The PC will be: Better, Faster, Stronger

There's a wind of change blowing through the peripheral landscape

Good news: the PC is far from dead. In fact, it's not hard to imagine it becoming even more important, and influential than it already is. Right now, tablets and smartphones powered by ARM chips seem to be taking over the world, but there's reason to think the PC might well win in the end. And here's why.

If we're talking in terms of pure componentry, then yes, the rate of the PC's technological progress has slowed a little of late, but only by some metrics and only because the industry is going through a major transition. Take Intel’s reluctance to really push the envelope on CPU performance. That's partly explained by AMD's failure to take the fight to Intel, but it also reflects a shift in emphasis away from pure CPU power and towards a more balanced and flexible - and potentially massively more powerful - approach to computing.

Right now, the benefit of spending the extra transistor budget that comes with new production processes on graphics might not deliver obvious benefits. But as we transition towards heterogeneous computing, things will very likely begin to dick, and that will mean it's the PC that takes us into the that next major era of computing wonders.

Before any of that happens, there's plenty to look forward to. Thank goodness. AMD looks more likely to take the fight to Intel and Nvidia, and the better AMD does, the more Intel and Nvidia will be forced to show their hands and give us their best stuff.

STEAMROLLED CHIPS

Of all the major computer chips due out soon, there are two that really excite us. It very much looks like Nvidia will be making its monstrous GK110 graphics chip, as found in the GeForce Titan card, more affordable later this year. Then there's AMD's Steamroller CPU due early in 2014. There's good reason to believe Steamroller will be AMD's best effort for a decade.

Elsewhere, solid state storage prices will fall of f a cliff while capacity balloons. It won't be long before we can just about all afford to have PCs powered by SSDs. Good things will happen in screens, too. IPS panel technology will become even cheaper than it already is.

We'd love to see uber-res 4K monitors become affordable, too.

Some industry analysts think that all it will take is for a major player like Apple to put its weight behind 4K and the whole thing will take off. Realistically, however, it's probably at least three to four years before 4K goes mainstream.

The final joker in the pack is the influence of the next-generation games consoles. Sony has already shown its handwith the PlayStation 4 and it turns out it’s based on pure PC technology and pure AMD PC technology at that. If the leaked specs for Microsoft's next console are true, the same applies, too.

"THE PC WILL BE COME THE MAIN TARGET OF GAMES DEVELOPMENT"

That’s got to be all kinds of good for the PC. First, it means the PC is effectively the main target for all games development for the next decade. And it means those games will be optimised for AMD technology. And goodness knows, we need AMD to do well. All in all, then, don't worry about the future of the PC. It'sgping to be great.

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