Too Hot to Handle: Future Gaming & PCs
HAWT: A Brief Look at Gaming on Future Computers
IT’S the year 2010. You’ve been playing your favourite computer game for the last two hours. You’ve become oblivious to the loud whirring sound your PC’s fans have been making. Suddenly you smell smoke. The next thing you know – your trusted PC has committed arson!
Intel’s Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger predicts that with the current rate of progress PC chips by the end of the decade will be as hot as the exhaust gases emitted from a rocket engine; and not long after that, PC chips may become as hot as the surface of the sun!
Luckily for gamers, Quantum computing and biological computing are two growing technologies that are helping to prevent future risks of our PC’s setting fire to our houses. Refining techniques and computer technicians have found that silicon is just as useful for keeping chips in computers cool as it is for enlarging breasts. And as far as speed is concerned, current trends show that the number of transistors on these silicon chips have doubled every two years.
Makin’ bacon on a PC chip …
Several techno-pessimists have also been worrying about the idea of future computers becoming larger than our flammable houses. In 1949 Popular Mechanics predicted that computers in the ‘future’ would weigh no less that 1.5 tons. Yet the reassuring fact of the matter is that the advance in technology far outruns such predictions, and newer computers have rather shown to be getting smaller.
One prediction that is highly probable, however, is that future technology is bringing us frighteningly close to producing our very own matrix – a virtual, simulated world inhabited by computer programs so complex that we think they are actual people. And with the development of Virtual Retinal Display sets, it will soon be possible to immerse oneself into this virtual world, and in a sense, live it.
It seems that the only technological innovation missing at this point is how to pee without having to go to the bathroom …
