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So there has not been any decent Friday Night topics for a bit, so I am going to start my own

There has been a lot of recent upcoming tech goodies recently and in the near future, M.2 SSD's, more PCIe SSD's, adaptive sync displays, smaller 23.8" displays with 2560x1440 resolutions, a swath of mechanical keyboards, new GPU's, and CPU's on the horizon.

I am personally excited about the more recent surge forward into PC display technology, and waiting anxiously for the one that will have all the features and specs I am looking for with a price the wallet can handle.

What new technological products and/or developments in the PC arena are you looking forward to and why?

Discuss.

I'm hoping that with windows 10 a PCIe SSD we'll start to see load time improvements for games. I want a new system, so I'm hoping once skylake comes out there will be a good reason to upgrade.

I've been excited about display tech as well, but there's my desire for more pixel real estate and my desire for high refresh rates competing, and then the vendor-dependence of adaptive sync leading to potential frustration even if one does come out that manages to do everything. Add the desire not to spend $2k+ on video cards to drive a bunch of pixels at 100+FPS, and I was feeling like I'd never get a new monitor.

So I just gave up and splurged on a 32" 4k IPS. Yeah, it's a fixed refresh rate, but at least it's 60Hz and displayport; I use it more for productivity than gaming anyway. And you know what? I found that at 32", you don't really need scaling in Windows 7 for a 4k monitor -- I've left it at 100%, and I appreciate how little space my taskbar, icons, etc. take up while still fitting oh so many letters on them. The text is small, yes, but perfectly readable. And fonts have been scalable within apps (word processing, IDEs, etc.) for forever; that's the stuff you spend a lot of time looking at.

I've been pretty bored by general tech improvements for a while; having bought a 2500k with 16GB of RAM a few months after release, I'm just not seeing much potential benefit in an upgrade. Sure, a new video card and a bigger SSD/HDD, but nothing else (other than the monitor). So I'm also hoping Skylake is a big jump, because it still feels weird to go 5+ years without wanting to buy a new system. At least it's clear we'll have faster-than-sata SSD options by the time Skylake gets here.

although not a technological product i am looking forward to games being more multithreaded becacuse of dx12 and consoles having 8 cores

also looking forward to hbm as i think its going to be a gamechanger for processors (gpu's/cpu's) not because of its bandwidth (which is awesome) but because of its high density and ability to be able to be put directly on gpu's/cpu's
apus with 8/16gb hbm might actually be useful with enough bandwidth
cpu's with 8/16gb memory directly on the cpu much faster than any ddr3/4

GPUs still excite me the most. They have the most direct relevance (games + HPC), and still receive the largest jumps in performance. I'm excited to see how HBM is going to play out as both AMD and NVIDIA cards are going to benefit immensely from the 3x jump in memory bandwidth, particularly as the HBM tech itself matures.

Longer term, I'm more than a little interested that Intel's claims they will ditch silicon at 7nm. Most of the mentioned III-V metals have a much higher electron mobility than silicon (and hence, switching speed...). Which I imagine means we could be seeing clockspeeds and OCing headroom ramp up significantly from what we've had for the last ten years. I'd be very curious for someone knowledgeable on the metallurgy could actually quote some numbers though, everyone says III-V 's are faster or much faster than silicon but don't mention any percentages.

I'm hoping that software will get smarter. Whether this be due to the programmers, or the OS taking the reigns. There are too many restrictions where 1 process hanging causes the whole machine to slow to a crawl.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

I'm hoping that software will get smarter. Whether this be due to the programmers, or the OS taking the reigns. There are too many restrictions where 1 process hanging causes the whole machine to slow to a crawl.

This has been done, and done 45+ years ago in Multics and the Apollo Guidance Computer.

spiritwalker2222 wrote:

I'm hoping that with windows 10 a PCIe SSD we'll start to see load time improvements for games. I want a new system, so I'm hoping once skylake comes out there will be a good reason to upgrade.

Not going to happen. Load times are CPU-bound even with a modest 2.5" SSD unit. PCIe SSD cards only make sense for I/O intensive applications (ie not games or mainstream stuff).

Digital computer technology is already hitting a plateau due to physics. It is becoming too difficult and expensive to shrink ICs and transistors. The smaller players of semiconductor industry are already making their exiting moves.

I do see that this plateau will force a renaissance of software engineering and coding since we can no longer rely on brute force. We will have to wait until another computing model becomes economically viable for mass-production before we will see any significant advances in hardware tech.,

Krogoth wrote:

I do see that this plateau will force a renaissance of software engineering and coding since we can no longer rely on brute force. We will have to wait until another computing model becomes economically viable for mass-production before we will see any significant advances in hardware tech.,

An example of that could be networking. Why do some sites take the same amount of time to load on a 100mbps connection as it does on a 1mbps connection. That can't all be the server bandwidth, can it? It's almost like there are too many connections created to load a single page that all take forever. Or is it all the scripting that is happening. Either way, drives me crazy.

Indeed. The PC hardware has been pretty stale the past few years IMO. I think i have been more interested in peripherals such as displays, keyboards, and mice the past while.

However, DX12, benchmarks do look like cause for excitement, time will tell. I think better software optimization in general such as multi-threading and 64-bit more common would also be a nice thing.

I am still running an AMD 955BE built back in August 2009, last upgrade was the SSD 3 years ago this month, and 1080p ips monitor about 1.5 years ago. If only we could get a 1TB samsung XP951 for the price of a crucial bx100, that would be nice, I know the CPU would be the bottleneck but that better than the sata bus limiting the SSD performance.

I am hoping my motherboard lasts a long while yet, I don't think I will building a new PC until I can compare what AMD can put out on Samsung 14nm finfet vs. whatever Intel has out at the time.