Bits Coming in 2012

We take a look at the tech treats and events promised for the year ahead.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2012/01/05/coming-in-2012/1

 

Interesting read.

One thing ive keep reading is cloud storage .. is this the revival of the dumb terminals you know that thing we used to use 18 to 20 years ago were the screen in front of you was not the one doing the work. It was just there to give you intput and output from the server .. but now they now call it cloud storage (just another fancy name)

The industry is running out of ideas and reverting back to old systems and then giving them a fancy new name ...

 

Interesting that you didn't talk about the rise in the power of smartphones, and how the internet access model is moving away from desktop pc's. Also that, because of the size of smartphones, they are challenging the keyboard mouse (WIMP) interface and a service like Siri seems to be the way forward... and will then leak onto other devices like TV's.

Good work though

 

Wish you had shared any info you have on the upcoming Nvidia GPU's.

I already know what I need to know about Ivy Bridge apart from how far I can push the chip's especially under the water loop I have ready to go for it, just need to get a new pump and a better case as my current case won't support all of my plans.

The On Live thing could be very good for pc games in the future but I can see it harming the hardware industry for gaming hardware.

Cloud storage is good but given the low speed's in term's of broadband, for many UK customers thankfully not me but I prefer to keep all my files on hdd's in my pc and dotted around in USB Caddies.

Smartphones will be interesting in the future with the development of Quad Core ARM chip's and smaller and smaller graphic's chip's, meaning we could see PS3 and Xbox 360 quality graphic's on a phone which would be really fun imagine playing the likes of Battlefield 3 on you phone whilst on a train, or on the motorway being driven to family party's etc.

Hdd's and SSD's are going to be interesting as well as I really want a 500gb ssd or larger but at the moment the price is to high for them, and I am going to stick to my 120gb Corsair Force 3 for not until the price comes down, who know's though imagine if pc games suddenly started coming on a 30gb ssd ready to go no need to install, just plug it in to a external Sata port and play the game.

Should be a good year this year but with a few holidays booked I am going to be to skint to spend money on my pc to get it to where I want it, but I will save and save and maybe the year after I will be able to do it properly.

 

The Firefox section is a bit off, i thought that i'd heard of a new deal. After a quick bit of Googling the first result is:

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/20...le-deal-worth-900-million/UPI-91841324756503/

$900M over 3 years sounds like a bit of cash to play with.

 

I was about to say the same.

And for anyone raving about cloud storage: thanks, but nothanks. When you live somewhere where 512kBit/s down is standard, has a 500ms ping all the time to everywhere or alternatively, have a paltry internet quota, this will never take off. Besides, I like having local copies of all my stuff,n you never know when the ToS may change for the worse, and SOPA going through will basically kill that since the MASSIVE US market (probably the biggest) will basically be not allowed to use it.

Finally about touchscreens taking over everything, I have this to say: You may my very expensive, plain-looking mechanical keyboard out of my very cold, fleshless bony hands.

 

I suspect you are underestimating the scale of such an undertaking. Vista was (intended to be) the biggest rewrite of Windows for a decade and, well, look where that got them. They have written a new shell, which is probably the top two percent of the codebase, that's all.

It is also a shell that's hopelessly bandwagon-jumping, incredibly limited and likely to be discarded almost immediately even by people who aren't running productivity software that needs a more conventional WIMP interface. What a colossal waste of time.

I edit video, the least demanding of which comes at a data rate of about 30MB/s. Cloud storage? No, thought not. With Vimeo, Youtube and, frankly, piracy practically bringing the internet to its knees as it is, massive takeup of "the cloud" (which just means "storing your stuff on an internet server" like it always has) is both impossible and undesirable.

What he said.

P

 

If I go for Window's 8 I will be getting rid of that app style interface as soon as possible because all I use my pc for is, gaming, Video work and watching film's so the normal desktop is fine.

I cannot stand this stupid app based OS stuff.

Window's 8 from what I have seen look's like it will be very quick but I don't think it will introduce anything for gamers apart from maybe playing games against, Xbox users possibly but even if they introduce DX 12 we still won't be able to use it because all the pc games are just console ports anyway.

I think I will just stick with Window's 7 unless something major changes within the pc world in the mean time before Windows 8 comes along.

 

Y'all are being a bit shortsighted. Microsoft does not really worry about a minority of geek users who just play games on their PC or just run a few specific productivity applications. For them, there still is the desktop.

What Microsoft is thinking of is the burgeoning market of tablet and smart devices, from smart phone to smart TV to smart home to smart cars. Their vision is that all of these will run some version of windows with an interface that is as reassuringly familiar and recognisable as a brand identity. You may recall another company that very successfully managed to make the experience of their products synonymous with their brand identity, and is raking in the big bucks as a result. Begins with an A.

This is not new, of course; Microsoft has been striving to do that since the first smart devices hit the market back in the good ol' days of the late 90's; it is just that the standard Windows desktop interface translated so spectacularly badly to small-screen devices. Remember the steaming turd that was Windows Mobile? I'm still trying to forget. But Microsoft has now invented the Metro interface and frankly, it's like garlic bread --once you taste it, you realise it's the future. Microsoft has worked out that it is easier to adapt a small-screen smart interface for the big screen --by adding extra functionality and features afforded by the bigger screen estate-- than the other way around --by paring down the functionality of a big screen GUI and ending up with something cramped and crippled. It is catching on to something that Apple has already worked out.

