. currently fibre channel and TCP/IP can barley keep up.

I think over the next few years you will see 500GB hard drives, 1TB tape and other hardware. on the topology side of things ISCSI will emerge over the next 12 months and 10Gb fibre channel will appear also I suspect.

BKtje

The way the PC 'works' is also changing.

There are numerous research institution looking at other ways to speed up computers and such without constantly increasing the clock cyle etc.

One research group is looking to rid computers of clock cycles all together, another is looking at organic tissue to store data (apparently huge amounts can be stored in a smallish space, ala human brain but the 'seek' time would be quite slow).

Not only the size and speed will change but also the actual look of the computer. In the future silicon may be outdated and we'll all be playing our VR games on some (part) organic PC. (/me ponders what name the PC have equal rights group will be called)

Ah the future, so many posibilities.

phobos

Getting back to a point that popinfresh initially raised, which was "Why do we need?", "Is there a need?", etc. The key work there being "need". Let's not get bogged down with the How's, in that "How we may create/develop a new technology", but rather let's focus (for now) on "Why" we would need such a technology, and how the call for it's existence ultimately came about.

Technology trends is something that facinates me, and has done for quite some time. I think popinfresh, you are thinking very much in the present, and not applying an open mind towards the future. If we look around us in the world there is so much scope for improvement, in practically every aspect of life (not just technology), but technology is easy to pick on, because it's caught a lot of people's attention in recent times, especially in the computer world. When you look back 10 years ago, and how we played 8/16bit consoles, and new games came out, at the time a lot of us thought, "how can they make it better than this". That trend continues, and now I just say to myself, as long as I can distinguish the difference between a game world, and reality, I know there is scope for improvement, that is of course, that the gaming industry wants to take things in that direction, but so far all efforts have suggested that.

On that note, colleagues of mine in the University are working on a project that could eventually eliminate the need for academic institutions. Now that seems very far fetched, but it's a technology with will be based on VR, titled Virtual Collaborative Environments. So take that for example, why would be want to advance with something like that. One answer would be, disability for example. People with disabilities may not be able to attend a common learning environment such as a college or Uni. Or we could just bluntly put it down to convenience. It's a fantastic project, and goes in to a lot more aspects that I'm revealing here, including psychology, and how we learn.

I hope you're not wondering where I'm going here, because this is all relevant. Remember at the end of the day computers are tools, and nothing more. When our tasks become more complex, our tools need to advance in parallel.

The only thing I agree with in your initial post is "Why would we need more powerful machines in the future when my computer today is capable of playing MP3s watching movies, playing games, etc". That is a fair statement, but just note that all the said tasks are very much established as present activities. The world will force you to advance your activities, either through becoming obsolete, ie you can no longer do something, because the facility no longer exists. What for example MP3 becomes an unsupported format of the past, and the next version has sound quality that will force you to question it's origin, and file compression that laughs at todays standards. So you will be forced to move on, but the transition is often subtle, and doesn't require you to come away kicking and screaming

Amongst my peers I have been reffered to as a futurist. I often have dreams of the future that are so real, I wonder where the ideas came from, and when I wake up I feel upset. A bit like a snail that took hours to slide across a piece of terrain, and to be picked up by a human, and placed way back the path already taken.

To take this thread further I ask you to step outside of the box, and acknowledge the potential that exists.

;-phobos-)

popinfresh

Well I'm not saying I don't think computers can get any faster, I'm asking as a question (not a rhethorical question) why they'd need to get faster. Like Music CDs for example. could you reealy improve the quality of a cd so much so that you could use up like a 10gig CD. I mean in what way could they be improved. The same with DVDs, can the picture quality be improved on any more. I suppose there's always holgraphic images, but that's at least 10 years away. I mean what comes next? a DVD2? And what would that be used for other than computer games??And with computer games, as was said further up when you can't tell the difference between computer and reality then there's no room for improvement. But that's the problem, I'm reckoning graphics wise this scenario is only like 8 years away, at the most. And then why would the bother making a geforce 15 when the geforce 14 cannot be improved on. Remember for this to happen all it needs is to be able to give a unique set of orders to each pixel on your monitor. If fairness though I suppose the ram necessary for something like this would be well up into like 32 giga-bytes (complete guess anybody roughly know for sure) and the processor like 50ghz? Remember all the computer has to be able to do is convince the naked eye they're seeing reality..

Matt Simis

The scope for improvement in graphics is definately there. nVidia recently said a 50x improvement in performance is needed to do realtime raytracing (of the "best" sort). Physics and interactivity need huge amounts of power... why restrict simulating Nuclear explosions to government super computers? Simulating a living world with real AI (not the rather backward stuff around now) will require massive leaps in pure speed, ignoring traditional memory requirements.

In the short term, perhaps we will see the likes of DVD (4-8GB) being replaced by HD-DVD or some HDTV derivative (8-20GB). That will at least require double the existing space on HDs. Remember, MP3 and Divx are a kludge, you shouldnt want to have to reduce quality due to storage and bandwidth restraints. HD-DVD from MS requires a 3GHz CPU to decode and thats totally non-interactive playback!

