The PC is not dead
While other technologies and devices may have grabbed the limelight over the past few years, the PC is still very much at the centre of the digital world. Desktop PCs continue to sell more and more each year, with research firms IDC and Gartner predicting growth figures of between five and 10 percent in 2006. However, it's mobile PCs that are leading the charge, with growth figures of notebooks in 2005 and 2006 expected to be in double digit region, possibly even getting towards the 20 percent mark. In fact, Mark Whittard, general manager of Toshiba in Australia, is going so far as to predict that one in every two PCs sold here in 2006 will be a notebook. That's a bold claim - even IDC doesn't think notebooks will take up 50 percent of sales until 2008 - but it's conceivable.
One of the driving factors behind the soaring notebook sales is the dramatic price drops we've seen throughout 2005, which should continue into 2006. The main reason for this is the global glut of LCD panels, which are the most expensive component in most notebooks. 2005 saw the first (decent) sub-$1000 notebooks hit the market, and we can expect to see more of the same in 2006, although don't expect the price to get much lower than about $750 this year.
Inside the box, the multicore revolution (if you'll excuse the hyperbole) will continue in 2006. This is not just a small shift in processor technology, it actually represents a substantial shift in the way we think about performance. Raw megahertz have long been losing favour as a primary metric of performance, and processor manufacturers have been struggling to keep their frequencies up in the face of massive architectural and engineering barriers. The move to multicore processors marks a shift from the old high-speed, single threaded, serial approach to a parallel, multithreaded approach.
Combined with 64-bit extensions, which at this stage mainly allow for more than 4GB of RAM to be used in a desktop PC, we can expect to see more software actively take advantage of multithreading. Besides highly demanding applications, such as multimedia authoring and 3D games, the main area multithreading will have an effect is with the operating system. Windows XP is already multithreaded, as will be Windows Vista.
Also on the processor front, the other major event we'll see this year is the first Apple computers to feature an Intel chip inside. Yes, Hell hath frozen over. The significance of this event is not yet fully known, as it's uncertain how Apple will port OS X to the Intel architecture, and whether there'll be other Mac/Intel crossovers. But it should be interesting to watch it all unfold.
Heat and power consumption are the other major factors influencing processor design in 2006, with both AMD and Intel bringing their power management features from their mobile processors into their desktop CPUs. Intel will also continue to shrink its chips down to the 65nm process, while AMD is struggling to move on from 90nm.
With multicore processors increasing in popularity, virtualisation also becomes a viable reality. Enterprise will be the big beneficiary of virtualisation in 2006, although we'll start hearing talk of desktop applications when Vista arrives.
Another significant PC event in 2006 will be the launch of Intel's digital home platform, the Viiv (rhymes with 'jive'), which is expected to arrive early this year. Viiv is best thought of as the Media Center equivalent of Centrino, and constitutes a coherent platform of Intel hardware and drivers that should make Media Center PCs a bit more focussed in their approach on the living room environment. It's unlikely that Viiv will make a big impact early on, but it could make a big difference to Media Center's popularity, which has so far been hampered by big ugly boxes, high prices and a lack of an EPG (which we'll talk about shortly).
View ahead
Undoubtedly the biggest event in the PC world in 2006 will be the launch of Microsoft's next generation operating system: Windows Vista. If all goes well, we should see Vista around the end of the year. It'll have been five years since the last major release of an OS platform from Microsoft, and by all accounts, Vista should be a great leap forward. Microsoft has really engineered Vista from the ground up, and rewritten a lot of the rules that set the standard for the likes of Windows 9x and Windows XP.
Vista will not only have an entirely different look or feel from any previous Microsoft OS, it will have an entirely new approach to the interface. XML, meta data, desktop search and RSS will all be integral parts of the OS - and if it sounds like a sophisticated Web-based interface, you're not far wrong. Microsoft has acknowledged many of the strengths of the Web, and the tools we're using to access the wealth of information on it, and is using these same tools to make finding content on our desktops easier. Expect to see improved security as well, including integrated antivirus and antispyware as well. Whether the funky filesystem, WinFS, makes it into Vista is still a matter of rumour and speculation, although it's unlikely.
Vista will ship in a number of different versions, all of which (except for the possible 'Starter Edition' for 'emerging markets') should be natively 64-bit. The higher-end versions should also feature Media Center functionality built in, although it's likely a specialised dedicated Media Center version will be developed for pure living room systems.
Vista won't only make a big impact on the OS and software world, but it should have a reverberating impact on the hardware world as well. Vista's hardware requirements are nothing short of spectacular, with it needing a fairly powerful DirectX 9 graphics card with 128MB of memory onboard, as well as a hefty 2-3GHz CPU, preferably 64-bit, and at least a half gig of RAM. Given that Vista should be arriving at a lull in the PC buying cycle, it could actually spark off another hardware peak as we all upgrade our systems over the 12 months from Vista's launch.