What did you think was the most interesting, innovative and exciting developments we talked about in 2008?
If I had to pick something that actually shipped this year, it would be Intel's SSD drives. Those things are the new hotness. Still a bit pricy, and still a bit small, but two of these in RAID 0 can saturate a SATA controller. Consistent latency even in random accesses, no need to defrag, and significantly reduced fear of mechanical failure are great things indeed. The improved responsiveness of the system is quite nice and definitely noticeable when moving back to mechanical drives.
If we don't restrict it to things that are available, but only that we have seen ... well there are some really cool things out there. Having watched stereoscopic movies at IDF and seen stereoscopic games at NVISION, I suspect we all might start wearing glasses more often. Hmm ... I wonder if polarized contact lenses are a good idea. Probably not.
One of the innovations I really want to get my hands on is Lucid's Hydra technology. They claim near linear scaling with multiple GPUs regardless of the game. We sort of have our doubts, as do AMD and NVIDIA. But wouldn't it be cool if they could actually pull it off? A vendor independent multiGPU motherboard that scales better than both CrossFire and SLI in all cases? That'd be very cool.
2008 was quite a year in graphics with new architectures from both AMD and NVIDIA. The unexpected success by AMD with RV770 was quite impressive and really threw NVIDIA's pricing for a loop. Which is great for the consumer. With high performance graphics cards available at good prices, pervasive DX10 hardware, and OpenGL 3.0, OpenCL 1.0, and DX11 in the pipe for the next year or so, it is a good time to be into computer graphics. It's taken a while but we are seeing PC games that surpass console games, and we expect the gap to widen quite a bit in 2009.
Here's to technology, and happy new year. Let us know what you think is the coolest stuff that happened in 2008 and what you are looking forward to in 2009
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
31 Comments
View All Comments
Penti - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - link
There are no DX10 or 9 calls to the graphic card, It's only the driver that has to interpret them, and lucids software. DX is a API not a ISA.EpsilonZero - Thursday, January 1, 2009 - link
Honestly i dont think SSDs are all there yet. Sure this was the first year that SSDs actually became affordable enough to be used at the consumer level, but the capacities are quite low.The best use for it right now i think is to use it as a dedicated windows drive with other loading intensive applications stored on it like a few games.
I think the best thing to happen this year is the stiff competition in the GPU market. I wish Nvidia and AMD could always be neck and neck like they are now because it has brought down gpu prices to historic lows for the ammount of performance that both companies offer. SLI or Crossfire are actually realistic mainstream options thanks to the low prices.
For 2009 I hope to see the same thing happen in the CPU market. It would be awesome if AMDs Phenom II can give Intel some competition. I dont know if they can take the performance crown away from the Intel i7, but comming close and offering cheaper prices could really make things heatup in that market. :)
yyrkoon - Thursday, January 1, 2009 - link
The most anticipated *anything* over here was the PCIe<->PCIe interconnects that were *supposed* to come via the PCIe 2.0 standard. Much cheaper than 10GbE to manufacture, and no TCP/IP overhead when dealing with external storage. I guess on some level it was realized, but it never seemed to make it to consumer level.Imagine PCIe 32x direct system communications . . . that would be totally awesome. Not sure any desktop PC could handle 80Gbit/s transfers though !
SSDs now, I am not too thrilled with. Every time I start to read about the technology, or benchmarks, there always seems to be at least 2 caveats. The first being price of course, while the second ranges from marginal performance in some cases, to piss-poor reliability in others. That does not mean I dislike to technology, but to be honest I would rather see a reasonably large DDR2 (or faster RAM ) static RAM drive. On the enterprise level, you *can* buy a static RAM configuration, but unless you're a large corporation who can afford $100,000 + for such a device, the technology is just too expensive.
gemsurf - Thursday, January 1, 2009 - link
I bought one of these and was truely amazed even with really high expectations! Best single upgrade for "performance you can feel" than anything I've ever tried. So much so, I ordered a 2nd for raid 0 and barely even noticed a difference! I agree with the SATA controller saturation point comment!I bought both of them using live cashback on ebay so I could enjoy them for a few months, sell them used and recoup all my money after the cashback and it worked! I actually made about $50. The speed wasn't enough for me to justify having over a grand tied up in 150gb of storage on my system, but I am sure missing them now! :( But I'm banking that the prices will come crashing down when some competition hits the market! Hurry already, will ya!
Kutark - Thursday, January 1, 2009 - link
Also agreeing with SSD. This is the first time in prob 8 years that i have been unduly excited about the proposition of obtaining a particular piece of computer hardware. Before this for me it was the original Geforce.Hopefully soon they will become more affordable ;-).
iwodo - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - link
Definately SSD. Which means the final bottleneck of the computer system is gone.I hope Anandtech do a technical overview on SSD.
SSD in itself it like RAID with 10 - 12 Flash Memory.
Intel Bascially have a SSD Controller with 12 Channel and DRAM Cache.
JMicro have 10 channel, with hopefully the new controller get 12 Channel and DRAM with the announcement of OCZ Vertex Drive.
Just how is that going to scale? Since there is a finite amount of space, Will be see 24 Channnel SSD ( 12 Chip on Both Side ).
Are there any limitaion on the SATA protocol that is stopping SSD from performing, is SATA the right Choice for SSD?
Doormat - Saturday, January 3, 2009 - link
SATA 3.0 / 600MB/s is up next, for 2009. I wouldn't be surprised if SSD advancements increase rapidly and outpaces SATA 3.0, that they switch to PCI-E since x4 slots offer 2GB/s in each direction.yyrkoon - Thursday, January 1, 2009 - link
There will always be a system bottle neck, and it will always be storage related.Rubinsson - Thursday, January 1, 2009 - link
I totally agree that it's SSD though I wonder were the ioDrive went. That drive was blazing fast and big(tho not for consumers =P)With SSD's i hope the prices will drop and sizes increases a lot in 2009(well more price drops atleast =P).
Others things id like to see is better colors in the computer screen market(like oled, fed, laser) as the LCD really was a huge downgrade in colors.(for me at my pricelevel atleast)
RagingDragon - Thursday, January 1, 2009 - link
Fusion io and their ioDrive are still around:http://www.fusionio.com/">http://www.fusionio.com/
http://gizmodo.com/5107281/fusion+io-iodrive-is-th...">http://gizmodo.com/5107281/fusion+io-io...he-faste...
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1683/1/exclusive_...">http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1683/1...io_iodri...