I was just wondering what the specs on your average computer might be 5 years from now

comparing to todays average:
Pentium 2.8Ghz
1GB Ram
160Gb hard drive
DVD/RW drive
XP Home
USB
10/100 LAN
DVI Video Card

4/26/2006 6:45:10 PM

4GHz quad core
2GB Ram
Vista/OS 10.7 Dual Boot

..... 80GB Flash Drive

4/26/2006 6:47:05 PM

or maybe 1TB HDDs will be commonplace -
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060426-6684.html
The new Barracuda 7200.10 750GB is only $600

4/26/2006 7:02:15 PM

too hard to predict

4/26/2006 7:07:48 PM

Quote :

"2GB Ram"

I would be shocked if the average memory spec in 5 years is only 2gb.

4/26/2006 7:09:03 PM

aren't there a lot of people who already have that?

4/26/2006 7:11:31 PM

i do lol

4/26/2006 7:13:27 PM

yeah sure, a lot of people have that now. And in 5 years a lot of people will have 8 or 16GB maybe. But what did you have in 2001 - probably 128-256MB.
And 512MB has only pretty recently become "standard". 1GB is still a major upgrade that most normal people wouldn't get when configuring their bargin basement dell. For something to count as the "average computer" spec, it has to be the base configuration for cheap-middle of the line Dells, HPs, Macs, etc. And I'm betting it's 2-3 years before they even attempt to go to 1GB as the standard (well, maybe when Vista rolls out next year 1GB could be more standard, or at least a much cheaper upgrade...). Then it will be another 2 years before they try to move to a higher standard configuration, like 2GB.

4/26/2006 7:16:26 PM

I cant wait for the 1GB video cards

4/26/2006 7:19:03 PM

^^i would not agree with that. wtf would you do with 16 gigs of ram. i'd rather have a 100 mb of static ram

[Edited on April 26, 2006 at 7:19 PM. Reason : ]

4/26/2006 7:19:12 PM

ok fine - then what are you getting at?
cdubya said he has 2GB now, and you said you do too.
Then I said maybe enthusiasts could have up to 16GB and you said that's way too much.

4/26/2006 7:22:44 PM

i'm just saying, hopefully by then static ram will be cheap enough for consumers to use. and yea i agree, i never use more than a gig of my ram, so 2 is way too much, i just figured may be one day i'll need it

4/26/2006 7:24:25 PM

5.0 ghz
10gb of ram
1tb of harddrive space
1.5gb graphics card

4/26/2006 7:35:14 PM

^^is on the right track

We wont see 16gb of system memory in 5 years.

Maybe 4gb, that would be reasonable for desktops.

What we will see is 8/16/32mb L2 and L3 caches start to creep their way into processors. That makes a much bigger difference.

And hard drives will hit the peak of platter densities before 5 years have passed, hopefully in about 5 years we will see the first generation of non-platter based mass storage.

Video Cards are going to continue down the road of becoming more multipurpose, general programmable cpu's, Physics cards will work their way into mainstream user machines, and CPUs will move to quad core.

On the software front, application developers will finally start the push toward native multithreaded applications, opening the door to the dual and quad core processors. Which means finally another real performance breakthrough in actual percievable use.

Operating systems will continue to move away from the Desktop paradigm and more and more into the context sensitive world we live in.

The internet is going to probably shit itself, and god only knows how that's all going to settle out.

[Edited on April 26, 2006 at 7:46 PM. Reason : .]

4/26/2006 7:41:44 PM

mhum, well i don't know if SRAM will ever really replace SDRAM. It's a simple fact that SDRAM will always be cheaper than SRAM, just by the nature of their designs. Therefore, in 5 years even if you can get 1-2GB of SRAM for cheap, you could get 10 times that amount of SDRAM for the same price, so people will still continue to get SDRAM.

Instead of hoping SRAM will get cheap, I think you will need to hope for other memory technologies that are under development (like various magnetic RAMs, Phase-change RAM, Ovonics Unified Memory, etc) to pick up where SRAM, SDRAM and Flash all fail us (i.e. must be fast, cheap, small, static, and nearly infinitely re-writeable, which none of the current technologies can do all of).

4/26/2006 7:46:55 PM

may be the world will come to an end and we'll go back to using punchcards. and tetris.

[Edited on April 26, 2006 at 7:52 PM. Reason : ]

4/26/2006 7:49:04 PM

Quantum computers

4/26/2006 7:49:52 PM

Quote :

"80GB Flash Drive"

How fast can they get flash actually. Aren't there limitations related to the time it takes for the memory to change states and store new information? Could they be made significantly faster than a harddrive. I know the biggest advantage is that they're very low power usage.

