Innovation and Anticipation

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