Auto Parts for Brains

Last year, we gave you our predictions of what will be big in 2008. Though, we have seen a lot of the rumors disproved by a lot of the new gadgets that came out, it is undeniable that some of the theories we covered involving the iPhone and some of the games and gadgets in this article were spot on.

This year, we have done more research, and instead of giving you a report on what rumors around the gadgetsphere, we are going to give you a glimpse of what the big Tech boys are cooking for us, the picky and pickle consumers.  These five technologies will definitely make you think twice before buying a PC in the next few months early this year, which is just perfect with the bleak economy still trying to make a recovery.

Core Wars: Intel’s i7

One of this year’s biggest buzz maker is the release of intel’s core i7 CPU’s which was known as Nehalem for many. Unlike upgrades from previous chips from Intel, this is a major upgrade from the chip company which boasts of a performance that is even way beyond what their high end quad cores can do.

It is quite sucky that just a few months after they released their quad core chips, Intel has already made those hardware a little out dated if not soon obsolete.

So how big of an update is the i7? Unlike previous upgrades, Intel’s latest chip does not only pack more cores into their CPU for better computing power. It has actually redesigned its hardware for a speed boost previously thought impossible.

One of the major changes in the i7 is the high-speed crossbar switch which allows its CPU’s to connect with each other. With the new chips, Intel threw away the front-side bus that is present in almost all current-gen CPU’s. This will result in better performance especially for heavy multi application runs on one computer. Aside from this, the i7 also include an internal memory controller which dramatically lowers latency and all four cores on a single die.

The i7 will definitely change the whole computing landscape in the coming months as it will require major motherboard upgrades, DDR3 support and Hyper-threading which means simultaneous multi threading support. We have seen the last feature when Intel released their Pentium 4 processors before but has revisited it with the minimal transistor cost and huge performance benefits offered by the i7. To add more to its already overwhelming slew of features, Intel also announced that the new chips support overclocking as well as an improved loop detector routine which can save power and boost performance further.

The i7 has already been released in the market early this year in its high performance variant called Bllomfield with its more affordable siblings Lynnfield and Ibex Peak soon to come for mainstream computing requirements.

Solid State Drives and other storage technologies

We have first heard of Solid State Drives offered on the laptops and nettopsas an alternative to SATA drives. They have, however, and still remain as a form of luxury with their limited capacities and cost.

This year it is expected that the SSD will move more towards the mainstream market with bigger capacities, lower costs and better availability. At the start of the year, Samsung mentioned a plan to release a 250 Gb SSD for notebooks as well as Toshiba with a whooping 512Gb. This is a major leap for so far SSD’s go below the 40 to 80Gb range and have not pierced the 160Gb barrier effectively just yet.

SSD’s will definitely overpower the common SATA in the next few months with its read speed of 200Mb per second and a mere 1.1 watt power consumption. They will fit with your notebook’s SATA slot without the need for additional hardware and are comparatively tougher with the absence of any moving part. The seal the advantages of SSD’s, tests have shown them to offer better boot up and response times, less heat generation and improved power efficiency.

As for other storage technologies, we have received reports of industry giants working on seeing the application of patterned media recording as an alternative to standard perpendicular recording. Though this and similar technologies will improve thermal stability between groves in the drive, we are not seeing any significant effect this might have on the emergence of the SSD in the mainstream market.

USB 3.0

USB 2.0 devices are everywhere. From our phones, to music players to flash drives enclosed in humping plastic animals. Whatever man can conceive of attaching to a computer’s USB drive, he has successfully brought forth. This year however, we may start to learn about an upgrade to our beloved data transfer port.

Enter USB 3.0. This new technology will definitely affect everyone who has a PC and owns a gadget in the world. This new technology makes the 12Mb/s to 480Mb/s data rate of current USB’s look puny with its ability to manage the transfer of ten times as much data in the same amount of time. Though backwards compatible with existing USB devices, USB 3.0 definitely win everyone over once it is released.

The new USB 3.0 cable has five new lines added to the existing four lines, running parallel to it in a different plane. Tow of these new lines will transmit data while the other two will receive data; with the fifth providing additional ground. The new Super Speed ports employs a new interrupt driven protocol which keeps your idle iPod from having their power drained off by the host controller as it tries to find active data traffic.

This technology is not yet slated to come out before 2010, but it is wise to assume that a lot of the gadget makers and PC manufacturers are already working into adapting their technology to this upgrade once it is available.

Netbooks

No one can deny that 2009 is the year of the Netbook. Just a few years before, major industry giants have just watched as ASUS conquered the netbook arena with their EEE series. Now, as more and more of them are following suit with their netbook models, it is expected that more and more better options will be out before the end of the year.

Nettops have come a long way since its release of eight inchers with 4 to 8 gig SSD drives. Now many of the available netbooks offer specs that even equate to their more expensive laptop counterparts.

The Netbook’s draw goes far beyond its price as it gave the consumers just the feature they need for a mobile device. With the first batch of netbooks marketed as a device capable of performing only the most simple functions, notebooks of today has evolved to be a good enough hardware for small to moderate performance requirements. Intel’s Atom processors have upped the speeds of these mobile devices and 160Gb SATA storage now becomes more standard for new models. Sony, Dell and Lenovo have already followed Asus, HP and MSI with their mini notebooks which provide consumers with more options that may fit their individual requirements.

Comparing all the current gen netbooks, features are not really that far off from each other. Mostly it is the design that differentiates each brand from the rest. With current developments in CPU technologies and storage systems, it may not be too far off before we can get a nettop that can run more apps faster.

Windows 7

Forget Vista. This year’s star is definitely the new Windows7. Dubbed as a “major” release of the Windows operating system, beta testers and industry analysts have so far given the new OS a positive feedback.

Features that got a lot of people excited included multi touch support, a redesigned windows shell and task bar and better support for gaming. The major crowd pleaser for the OS, however, remains to be the performance improvement it offers. Unlike bloaty Vista, Windows seven was claimed to run successfully even on hardware below industry standard specs. This time Microsoft learned from their mistake and took out all the junk from Vista that people does not like and came up with a solid OS that requires less storage space.

What Windows did is put a lot of the options they once had with Vista as an option for consumers to use in a separate Windows live Essentials Suite, which is available online as a part of Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative. The new release also offers updated versions of WordPad and Paint as well as Accelerators, Cleartype text tuner, Gadgets, Infrared recovery etc. etc.

Microsoft says they have also done some major cleaning and trimming of the code for the operating system since Windows 3.1 which successfully removed the bloat that has swelled in the past few years. As a result, Windows 7 is a pretty lean system which is streamlined to run well in machines that cannot even run Vista.

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft has a sure winner with their latest OS in the coming. With the recent buzz and reviews from beta testers, however, it looks like they actually got something people are sure to love.