^ I hear those work better when they're not turned on.

[Edited on April 26, 2006 at 8:27 PM. Reason : ]

4/26/2006 8:25:57 PM

flash is incredibly fast compared to HDDs. Just the simple fact that it's a purely silicon, electrical device, compared to a stack of rotating discs should be a pretty good indication that it's several orders of magnitute faster. But they're not as fast as DRAM though.

The major advantages of flash are: fast access, nonvolitile, low power
The major drawback (why they can't fully replace HDDs now) is they have a limited number of write cycles before the cells "wear out". and of course bit-per-bit they're much more expensive (~$30/GB for flash vs. $0.30/GB for HDD). But of course Samsung introduced their 32GB "Flash HDD" last month, so you can bet more are coming.

4/26/2006 8:36:59 PM

in 5 years, 2GB is going to be the 256MB of today...just enough to scrape by on.

4/26/2006 9:17:24 PM

I believe the real achievement is going to be power and size. With more consumer devices going the all in one cell phone or media player route; id expect to see current desktop specs squeezed into palm pilot sized packages with good battery life for the future. I think this will be more remarkable than gigarhurtz and megarbites. Interconnect busses will get faster too, so USB type devices will be able to do more, especially interfaces like Bluetooth.

It would be incredibly neat and useful to have a phone/palm sized computer for on the go, and 'dock' it when you are at your desk with enough power to do cad, 3D, and run Notes

4/26/2006 9:38:32 PM

Quote :

"in 5 years, 2GB is going to be the 256MB of today...just enough to scrape by on."

Agreed...Vista even recommends 1 GB of RAM now.

4/26/2006 9:45:29 PM

I'm looking fowards to phyics cards.

4/27/2006 12:30:57 AM

Maximum PC's dream machine in 2001: They built 3 that year...gaming rig: P4 overclock to 2GHz, their workstation featured dual 1.2GHz Athlon MP CPU;s, and their entertainment configureation featured a cool and quiet P3.

The 1996 Dream Machine had a 200MHz P1, 32MB of EDO RAM, and a 2GB SCSI harddrive.

The 2005 dream machine had Twin dual core opteron 275s, 8GBs of registered DDR400 RAM, A 5 drive 2TB RAID 3 array, dual 7800GTXs, and more coolness.

You can use your imagination to see how things will scale in the futire.

MPC's RAM used for their dream machine:
1996-32MB
1997-64MB
1998-128MB
1999-?
2000-512MB
2001-?
2002-512MB Rambus memory
2003-1GB
2004-2GB
2005-8GB

Raw Storage:
1996-2GB
1997-4.2GB
1998-9GB
1999-18GB
2000-75GB
2001-?
2002-240GB
2003-500GB
2004-600GB
2005-2500GB

4/27/2006 1:14:01 AM

give a people more resources and they will discover ways to use/abuse/waist those resources until they are asking for more.

keep in mind that it was said that nobody would ever need more than 640kByte of memory, and when 40MEG HDD came out everyone was like WHOAAAA how are you ever going to fill that. same with the first 1GB drives.

As far as games have come, they still don't look like real life, Pixel shaders etc have a long way to go to get REAL flesh tones, they have come a LONG way, and I'm amazed at times, but until they can get non-cardboard trees and flesh tones real, and FULLY interactive environments, they will still need more memory processing speed...

and when they accomplish that, you can move onto cubing your computing power needs with advent of true 3D displays so your resolution will now be 1920x1920x1920 or however you want to break it up your going to need another magnitude of computing power. of course then my mind wanders to well actually a 3D display would need to be pseudo life size in order to make it worthwhile b/c my 3D perspective window into a 2D game works better than if I was staring at a cube with REAL 3D images but the scale was reduced drastically...

in 5 years, we will see a lot of cool stuff... hopefully including massive Fiber to the home deployments where 100meg with 20+meg upstream will be possible bring... Innovation and Invention are only limited by imagination, some people will say physics, but for the most part, when you run out of road on one technology another method can be developed using something else to carry the ball from there.


