Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Computex 2008
Singapore's ITfair 2008 is coming up this 12-15 June 2008, but Taipei Computex 2008 has started exhibiting.Computex makes Singapore's ITfair seem ancient and primitive. Singapore's largest IT show is COMEX, but it is just a 4-day farce of ugly Singaporean's in a mad rush and jostling for the latest deals and sales.
This year's Computex has never been bigger, with this year's show spilling over to a new venue, the Nangang Exhibition Hall. With up to 1725 exhibitors from 27 countries, this represents an increase of 27% in the number of exhibitors.
Computex is all about vendors show-casing their latest technologies and product offerings with most that are not available on the market yet. I'll be showing you some of the highlights that I think are significant for the near future and the trend of IT development into the next decade, without all the geek-talk of course. But you do know what a Gb (gigabyte) is right?
Pictures are courtesy from HWZ and VRzone.
Here is a demonstration by HIS, FOUR, dual-GPU Radeon 3870X2 cards in QUAD-Crossfire configuration. That's EIGHT GPU cores for extreme graphics!!! This will probably represent the epitome of graphics for enthusiasts, the day where the number of cores for graphics outnumbers the number of processing cores.
Here's an interesting product from Kingston. a 32GB SD memory card. How big is your current one in your camera? I doubt it's larger than 2gb or 4gb.
If you think your 500gb / 1Tb harddrive space in your computer is large, try Patriot's new range of SSDs (Solid State drives). The Patriot Warp has storage capacities ranging from 16GB to a whopping 256GB. 256Gb of solid-state memory. 10x the seek speed the fastest 10,000rpm raptors today. I highly doubt there are many of you out there with 500gb harddrive capacities in your computers today as well. This is the near future direction of storage capacity for the next 3 years at least.
Shuttle has a few new SFF (small form factors), here is the K48, which is intended to be a low powered and quiet PC for office and home use. With its Intel 945GC + ICH7 chipset, it's not the most powerful of systems, but requires only a 100W PSU. Obviously, quiet and low power consumption are the objectives here, along with the fancy display of course.
Next trend in computing for the next 3 years. Netbooks. or UMPCs. (both are actually quite different). Netbooks are the next in ultra-mobile computing. Smaller and lighter with longer battery life than even the lightest and most advanced Centrino/C2D laptops today. You should have seen the Asus Eee PC by now, or the OLPC. Powered by the next-generation of ultra-low power processors.
Such as VIA's NANO, Intel's ATOM and Nvidia's Tegra (super new).
Nvidia's Tegra
Nvidia touting the advantages and size differences between Intel's ATOM and it's own flagship Tegra solution.
Singapore doesn't even have ATOM powered netbooks on sale yet, (maybe we'll see it during the ITfair 2008), but the Asus Eee Pc is the closest thing you can get to it. Now you have Intel's ATOM, VIA's NANO and Nvidia's Tegra, it's only a matter of time before such products become mainstream in Singapore's shores.
Okay what's a little MK without all the High-tech enthusiast's stuff? WATERCOOLING is the only way to go for enthusiasts motherboards. With processors packing more transistors and heat, the inevitable direction in cooling is with liquid cooling system as Air-cooling doesn't cut it anymore for domestic computer setups. Components are packed more and more tightly together and a liquid solution is required to cool all these items. (As shown in my MK2008).
There are many liquid-cooling setups in the market, but are still mainly for enthusiasts, but this is set to change in the near future. Computex debuted several new watercooled devices, and in the past few years, water cooling had always been a novelty or a concept, now it's becoming more mainstream.
ASUS has the Maximus and Striker II watercooled motherboards, MSI has it's HydroGEN series, and now Foxconn is joining the fray with it's latest motherboard below.
The BlackOps motherboard is part of Foxconn's Quantum Force series of boards which are designed for extreme overclocking. This is a X48 + ICH9R board with a FSB capable of 2000MHz (OC) and supporting up to 8GB DDR3 1600MHz.
A-Data is also showing it's RAM watercooling solution.
More watercooling for Gigabyte as well.
Well, in summary:
The future in the next 3 years :
1) Conventional electronic components (no futuristic Nano-machines or intelligent Bio-AI engines yet), but with larger, faster, bigger capacities.
2) Smaller/lighter/cheaper ultra-mobile processors and mobile devices with multi-touch screen technologies
3) Water-cooling to become more mainstream as air-cooling hits it's heat barrier.
