The PC of 2010
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Solid state drives
So you know the way that USB stick on your keyring has no moving parts and can survive being jumped on by a rhino? That's what PC hard drives are moving rapidly towards. Noisy, slow, ever-twitching drives and a predilection for sudden mechanical failure are on the way out. While solid state drives are slower to write data than most traditional HDs, the higher-end models are dramatically faster reading which means load times are far quicker. A standard 2008 desktop hard drive takes around 50 agonising seconds to load a Team Fortress 2 map. On Intel's X-25M, currently the darling of the solid state set, it's around 25.
Downsides are the price the X-25M is around $700 (£500) for 128Gb and that cheaper models suffer from huge performance spikes. The average read speed might be awesome, but if you pick up one of the earlier-gen drives you'll find sporadic slowdowns. 2009 should see the X-25M's price drop and its improvements spread to cheaper rivals.
Intel Larrabee
With Intel stronger than ever since Core 2 Duo, they can afford to turn their attention to additional fronts. Specifically: graphics cards, something they've hitherto only dabbled with in low-power, oft-reviled integrated chips. With Larrabee, they're going full-pelt for an add-in card designed to kick sand in the face of the GeForces and Radeons. It's built on significantly different principles: as much on CPUs as on GPUs.
As well as playing to Intel's strengths, this is also part of the nVidia/Intel war for the future of all processing. In theory, a Larrabee card is enough to run Windows itself; there's even talk of a modified version that'll drop into a CPU socket. Initially though, it'll be a graphics card, with 24, 32 or 48 cores touted as more than enough to run games such as Gears of War and HL2: Episode Two at 60fps at 1600x1200. Larrabee should strut its stuff early this year. Just what we need: 3D card buying options getting even more complicated.
