Just eye-candy from APODnothing to do with computing

Several article/posts at PCMag.com that paint interesting picture of the near future. This one by M. Miller in Forward Thinking discusses next generation chips, tablet chips but also the direction of all chips. At the latest AMD chip conference

…strongly pushing the idea that the future of microprocessors will not be just traditional CPUs, or even the combination of CPUs and graphics processors (GPUs), but instead will consist of all sorts of “heterogeneous” processor cores working together.

In the article there were a couple of interesting tidbits….the doubling in speed with ~doubling of transistors per area faded over the last few years, one of the things driving multi core. Also today’s high end pocketable units have rough equivalency with 2001 supercomputers. Memory and peripheral speed obviously hit that raw performance as well as non optimized development environment.

Then this piece also under Future Thinking, discussing the direction of LCD and AMOELD and related technologies, there are several others not mentioned but this article is a good discussion of the near term mass production technologies.

Then there is an end of 2011 discussion by Tim Bajarin on the coming of Hybrid tablets, something like a Mac Air with a separable screen ~ tablet. I use my iPad (like right now) for a lot of light to medium duty tasks I once had to use my laptop, I sometimes use a Bluetooth keyboard (though not right now.) Can some one could come up with an ultrabook class laptop with enough additional functionality to make the added cost worth it? TB says he thinks WI 8 might be a leader, could be but iOS seems muscular enough….except maybe multi windowing…we’ll have to see.