Future PC 'will have 100,000 cores'

Plus a million gigabytes of memory – and super-real porn, predicts technology strategist

The basic desktop PC in 25 years will have a 100,000-core processor, a million gigabytes of memory, and a hundred million gigabytes of storage, according to the chief technology strategist at Fujitsu-Siemens.

Dave Pritchard says clock speeds may still hover around 3GHz to 4GHz, but aggregated over the cores they will be equivalent to three million gigahertz.

Internet access speeds will of the order of 250Gbytes/sec, he says on the basis of Nielsen's Law, the prediction by Sun engineer Jakob Nielsen that bandwidth to prosperous homes will increase by 50 per cent a year.

Pritchard's figures on processors assume Moore's Law will continue to hold – that is, that transistor density, roughly a measure of computer power, will double every two years.

But he admits that this assumes there will be sufficient demand for the increasing computing power to finance the huge investment required to deliver – even supposing the technological hurdles are overcome.

"I think the demand will be there on the server side, but I am not sure about desktop processors," he said.

Pritchard agrees, too, that today's software cannot take full advantage of current processors with two or four cores. But he believes that problem will be overcome within seven years.

The increasing processing power will be used for speech and face recognition and the retrieval of information, as opposed to data. "When Captain Kirk of Star Trek asks his computer the population of a planet he gets a single answer. If you ask Google you will have to trawl through ten thousands answers. That's the difference," said Pritchard.

He also foresees neural-computer interfaces allowing direct communication between humans and machines. These will enable the production of virtual-reality games – and pornography – that are indistinguishable from the real thing.