What will Windows 7 do for the hardware of tomorrow?
Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Mike Halsey in windows 7
I was thinking the other day about how I really don’t need to upgrade my PC this year. It’s now getting on for three years old and, with the exception of a RAM upgrade last Christmas, still has no problems running all my software and starting up swiftly and trouble-free.
Thinking on, PC hardware hasn’t really moved on too much since I built it. It has a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo and 4Gb of DDR2 1066MHz memory, while the motherboard, an Asus P5K is still on sale, something of a surprise for a motherboard.
What’s more the prices of these components haven’t dropped noticeably since I bought them, and the current high-end parts like quad core processors are still luxury items.
The reason for this is that what I’ve got, and what most people are still buying is perfectly good enough for today’s needs. What’s more, with Windows 7 running faster than Vista and requiring less demanding hardware, I can’t see this situation changing.
The uses an ‘average’ PC are put to haven’t changed much in the last five years, with the emphasis being placed on the speed of your broadband connection, not the PC itself.
By the time Windows 8 debuts we’ll have six and eight core processors and DDR3 ram will be the order of the day, but to my mind they’ll still be expensive compared to what you need to have a happy computing experience in the home or office. What I’m using today will still be on sale.
So will hardware development stagnate under Windows 7? Certainly not. I expect to see smarter hardware in the future with a great emphasis placed on power consumption. The introduction of XP Mode and the rise of virtualisation will no doubt only be the beginning of Microsoft pushing manufacturers to include motherboard hardware virtualisation as standard. Let’s face it, until all new motherboards come with support for hardware virtualisation, we’re all saddled with legacy code, unstable systems and oodles of unwanted patches and updates.
Three years from now you won’t be able to buy the P5K motherboard I’m sure, but the motherboards you will be buying won’t be much different from what I already have inside my PC, they’ll just be smarter.
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