[Edited on April 27, 2006 at 7:49 AM. Reason : sp]

4/27/2006 7:46:22 AM

Quote :

"and when they accomplish that, you can move onto cubing your computing power needs with advent of true 3D displays so your resolution will now be 1920x1920x1920 or however you want to break it up your going to need another magnitude of computing power. of course then my mind wanders to well actually a 3D display would need to be pseudo life size in order to make it worthwhile b/c my 3D perspective window into a 2D game works better than if I was staring at a cube with REAL 3D images but the scale was reduced drastically... "

ummmmmmm.where to start.

4/27/2006 8:06:44 AM

picking on my haphazzard thought process there?

I typed that in like 30seconds before I had to go to class... was kinda a fluid train of thought processing that never got refined...

3D display technology. Currently we have 3D game environments represented on a 2D display and the 3D deminsion comes in the form of depth/field of focus perception. This works very well.

I've often thought about true 3D displays, but when I think a little further about the logistics I realize that due to scaling/depth/field of focus reasons a 3D display wouldn't be worthwhile for anything other than objects that could fit into the envelope of the display, as opposed to our 3D perspective in our current 2D displays. so in order to make it useful it would have to be scaled to lifesized like the holodeck in star trek(I'm not a trekkie so don't go down that road I have no clue).

but you know what, this has been done for the past 30 years with airplane simulators and such, as long as your encapsolated a simulated viewpoint is pretty easy to mock up... SO back to the physics of leafs ... Man I must sound like I'm drugged out of my mind... nope just bored at work

4/27/2006 1:16:09 PM

not in 5 years but probably not much beyond that will be full mode VR glasses, not heavy, the image would be beamed wirelessly (optical or otherwise) to the lenses on your face. that would work with in a 180 degrees from the display....

probably more like 15 years for that really...

for a better description read Snow Crash

but for 5 years the high end will probably be....

6-8 ghz quad or 8x core with a large L2 and L3 caches in the 4-16 meg range per-core

probably 1-2 TB HD storage still on discs due to cheapness
Holographic storage a strong possibility for optical media instead of DVD drives....

video, physics and sound cards each become more and more powerful and resultingly less taxing on the cpu

the only way i see the internet shitting itself is if government or coorperate meddling harm it in some way that is fundamental
- highspeed optical/silicon switches have been pretty recently made drastically improving the only really 'slow' part of optical data cable systems.

along with multi-wavelength WiFi, optics will carry the net forward by sheer momentum really

4/27/2006 6:00:11 PM

there's a reason VR hasn't progressed since the early 90's. look up simulator sickness, there's a big paper on it I found that explained a lot.

also, very soon, video cards will no longer be "cards" per se but there will be a socket on your board for a raw gpu, to which you will add your own memory

[Edited on April 27, 2006 at 6:29 PM. Reason : d]

4/27/2006 6:28:25 PM

Maybe not in 5 years, but definately before 10, hard drives will be replaced with solid flash type memory.

and we will still be making media in the shape of a CD.

4/27/2006 7:42:35 PM

no they wont.

Solid state nand memory is NEVER going to be the mainstream. It's too expensive just from a raw material standpoint. The amount of rare material that goes into flash, much like into every other type of solid state memory, is too expensive for mass commercial storage.

not to mention flash memory has a much lower lifetime than even today's hard disks. nand devices are supposedly better, but who knows by how much.

The next breakthrough in storage is either going to be in holography (aka storage on silicon in 3d), or in some kind of nano device(s).

4/27/2006 8:59:50 PM

Yeah, harddrives are just too cheap per GB to go away at least for mass storage and archives (for now and well into the foreseable future.) I could see a system that had a ramdrive or something to preload all the most used files, but I'm sure there'd still be a harddrive to actually keep everything. I mean, if everything's on a flash drive and it dies on you or if everything's on a ramdrive and the battery backup or power goes out, you're going to want that large, cheap harddisk in there anyways.

[Edited on April 27, 2006 at 9:16 PM. Reason : ]

4/27/2006 9:15:35 PM

the kick ass servers of today already run purely out of ram after loading the operating system... this is also how high end embedded systems run... hell most of you with 2GB of ram can turn of page file memory which is effectively doing the samething...

[Edited on April 27, 2006 at 10:24 PM. Reason : static memory has to exist somewhere to store the OS and perminant data, but most opperations RAM]

4/27/2006 10:23:10 PM

Quote :

"there's a reason VR hasn't progressed since the early 90's. look up simulator sicknes"

i know, the difference with this is the environment does not move with your head or eyes, which causes the sickness but rather you manipulate the evironment via mouse or keyboard or some other input device. it would be a bit different, it would have to be to overcome said issue with visual input and disorientation.

4/27/2006 11:40:25 PM