Times are a-changin'
As a news writer, you come across a lot of rumours and wild speculation, making it very easy to get caught up in the hype. But even knowing this – and wearing my finest cynic’s hat – 2010 has been a year of great expectations that have just failed to materialise in any substantial form.
Year of the tablet? I
think not!
From the very start of the year we were told that this would be the year of the tablet. Everyone was whispering about whether or not Apple would unveil the iPad, Steve Ballmer was waving around slates at CES and NVIDIA and - to a certain extent - Google were promising more Android tablets than we could shake a very large stick at.
And now, after the New Year has been cheered in and hangovers subsided, the only serious slates on the market are the Apple iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Everything else has either been delayed, cancelled or a half-baked waste of silicon. No one company – and by that, I mean neither Google nor Microsoft – has managed to create a portable OS that’s a genuinely viable alternative to iOS, and manufacturers are still struggling to put together a decent combination of processing power and acceptable battery life.
Of course, 2011 is expected to be a lot better, with several high-profile devices planned and a tablet-centric version of Android launching within a few months. NVIDIA is also likely to follow through on its promises by shipping the dual-core Tegra 2 SoC in significant volumes, which – based on early indications – is expected to be an absolute powerhouse. But this doesn’t change the fact that I was promised my mobile computing revolution yesterday, not tomorrow.
Graphical Glitch
In my eyes, nothing characterises the misplaced optimism and relative disappointments of 2010 better than the graphics card market.
It started with NVIDIA, whose all-powerful Fermi GPU launched just as the days became warmer. In hindsight, this might not have been a great time to launch one of the hottest and most power-hungry GPUs ever created. Although the GeForce GTX 480 had the performance, its power consumption, searing temperatures, turbine-esque fan, high price and non-existent stock levels were a major let-down, and a bit of a blow for fans of the green team.
Without a doubt, the engineers got the formula right with the launch of the GeForce GTX 460 and – more recently – the GeForce GTX 580 and GeForce GTX 570 GPUs, but these were the cards that should have launched earlier in the year.
Unfortunately, AMD fared no better when it came to living up to the buzz surrounding its graphics cards. The Radeon HD 5000-series had aged well, but we were ready for something new, and the Northern Islands chips were poised and ready. Despite being forced to skip the move to a 32nm manufacturing process, the engineers had a year to work on the new GPUs and AMD’s reputation for building small yet powerful chips promised to deliver a Fermi-crushing blow.
Rumours abounded of monstrous, 1,900 shader GPUs, but the reality – which arrived in the form of the Radeon HD 6900-series and to a certain extent the HD 6800 cards – failed to live up to our expectations. There’s no doubt that the new GPUs are powerful and relatively efficient, but they’re clearly an incremental upgrade, rather than a major step forward. The fact that AMD was once again unable to reclaim the ‘most-powerful GPU’ title was also disappointing, although in many ways unsurprising.
Does not compute
The processor market was also a let-down this year, but not because any products failed to deliver. In fact, we saw the launch of the six-core processors and the world’s most powerful desktop CPU. But despite these developments, the CPU market was largely stagnant this year and gave us very little to get excited about.
Intel got off to a good start with the 32nm Arrandale notebook chips, which – along with the new Atom CPUs later in the year - finally made eight-to-12-hour mobile computing a practical mainstream reality. On the desktop side, Clarkdale was a nice – although not earth-shattering – upgrade for the middle market, which was followed by the company’s first hexacore CPU in March - the Core i7 980X.
AMD, meanwhile, has done little more than introduce slightly faster versions of its aging Phenom II/Athlon II processors, which have now been with us for quite a few years now. The introduction of Thuban as a mainstream hexacore CPU was welcomed with open arms, and the ultraportable Nile platform was a relatively capable – and much needed – replacement for the disappointing Congo mobile platform. Again, though, these were small blips on an otherwise dull landscape that saw almost no action past spring.
Of course, both companies have been happy to divert all of the attention onto the Sandy Bridge and Fusion processors, which will be launching at CES. Both of these have the potential to make a massive difference to the computing market, especially mobile computing and represent very exciting developments. However, it has meant that the latter half of 2010 has been a bit drab.
The best of the rest
It wasn’t all bad news, though. Storage has actually been quite interesting, with SSDs finally approaching mainstream price points, and 3TB, 3.5in and 1TB, 2.5in mechanical drives starting to make their way into the channel during the second half of the year.
Software has also taken some interesting turns. From the signs that Microsoft actually ‘gets it’ with Internet Explorer 9 to the previews of Chrome OS and Apple’s OSX 10.7 Lion due soon, 2010 has had some highlights in software news.
We’ve also started to see the computer market recover following the recession and a lot of positive growth from all sectors. The combination of Windows 7 building momentum and Intel’s new CPUs has given manufacturers something to really push, and PC sales have taken a major upswing this year.
Thanks, you’ve been
great
In all, 2010 felt like it was the warm-up act - it got us excited, but really, it isn’t what we came here to see. All of the really exciting products are due to launch in 2011, and they’re sure to bring some major changes to the status quo in both the CPU and GPU markets.
What this actually means is that 2010 has been a pretty good year for tech news, since we’ve gotten to think, talk and write about all of the interesting things that are about to – or might – happen. But once all of these products actually get released things should really start to heat up, changing the market place and, maybe, even the way we think about computing. And that means that the news in 2011 will be even better.
