Trond-Eirik is rambling on about stuff

General stuff about system architecture and development

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

What's happening with the portable devices

One of the issues that have been on my mind lately is the last large change in the hardware technology. There is a switch from single core processors to multi core processors.
This is already very noticeable in how software programs is developed, at least if you are using the .Net Framework. It's not an obvious and huge change, but it's all those small pieces that is being added with each new version of the Framework.
From the BackgroundWorker GUI component to all those more sever directed Async wrapper methods that are found in almost any server based call.

It seems to me as we are going to see a lot more of these small adaptations in the .Net Framework. The latest I heard was that there was going to be added multi-thread support to for each loops so that the pre-compiler automatically should be able to split a for each loop into parallel tasks that was to be executed on different threads.

However, all of that is old news. I think that is a trend we will se a lot of in the future, and we will se adaptation of both languages and framework to add better multithreading support.

However, a different trend that I'm interested in is what seems to be a rapid change in portable devices as mobile phones and other portal devices.
From being very limited devices with slow processors, very limited memory and display that is unable to produce any reasonable graphics, these devices are now very rapidly getting more CPU, memory, processing power and high-res displays. At the same time laptop PC's is getting smaller and smaller. This makes the gap between laptops and portable devices to get smaller and smaller all the time. The latest technology to really close the gap between these technologies is the SSD's (Solid State Drivers). The last, missing piece is the long promised super batteries. If those were actually hitting the marked I imagine that some real changes would be seen very fast.

I think that it is very possible that we within few years from now will see a major shift in how these devices is used. I don’t expect any revolutionary, but a huge increase in the current trend of smart-phones and applications for these devices. And as this shift in how hardware is used, we will again see that the software industry will have to adapt and adjust the software solutions accordingly. Still, the change does not have to be that dramatically. All the current changes with Smart Clients, online-offline support for almost every application and other changes is all very adaptable and directed to this change.
So, I think we’re on the right track… at least until something totally different happens instead ;-)


TEK

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