Networks Key to Future PCs

Faster-starting computers and better power management were among the familiar themes at Microsoft’s eleventh annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), where the company again tried to enlist hardware manufacturers in its vision of how PCs should evolve over the next decade. According to Microsoft, the key to future PC growth will be home entertainment scenarios (for example, for storing, manipulating, and distributing digital audio) and technologies that support them, such as wireless networking and high-speed input/output (I/O) buses. However, it will be several years before most of these technologies are commercially available.

PC Architecture Still King

Microsoft expressed no concerns about the future of the PC architecture, which it defines as a common and uniform software platform based on the Windows operating system family and the .NET Framework, running on a hardware platform consisting of Intel-architecture processors; standardized memory, storage, graphics, sound; and I/O devices that continually become smaller, more powerful, faster, and less expensive. Microsoft is confident that this PC architecture can morph into a variety of form factors and devices that include home entertainment devices, network edge devices (such as gateways and firewalls), tablet PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and powerful workstations and servers based on multiprocessor or blade designs and new 64-bit processors from Intel and AMD.