time...

10 years ago we were still on the heart of good old pre-gigaherz (almost premegaherz!) CPUs and such. Now we are entering the 64 bnit stage, people regularly hit 4ghz with P4s, and get comparable performance out of A64 and some higher-speed XP chips. Nice at it is, where do you think we'll be in 20 years? Heck, make it 10....

My father was involved in the infancy of Darpanet and worked on Mainframes that used nothing but tubes... He was involved with ICBM guidance systems etc, and to this day even with his constant exposure to computers and such (he's using a 2100XP I gave him) he still revels in the fact computers are still in their INFANCY.

Where will we be when 128 bit, 256bit, gigabit etc copmputing comes out? Holographic memory, solid-state energy-based data storage, etc. When terabyte data storage becomes passe, and speed will be measured in ????

Discuss....

Very interesting question. I'm particularly interested in the implications of quantum computing. Will it really mean that there will no longer be any safe way to encrypt data? And if not, what new system will they come up with?

Frankly, I'm a little surprised we don't have holographic storage already. I read some articles from Science News a few years ago that indicated they were making excellent progress on it in the lab. Of course, that just begs the question: what are you going to store when you have all that space?

I've wondered about this a few times. I figure that in ten years or so, the speed of your computer will not matter. How much can we really ramp up quality in games and so on? People won't ask "what are your system specs" because it really won't matter anymore. Now that is the conusmer market, but how about the industry? That will probably be pretty similar. Storing massive amounts of data will be a common occurence, and of course much much cheaper than it is today. I think that the future is going to be a lot more P2P as well. The internet will not be run mostly on dedicated servers, but distributed over every computer in the world, more so than it is today. Of coure the NewEgg site won't reside on a myriad of home computers, but I still think that software will be much more open source, and much more available to the public. I think that distributed computing will be pretty big as well. DevFolding on everybody's computer. It is kind of scary though to think that ressources could be so shared, even today. Privacy will be even more of a concern than it is today...

OK, gotta come back to the real current world lol. That was weird .

Good thoughts.... anybody else care to take a dip into the waters of the future?

hmmm... well I can imagine games growing to over 4Gb each within a few years, games such as The Sims 2 are already 2Gb. That would force Hard Drive manufacturers to create larger faster disks. Also by 2015 the PS3 and Xbox 2 will be pas their prime and the newest consoles(no doubt a PS4 and Xbox 3) will be comeing out. Processors will not only get faster, they will all become 64-bit, and much cooler. The final still heavely loaded with bugs version of Windows Longhorn will just be hitting shelves and will come packaged with your new Dell computer. Security will be a big problem, hackers will find new devastating ways to gain access to your computer and with many more banks and other companies turning to the internet your privacy will be a big concern.nothing will happen with the keyboard and mouse though, or maybe something like in Minority Report. Talking to computers won't catch on as they often make mistakes and you hae to go back and correct things.

Its tough to say. Right now the industry has reached kind of an impass. There are new technologies coming out, but nothing revolutionary yet. That won't hit until multi-core chips hit the scene. I think those will really take a foothold. In ten years they could put 4 cores on a desktop chip, but have it utilize less power than today's single core chips.

I also think the industry will start to move away from an elaborate software system like Windows, and implement something less complex. Security is getting worse and worse, and its mostly because of the thousands of ways a hacker can exploit your computer.

I also think that the industry will find a way to make a computer operate as specified without any elaborate software. For example, 64 bit chips don't operate at 64bit efficiency because the next version of Windows isn't out. The operating system's bit rate won't matter. Perhaps there will be a processor on the motherboard directly responsible for converting the information from the HDD to the proper Hardware bitrate. It would be a simple drive controller integration. By then it would operate at a good enough efficiency that there will be no lag.

But of course this is all pretty optimistic. It may turn out that the tech industry doesn't advance as much as we might hope. But I like the Idea of a small, but hardcore Graphics card in my system, with a 4 core GPU; make that 2-4 Core GPUs, 4GB of onboard QDR (Quadruple Data Rate) Ram with a 2048bit bus. As well as an 8 core CPU, and double core northbridge. LEss transistors, and overall less size. Geeze, theres so much I can't possibly go through it all.

Oh, and I Forgot to mention; heatsink-less processors!!! ^_^ (wishful thinking)

I think biocomputing is something we will see withing 30 years.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7481
A while back, that was what was supposed to happen, but AMD's dual core design and 64bit technology forced intel to move there also.

this is what may come to be

I'm excited by the idea of biocomputing. It's so...well, science fictional. Of course, it's been observed more than once that we're currently living in a future with a lot of stuff that even science fiction authors didn't picture/predict thirty years ago.

Rest assured-- you make teh space, MicroSquish will find a way to fill it.

The first biocomputers will likely be implanted cell-phones... if it hasn't been done already.

I agree with mrps2man, speed won't matter. The rig won't matter so much, but I think memory will still be the measure of the man, as it were.

Distributed computing will be king, and I'm not talking just a half-dozen processors on a MoBo. I'm looking at peripherals that are full-blown computing devices in themselves. It's already happening with your graphics cards and some sound cards-- their own processor(s), memory, DMA to the HDD...

Wearable computers wil become more ubiquitous... LCD's built into glasses, prescription or no, implanted audio... a combination cell/radio/hearing aid, perhaps? The current time will be tattooed on the back of your hand or the tip of your finger, if it isn't being directly jacked into your peripheral vision-- that's a few decades down the road though, I think.

I just realized that I mis-spoke :-p

2048bit memory channel would be alot more than quadruple hehehe... more than dodectuple