We also need to get all this power smaller and cooler (temperature wise), we need handhelds faster than todays top end desktops, just so they remain "inline" with expectations. If they are to replace Desktops then they need to be vastly more powerful again.


So much needs improving as there is too much that still exists in fiction and theory.



Matt

koneko

Originally posted by popinfresh
Like Music CDs for example

Two two main examples you listed in your last post...

Music CDs and DVDs. Both have already been improved on...
DVD Audio CDs can be of a much better quality and clarity than regular audio CDs, and can be multispeaker.
DVDs, we will have HD-DVDs soon (it's already starting with the Terminator 2 DVD).

Things can be improved. Of course it can. We should be striving to improve quality and make everything bigger better and faster. Not hope that everything stays stagnant. That isn't what technology is about. People could have said the exact same things you're saying now when VHS and Betamax were out.

Raz

Like Music CDs for example. could you reealy improve the quality of a cd so much so that you could use up like a 10gig CD. I mean in what way could they be improved.

A quick bit of signal theory here.
Consider a sine wave playing. It gives a constant hum.
In real life there is no breaks in the sound. There is sound from this sine at every instant you care to examine. It's a continuous signal.

This is not so with things like CD's and DVD's.
To put the sound onto a CD it has to be sampled, ie. we measure the different aspects of the sound a couple of thousand times a second.
So what you have is a series of individual sounds plyed in sequence so quickly it sounds like the real thing.

This sounds great but there is an inherent problem. You sample a sound 96K times a second.
If you have a sound playing with a frequency of 96KHz this is fine, but what happens if the sound increases to 97KHz and beyond?
You start to miss some of the signal. So the sound isn't the same, it's pretty much indeciferable to the human ear but it's still not perfect and that's what we should strive for, perfection
I think the human ear can hear a range of 200Hz to 20KHz. That's off the top of my head so feel free to correct me.

So maybe there's no real need for improvment but people always strive to be the best that they can be and set new records and it's no different in the technology sector.
Why do we need to improve things? We don't really need it, it's just human nature!

Matt Simis

Originally posted by Raz
A quick bit of signal theory here.
Consider a sine wave playing. It gives a constant hum.
In real life there is no breaks in the sound. There is sound from this sine at every instant you care to examine. It's a continuous signal.

This is not so with things like CD's and DVD's.
To put the sound onto a CD it has to be sampled, ie. we measure the different aspects of the sound a couple of thousand[/] times a second.
So what you have is a series of individual sounds plyed in sequence so quickly it sounds like the real thing.

This sounds great but there is an inherent problem. You sample a sound 96K times a second.
If you have a sound playing with a frequency of 96KHz this is fine, but what happens if the sound increases to 97KHz and beyond?
You start to miss some of the signal. So the sound isn't the same, it's pretty much indeciferable to the human ear but it's still not perfect and that's what we should strive for, perfection
I think the human ear can hear a range of 200Hz to 20KHz. That's off the top of my head so feel free to correct me.

Those figures tie in nicely with DVD Audio, which is 192KHz. Its taken well over 10years of 16Bit, 44Hz CD Audio dominance to get DVD Audio, sometimes it takes a long time to get rid of inferior standards, we should prepare for that too. DVD Video may look good today but...



Matt

Altheus

We are so far from reaching our potentials, infact I'd say, we've slowed down significantly. I think it's a big conspiracy almost. Things like HDTV, HD-DVD, DVD-Audio are moving so slowly... I distinctly remember when the big five wanted to push DVDs they swarmed the market... perhaps they havent quite saturated the market just yet...

But things I'm really looking forward to in the next ten years...

Video communication (proper! none of this webcam bollocks)
High Resolution projection alá IMAX as standard in cinemas
High resolution affordable large flatscreens...
Realtime optical media, that doesnt require a format or anything like a format or anything like that.. I remember reading recently about a 99GB DVD format... that'd be nice

Right now the bottleneck is caused by huge research costs, resulting in extended periods of high price retail products.. i.e. CD-Writers... I remember a 1 speed on a 486 would cost nearly a grand... now it's like €50 for 52x writer and media costs a few cents...

As for graphics, I'll sit pretty when the box next to my Ultra HDTV is rendering something like Toy Story in realtime at 60FPS... or at least playing games up to the same level of rendering as the stuff in LOTR or Final Fantasy (the movie)...

We're so far off reaching most of what we have to look forward too. Things have to get smaller, faster, more economical, more portable, and ultimately networked together in a matrix like fashion. Technology is moving slower than ever in the last 4 years in my opinion... remember the Voodoo1, is the Geforce FX5900Ultra really 6 years ahead of it? Considering 6 years before, many of us still used 286s to play our games on?

hostyle

some of us expect to be running our own personal Matrixes in the near future ... Intel 3.2 GHz jobbies just don't cut it ...

weemcd

think about it even though games are expanding technology is expanding too, like when doom 3 comes out almost all pcs will struggle, thers always going to be a next- step, that people aim for. i thnik vr will have an important part to play. and the grid- everything interacting with everything else. i read a thing in time magazine about it and it was very interesting.

SouperComputer

bah, "640Kb of RAM is enough for anyone"

LOL