From: J Corbally (icorb@indigo.ie)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 16:34:29 MDT
>Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 11:59:14 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Samantha Tennison <xytrope@yahoo.com>
>Subject: The 2005 PC: Quantum Leap?
>I've been following many of the bleeding edge trends
>the last few months, and from all appearances there
>appears to be a quantum leap in computer performance
>and capacity on its way. Here are the following leaps
>I am currently aware of:
>MRAM - Magnetic RAM:
>According to most sources MRAM will be commercially
>available in early 2004. And mass production by the
>end of 2004. For those who don't know, MRAM allows for
>instant-on computing - no more boot up time! The
>question posed here, is do you see it coming into wide
>use by 2005, and will it replace normal DDR-II or III
>RAM or supplement it?
Depends on the density, which depends on the cell size, which to a large
degree depends on the mask size, and ultimately its bandwidth/latency. May
be that instead of using it as main memory, they stick in just enough to
store all information necessary to do instant restarting. The main problem
with "instant on" currently isn't the memory, it's the OS. ACPI 2.0 is
supposed to help a lot, but you'll still have old peripherals and old apps
that'll go screwy cos they were never written to fully allow for suspension
and power off modes. Windows is still a bit away from flawless "no power"
resumption as well.
As for MRAM, I'm not familiar with it's performance characteristics, but
it'll have to be at least up to current DRAM, with comparable room to scale up.
>Holographic Storage:
>Already In-Phase Technologies has a working prototype
>that stores over 100 Gbytes per removable disk. A
>company in Japan has demonstrated a system that can
>hold over a Terabyte per CD-sized Disk. The Japanees
>expect this to become commercially avaialble by
>2004-5. Imagine what you could do with a Terabyte -
>Thats equiavalent to a million books (a university
>library), 100 DVD movies, 1400 CD's of music, etc.
>Question posed here, is do you believe these reports?
>Are we seeing the birth of the new de-facto removable
>storage media?
I've heard about this disk. What I'm concerned about is whether they'll
sell it to the highest bidder in which case it'll be hamstrung like DVD,
which suffers from the "too many CEOs, not enough engineers" scenario. The
CD was invented to facilitate Digital music. The DVD was invented to
protect company profits. And it shows. No rewritable version, discs that
only work in certain countries and so on.
>PCI Express (previously 3GIO):
>This new motherboard architecture is the most
>substantial improvement in over a decade. AGP speeds
>are expected to exceed x32, and the throuput on the
>board itself will be accelerated dramatically.
PCI was the saviour of the PC, IMHO. Genuine high speed PnP even on
pre-Win95 systems. I used to debug them, lovely system. Good to see
they've been keeping it current. They've also created a High speed serial
PCI standard from what I hear, fully backward compatible. Then again,
motherboards have had what was essentially Serial PCI for a few years now.
>
>Graphics Acceleration - post NV30, and IBM's "The
>Cell":
>IBM is claiming their new graphics processor is
>capable of performaing a Teraflop (thats 1 trillion
>floating point operations per second)! I find this
>somewhat hard to believe, but if its true, we are
>talking about more than a 100-fold increase in
>graphics processing power. They are expecting these
>new chips to be avaialble in early 2004, and already
>there is talk of becoming the core chip in the
>Playstation 3. I'm trying to imagine the real-time
>rendering capability of a chip running at this speed.
>Of course, it will largely depend on developers taking
>advantage of it, but holy cow. What types of graphics
>applications do you see. Will this be the power we
>need to finally have realistic VR?
I'm not too surprised to see a GPU that fast. Graphics cores tend to have
small and highly optimized instruction sets, as well as architectures that
can be better optimized as the type of work they do is pretty consistent in
its nature. Since large caches don't provide the same kinds of performance
gains that they do in CPUs, plus you can dump a lot of the
predictive/predicative hardware, you've got much more die space for more
hardwired functions and processing pipelines. Not to mention the very high
speed dual ported RAM they slap on.
>Samantha
Excellent summation, Samantha. I've been out of the game for a while, so
this is a great snapshot of the current state of affairs.
James...
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and
crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures
to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
-Q, Star Trek:TNG episode 'Q Who'
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