2002 was somewhat of a lackluster year for developments for PC hardware. No doubt there was a lot of speed increases based on Moore's Law and that will continue every year for the foreseeable future. But what new things in PC hardware can we expect for 2003? Here are some of my predictions and observations for the next year on what to expect in the PC hardware market over the next year.

Cases

2002 was a banner year for the case mod market. New case designs incorporating a wide range of colors, designs and lights were introduced to a wider market that will be hard to top. The trend for mainstream desktops will probably be towards smaller and quieter systems to make them more functional in environments such as home entertainment or to allow the systems to reside on the desktop (as they are named) instead of on the floor. Also look for new design trends in case lighting to add more options for lighting that reacts and changes instead of producing a single color.

Cooling

With the ever increasing heat being produced by both CPU and video cards, the cooling market is going to see some big changes in the next year. The trend up until 2002 was to increase the airflow and size of the heat sinks attached to the devices to help cool them down, but the manufacturers are starting to reach the limits of the materials they are using and consumer resistance to the noise the fans produce. People are particularly concerned about noise in their computer environment and as such developments are being made to reduce fan noise through variable speed fans or alternate cooling methods. I suspect that 2003 may be the first year to see a PC system from a mainstream manufacturer to include a water cooling solution.

CPUs

Intel has already released Hyper Threading support at the end of 2002 and plans to incorporate it in all future Pentium 4 products. Expect to see the clock speed of Intel's processors to increase, but little other innovation seems to be on the horizon. AMD on the other hand was going to release the first of its new 64 bit processors in 2002, but due to delays we can expect them to come out in the first half of 2002. The new 64-bit architecture is planned to allow for new applications to run in the more complex 64-bit environment while still providing excellent performance in existing 32-bit platforms for backwards compatibility. This is especially exciting considering Intel's attempt with the IA-64 that failed to produce a demand for 64-bit applications.

Hard Drives

Serial ATA has been in development for some time and the first few products to support the new interface started arriving in 2002, but expect 2003 to be the big year for this new interface. The ease and speed of the interface will finally start the drive manufacturers to begin selling drives with this interface. Drive densities will continue to climb over the next year with the possibility of drives reaching a staggering 500 GB on a single consumer drive by the end of the year. Small form factor systems may also begin to see the use of the smaller notebook drives in computer systems to help reduce the size of the systems.

Memory

Dual-channel will be the hottest technology on the market. NVIDIA released its nForce2 chipset for the AMD processors while Intel released the new Granite Bay chipset that use dual-channel designs. This allows two memory modules to effectively emulate a single larger module to produce faster performance. This should be picked up and used by additional chipset manufacturer's to increase the performance of system memory. DDR-II could make its way into the market towards the end of 2003, but the chances are slim since the PC3200 standard was only recently accepted for DDR memory.

Motherboards

No big developments are slated for 2003 primarily due to the lack of CPU developments for the year. The trend has been towards full-featured motherboards to compensate for the lack of developments. The biggest developments will probably come from small form factor systems (the ITX and flex ATX boards) and support for the new AMD Hammer 64-bit processors.

Optical Drives

2002 was the year that really saw the development of DVD burners, but the lack of a single standard has left the market in flux. I expect to see that by the end of 2003, the drive manufacturers will have either agreed on a single format to use for DVD recordable drives or that market pressures from consumers will cause one of the two formats to be preferred and thus become the de facto standard. CD-RW drives will continue to push additional speeds for recording, but the pace will slow for recordable media compared to the rewritable media.

Sound Cards

The sound card market will likely be static for 2003. Creative which tends to drive the industry released the Audigy 2 towards then end of 2002 and doesn't have any scheduled products at this time. The main developments in the audio card market will be by competing companies to start producing cards with comparable features to the Audidy 2. There will also be an increase in the number of cards supporting digital audio connectors such as coaxial and optical digital cables.

Video Cards

The end of 2002 saw the release of Microsoft's latest version of DirectX which should drive sales of video cards for the later half of 2003 as developers start supporting the new features. The beginning of the year will see the latest graphics processor from NVIDIA, the CineFX engine. Details are still sketchy as far as the statistics of the card go, but it the market hype lives up to it, then cinema quality gaming may not be far behind. Not long after the release by NVIDIA, ATI should release their R350 processors out. This should be an update to the extreme performing R300 processor that was the first to support DirectX 9.1 features.

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