PC chips are getting faster, leaner and meaner

The arrival of Intel’s latest Mobile Core i5 and i7 processors mean greater power, connectivity and battery life for PC users, but is this just the beginning? John Hillman looks at how chips are changing the way we live.

Speed and energy efficiency

Our digital universe is shifting. Computers are shrinking into smaller devices as we reach the point where we expect to have Internet access 24/7, whether driving to the shops or hiking across Snowdonia.

In response the processor is evolving dramatically. They’re getting faster, more powerful and becoming highly energy efficient. What seemed unthinkable just 10 years ago is now considered slow and out-dated, a wee bit ‘2001’if you like, as the rise of new and ever more impressive computing power continues unabated.

At the start of this year Intel announced the arrival of new breed of powerful Mobile Core i5 and i7 processors. These chips are capable of steadily increasing speeds without impacting on battery life, and have the ability to turbo boost overall performance on demand.

Put simply, these new chips are designed to ensure consistent and reliable Internet access and multimedia performance on the go while using minimal energy.

Intel expects around 400 laptop and desktop designs to be released with these processors this year. What that means for you is that your next laptop will probably be around eight times faster and more energy efficient than your last one.

Superchips are coming

Meanwhile computers continue to get thinner, smaller and more mobile, as netbooks, tablets and smartphones start to dominate the PC market.

As we all look to spend more time online, searching for information on the move and in real time, the challenge for technology over the next decade will be to find ways to get us online faster and stay mobile for longer.

Even now you’ll find more muscle in a PC’s Quad-Core processor than you would have found in a supercomputer back in the 1990s. But this is nothing compared to the onslaught of raw power that awaits.

The University of Rochester, New York, has come up with the world’s first three dimensional chip, called a cube processor. These are faster than the traditional 2D silicon chips simply because they can cut the time it takes to send and receive signals from one side of the chip to the other.

To give you an idea of how this will affect your personal processing power, it could see a chip found in a smartphone be reduced to a tenth of the size but increased ten times in speed and power.

A quantum future approaches

Yet it doesn’t stop there. A team at Yale have devised a way of building the world’s first solid-state quantum processor, using electronics that aren’t that different to many of the components found in an everyday laptop.

These slightly mythical computers have long been the stuff of science fiction, occupying a space between eccentric plausibility theories and geeky pipe dreams. But should these production problems finally be cracked we’ll witness something truly remarkable.

These processors will generate so much processing power that they’ll make the US Defence Department’s most powerful supercomputer look like an old ZX Spectrum, opening up possibilities that will revolutionise the way we live in ways we can barely begin to imagine.

The world of computers is changing fast; where we’ll be by the time the next decade rolls in is pretty mind boggling.

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Image Credit: Wonderlane