Interesting that your hub design is very similar to the desktop machine Convergent Technologies put out roughly 25 years ago. There they had a base box with the CPU and memory, and snapped in lego like pieces for disks and other peripherals.
The more things change...
An artist’s rendering of a modular ARM-based Apple “Pi”, circa 2019. (conceptual art courtesy Spidermonkey, Inc.)
With ZDNet having just celebrated its 20th anniversary in April of 2011 and publishing a number of retrospectives on how technology has evolved over the last twenty years, both Scott Raymond and I decided that it might make for an interesting thought experiment to try to project what personal computing might actually evolve into in the next decade.
Also Read: ZDNet 20th Anniversary Special Coverage
The business of trying to crystal ball or read the tea leaves of the computer industry has always been difficult, particularly when trying to project it out for more than two or three years if you aren’t an insider at companies that are directly working on actual technology roadmaps for semiconductors, system components, software and operating systems.
However, even if you are an insider, the gap between researcher and actual productization can often lead to very different outcomes based on market acceptance, real manufacturing costs and any number of other mitigating factors.
Still, there have been a number of recent advances that we have observed in personal computing, the modern datacenter as well as in consumer electronics and embedded systems that allow us to make a number of educated guesses as to how these trends might actually manifest themselves as real products in the future, as much as eight or ten years from now.
Also Read:
- Project Blade Runner: The user experience of 2019
- Project Blade Runner: Putting it all together in 2019
Certainly, I expect that we almost definitely have missed the mark on a number of details and will fail miserably to anticipate a number of new technologies or trends, or might even be too optimistic in terms of how quickly some of these ideas may be adopted.
But whether we see this in 2019, 2021 or even 2025, I think that this reference architecture –- which we have adopted the name “Blade Runner” in homage to Ridley Scott’s 1982 vision of 2019 is a good pinhole or an educated napkin drawing for a glimpse at the Personal Computer of the future.
The Blade Runner foundation: “The Hub”
The foundation or basic building block for our Personal Computer of 2019 is what we refer to as “The Hub”. We envision this as a flat, half-inch thick square slab with approximately the same area dimensions of today’s Apple Mac Mini –- about seven and a half (7.5”) inches or 20cm.
The Hub will contain all of the electronic components of what we think of on today’s PC motherboards, but much more integrated and miniaturized. The communications and memory bus, the CPU crossbar, the integrated controller electronics for all the I/O components as well as the networking and interfaces will all be housed in this device.
The desktop PC “case” which we know of today that is filled with wires and expansion boards will no longer exist. Instead, there will be snap-in modules that are more analogous to Lego Bricks that will click into the Hub that will perform the functions of the PC components that we recognize today -– CPU, Memory, Graphics Processing and Storage.
Since virtually all of our components in the PC of 2019 are completely solid-state, relatively low power and generate only a minimal amount of heat, the Hub could sit flat on the desk pancake-style, or in a vertical position.
It could also reside in a living room as an advanced set-top box, connected to a large high-definition display. The actual physical design aesthetics would largely depend on the vendor selling and marketing the system.
The Hub itself is the fundamental building block of the Blade Runner architecture.
While the average PC might consist of a single “Hub”, with a single CPU, memory and storage module, it would be possible based on our driving architectural decisions that multiple Hubs could be connected or stacked together to form much more powerful desktop computer systems, such as for creative content professionals, engineers, or high-end gamers.
We also recognize that many consumers might purchase highly integrated systems where the Hub and modules are in a single, enclosed, non-upgradeable unit attached to some sort of display, or integrated into the display itself, such as with a tablet or laptop computer or even a fully integrated desktop device like “The Screen”.
Also Read: I’ve seen the future of computing, It’s a Screen (2008)
Also Read: 2016, You’re watching the Linux Channel (2008)
For example, some companies such as Apple might decide to adapt this architecture to their own uniquely desired form factors — even exotic saucer-shaped, stackable systems like the “Pi” shown in our title artwork created by our conceptual artist.
But the electronics themselves and basic building blocks in the Hub, regardless of actual end-user product configuration would still be the same.
The important thing to remember about the Hub is that the systems architecture for desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets would be identical. There would be no important distinction between desktop and embedded systems programming from a developer perspective. We’ll get into this when we discuss the actual operating system that runs on Blade Runner.
