Discussion: The most exciting upcoming developement?

[MSIC]

Have been reading about the latest news with Vista, including the security changes and the Aero interface etc, which seem great. Have also been pondering about other recent developments such as:
Solid state hard drives;
Partial flash / part platter hard drives;
Direct X 10 unified arcitecture graphics cards;
Plug-in USB flash keys to bump up loading times;
Far higher limits on RAM;
Quad cores -> Multi-mega-cores;
Improvements in batteries ie Fuel Cells & generally (maybe) increasing wattage effieciency;

It all sounds fairly exciting to me. What inovations in particular are you guys all waiting for?

PS I am not conducting market research LOL! Just curious.

[DavidM]

AMD 4x4 - and also the idea of allowing others to use the second socket for specialised purposes.

[dave87]

Purely out of self-interest I'd like to see anything that makes laptops faster and/or makes the batteries last longer, as I'll be getting one soon and don't want to be having to carry the charger round with me all the time....

[pak000]

i like the idea of solid state drives dropping in price
The perpendicular tech that is out now is being held back, but soon drives will be much larger. In combination with solid state, its going to be interesting.

Multi cores and the coprocessor type things will be good for my work

[jamin]

Short term devlopments pale into insignificance when you look long term, optical and quantum computing are incredibly exciting! Fancy having a massively poweful computer that is the size of a few molecules? Or a computer that operates by slowing and switching photons?

I do!

[Kumagoro]

Im hoping for holographic thingamajigs to replace HDDs within 5 years.
Good bye noisy HDD. Also I hope that holographic media can be made as
cheap as cds within 10. In the short term I hope vistas new and improved
power saving means I can leave the computer on and have it boot up near
instantly.

Also, though unrelated, im hoping to catch iku iku byo.

[Dorza]

The biggest shakeup in the next 5 or so years will hopefully be solid state hard drives becoming more and more common. This is quite exiting to me and the other big shake up will be muli-mega core processing that has full software support.


Long term its got to be optical/quantum computing oh and holo-storage. If i understood what I read correctly a quantum Qbit can be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time