2009 was a slow year in terms of computer technology releases. Probably the biggest blunder would be the large number of technologies that were pushed back until 2010 after the economy hopefully improves. That doesn't mean that products weren't launched that didn't get very far or made the computing environment a little worse for consumers. Here are some of they most notable blunders when it comes to computer technology from 2009.
©eVGANVIDIA was king of the graphics market for a long time thanks to their very powerful graphics solutions. Their GeForce 200 series cards made a huge entrance in 2008 that kept their performance lead ahead of major rival ATI. Production delays, bugs and low yields doomed NVIDIA's graphics cards for 2009 though. Sure, they released some new 200 series graphics cards but they were essentially reworked cores of existing cards with some new names put on them. Their next generation Fermi product was slated for a November 2009 release but a series of problems have pushed that back into the second quarter or 2010 and possibly even later. All of this allowed ATI to regain the graphics crown with their Direct X 11 compatible Radoen HD 5000 series.
AMD has always been big in the budget processor market but 2009 was a very unusual year. 2009 was the year of reused names and suffixes that exploded the number of processor options. Here is a list of some of the various CPUs that can be found in budget desktop systems: Sempron, Athlon, Athlon II, Phenom and Phenom II. This doesn't include the X2, X3 and X4 suffixes that can be appended to several of these products. Since the majority of these processors exist in the under $100 price range, consumers were overwhelmed with options that are extremely difficult to judge their relative performance to one another. All of this combined with sub-par performance compare to budget Intel processor lead to a very poor year for the company.
Intel's Atom processor made my 2008 list of blunders. Sure, it may be hugely successful but its limited performance leaves much to be desired. At the very end of 2009, Intel finally released their next general Atom processor to replace the very old Atom N270 and N280 were have seen for the past year and a half. This version would integrate the graphics and memory controllers in to the processor. Would it bring improved performance and better graphics? In short, no. The new Atom N450 doesn't provide any tangible benefit to programs for performance or graphices over the older platform. It does add improved power consumption for longer battery life but with current Atom netbooks lasting up to 8 hours, do we really need more running time?