It's not about you or me anymore. We are as significant a market share to Microsoft as the garage geeks of yore who soldered their own Apple I circuit board together are to Apple. The vast majority of the potential customer base out there are Big Brother watching, Facebooking, texting, tweeting teenagers bopping along with their own personal MP3 mash-up soundtrack to their lives. They play games on consoles, they browse on their mobiles, they use a keyboard, mouse and 'productivity' software only on school PCs for their homework. Under duress. They have never touched a floppy disk, let alone a vinyl record, and they have never seen the inside of a computer. They can't tell a harddisk from a CPU. And they are by far the majority; the next generation of customers who will give birth to even less tech-savvy customers in turn.

We are the fringe, and a sucky customer base. Because we are highly critical and demanding, and hack stuff, pirate stuff and make our own stuff anyway. We are (loosely) seen as part of the Linux crowd; people who develop competing software and then give it away for free, making life harder for the likes of Microsoft. We are a pain, frankly, and Microsoft --and Apple-- wish we'd just go away.

 

"This would not only make the Wii U potentially massively more powerful than both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but it will also have the notable effect of pushing DirectX 10.1 into the mainstream console gaming business."

OpenGL ES 2.0 surely?

It is nice that it will bring DX10.1 [class] hardware to consoles, but i am not aware that ES 2.0 provides any more features on this than it does on the PS3, to it will be the extra performance that makes a difference.

There was only one 40nm GPU manufactured from the 4xxx series, and that was the 640 shader version so my money is on that.

I thought the Wii2 might be based on a triple-core Llano Fusion, but it was not to be as we now know:

http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/nintendo-wii2-and-the-amd-contribution-just-how-much/

I think it will bomb because of the silly tablet/controller thingy.

 

word, brother

 

Do we know if MS are making DirectX for ARM at all?

 

I wonder if they really mean that the GPU will be based on the R700 architecture (ala VLIW5) rather than specifically a GPU from the 4xxx series.

In my mind it would make more sense to tweak a HD5670 - HD5770 level GPU (40nm, DX11) than tweak a 4xxx series GPU. After all the HD5770 is nothing more than a die shrunk and tweaked HD4870 (800 shader VLIW5).

A Llano based console would be pretty cool as the efficiency improvements that come with coding for a set level of hardware (in simple terms) could really show what the VLIW5 architecture and the Stars CPU is capable of.

 

I am not putting too much faith into ARM based windows machines taking off. The only reason it might sell is due to the windows name, otherwise it is exactly the same as iOS or Android ICS in terms of functionality (metro interface only) and requirement for specifically written apps.

Unless Microsoft can pull off the similar Universal app trick Apple did with their x86 switch back in 2004.

 

Netbooks aren't really dead they've just been upspecced a bit, most laptops with e350/e450 etc. aren't classed as netbooks and are selling by the bucket load....but they are netbooks really, my HP DM1 is a netbook, regardless of price I never want a full sized laptop. 11.6" is my limit for portability.

PC gaming requirements will never be simplified unless its all done through one piece of hardware or something like Onlive.

Can't see SSDs becoming mainstream, they aren't the safest place for your data, if they fail good luck getting your data, if a HDD fails you can often recover as they typically fail slowly, reckon the Hybrid drive is the future, using a large SSD for read/write caching but ultimately storing everything on a trusty mech drive.

Cloud storage, don't see the appeal unless you have a limited tablet or something, I'd rather not store any of my stuff in the cloud, again due to data safety, there have been a number of data losses by cloud centres and there is not a lot clients can do about it.

Ultra books, if you want a tidy laptop with Windows compatibility you won't buy a Mac book.

 

looks like a pretty drab year :-/

 

I was going to buy an ultrabook... but the 1100€ was too much...
instead I bought a i7 2670QM, with a GT550M, an HD monitor, 640Gb HDD (already replaced by a x-25m 160Gb).
All for 800€... They need to price those ultrabooks down a little...

 

it would make sense in many ways, and i hope it is indeed true.

i'd love to see the Wii to have access to features like tesselation etc, but again it comes back to OpenGL ES 2.0 support, for plain OpenGL would probably be considered unnecessarily complex and i doubt they would ever choose DX.

oddly enough, opengl 4.2 is designed to be able to run opengl es 2.0 on supporting hardware, and recent ATI drivers support opengl 4.2.

do you need equivalent hardware to make use of this tho? i.e. a DX11 AMD gpu, in which case a 4xxx series wouldn't cut it..........

 

I still don't see how going digital is a good thing. Picture quality was never an issue with analogue. Digital just allows them to use higher and higher compression ratios, as they fit more channels into the signal they make more money and the picture quality drops. I'm already sick of pixels all over the screen during a football match- they have my subscription, they still play adverts, and it's not enough, the quality must also go down!

 

Sounds like you either need a better aerial or your dish is obstructed by something.
More choice is always a better thing. Yeah, it may be more rubbish, but sticking with just 5 analogue channels?

It's surprising to see so many ludites on a tech forum!