With 2011 drawing to a close, it's time to look forward to the technological delights heading our way courtesy of the most resilient and consistent innovative computing platform of them all, the trusty old PC.
This time last year, we got it right on Intel's Sandy Bridge and a relatively stagnant year for PC graphics, were let down by AMD's Bulldozer and jumped the gun on tablets and apps.
For 2012, it's looking like the roles are set to reverse for CPUs and GPUs, laptops PCs are going to be better than ever and the tablets will finally make the mainstream. No really, this time it's true.
Ultrabooks are coming
Grudgingly we must concede that while Apple perhaps didn't invent the ultra-slim, ultra-light notebook computer, it did establish it as the next big in laptop computing. But like so many Apple products, the MacBook Air has never been particularly affordable until relatively recently. But it's still a Mac.
The good news is that 2012 should see the arrival of whole armies of MacBook Air trampling Ultrabooks from the big names in PC manufacturing. Te Ultrabook is an Intel concoction and the idea behind it isn't terribly radical. At its simplest, it's a thin and light laptop PC with solid state storage.
But as prices for SSDs come down and advances in chip manufacturing make desktop performance possible in ultra-compact form factors while extending battery life towards the al-day ideal, the ultrabook adds the final ingredient to the recipe Apple has been simmering with the Air. Affordability.
Intel wants Ultrabooks to top out at $1,000. In the UK that's means something around £800. That's slightly less than the £849 starting price of the Apple MacBook Air. It's also much cheaper than current high-performance thin and light systems such as the Sony Z. For an idea of what an Ultrabook looks like, check out Asus's delightful Zenbook UX21 .
Of course, Intel's major contribution to the Ultrabook sector in 2012 will be mobile processors from the upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge family. These won't have a huge impact in terms of performance. But at a given performance point, they'll put the kybosh on both prices and power consumption.
By the end of 2012, you'll be able to choose from a wide range of superlight, relatively highperformance laptop PCs that go all day on a single charge and delivering a computing experience that's indistinguishable from most desktop PCs.
Windows 8 makes the PC tablet-friendly
The tablet PC is the idea that just won't die. In fact, last year we prgonosticated 2011 could be the tablet transition happened, what with Intel's Atom maturing and Apple's iPad 2 pushing the basic tablet concept into the mainstream.
Needless to say, it didn't happen. Is there any reason to think 2012 will be any different? Yes, actually, there is. Microsoft is finally taking mobile platforms seriously and the next release of Windows will include a proper touch interface, not the feeble, half baked efforts we've seen up to and including Windows 7.
If that sounds like a familiar refrain involving promises from Microsoft that never make the transition into reality, may we point you in the direction of Windows Phone and its cutting edge Metro UI. This tile-based interface forms the starting point for Windows 8's tablet edition and it's on another level to anything Microsoft has previously achieved. It even makes Apple's iOS look a little old and crusty.
ARM vs x86
Of course, the arrival of Windows 8 also presages the emergence of an even biger question for the future of the PC. Can it survive death by a thousand cuts from a swarm of ARM-powered chips and devices. Moreover, can a PC be a PC without an x86 processor?
The issue here is the arrival of the first version of Windows with support for ARM rather than x86 processors. It would be a bold prediction to suggest Windows on ARM was going to be the next best thing. But it does add to the general momentum towards a blurring between conventional x86 PCs and ultra mobile ARM-powered devices.
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