The year will start as 2009 ended, with the introduction of USB 3 and SATA/600. These boast speeds up to 10x that achievable before. They will really open up hardware, especially removable storage, allowing external hard drives to transfer data at their true speeds. Intel’s new Lightpeak technology could well smash these two however, at last a proper fibre-optic technology capable of connecting, well just about anything really and with a theoretical throughput of a massive 100Gbits/sec.
Still on storage, we can expect to see SSDs take off as system drives, sadly they’re still far too expensive for data drives, but a 64Gb drive, easily big enough for a good sized Windows installation, can be picked up for only £100.
Larabee, again from Intel is a new graphic technology that uses x86 CPUs to crunch more data than the numeric processors on traditional graphics cards. The theory, Intel says, is that they are much more efficient at performing complex maths operations. So far the early demonstrations from Intel are promising, and this could change PC and console gaming considerably.
Apple could finally invade the corporate space in 2010 with the first Mac Mini running OS X Server having recently been launched. For cheap network storage or a file or print server for a small office this is ideal given its small form-factor. Maybe we can expect to see more offices switching to Macs as a result, though prices may still need to drop.
Google Chrome OS might not be an especially useful operating system in the 90% of the time you’re away from a wi-fi internet connection. There can be no doubt however though that it will be THE big tech story of 2010 and will generate levels of publicity we’ve not seen since Windows 95, while Google’s Android operating system will probably overtake Apple iPhone OS and Windows Mobile in market saturation.
Finally, and this is one technology I sincerely hope catches on this year, OLED screens could finally make cheap and energy efficient monitors a reality. This could significantly reduce the price of netbooks and budget laptops, especially with the increasing popularity of SSDs bringing them down in price too. Bring it on!
