Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Thu 19th Feb 2004 20:06 UTC
No, I'm not going all "New Age" on you, this time I'm looking at how computers are going to get a 3rd dimension and how this will change the way we interact with them. The previous parts of this series have been based on extrapolations or previous history. This time I'm looking further forward, when technologies currently in long term development become available and open up a whole new realm of possibilities.
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"Architectural advances in microprocessors seem to have slowed down in recent years...."
Huh? The tremendous die area has been utilized to implement numerous refinements to all sorts of things--larger and faster caches, better branch predicting, register renaming, longer pipelines, speculation, larger issue width, out of order execution....The Opteron and the Power5 both represent major advances beyond Alpha.
"Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) get more performance at a much higher rate than CPUs but have to date always been limited to producing graphics. These days modern GPUs have programmable vertex and pixel shaders and these are starting to be used for general purpose computations[1] in research and even in some applications. With the next generation shaders they will become not only more powerful but also more general purpose."
Graphics processing is about the most embarrasingly parallel task you could can imagine. They are fast because there are few data dependencies and everything can be done in parallel. For data dependencies, you implement multiple passes. Sure researchers have used them for some embarassingly paralle problems that happen to not be graphics, but it is not like these GPUs will replace a CPU any time soon.
"The human brain has a very large portion devoted to the processing of visual information."
Wrong. The visual cortex is small in comparison to the rest of the brain.
"When I say the 3D GUI is coming I mean a GUI displayed in three dimensions, not a 2D representation of a 3D space such as games deliver. I mean a real 3D display where objects on screen have Height, Width and Depth. Our displays are one way or another going to gain another dimension, 2D displays are going to seem somewhat quaint by comparison."
What's the point of making a hologram? You still only have two eyes. Put on some goggles!
Augmented reality will be the future. Why even have a monitor that sits there on your desk for you to look at, when you can have a lightweight pair of glasses with a wireless connection?