Your PC in 2008 and Beyond

Put Your TV Anywhere

Despite the wireless revolution happening all around your home, your high-def television remains shamefully hard-wired in place. Wouldn't it be great if you could put your TV anywhere you wanted, without worrying about where the cable jack was, and still get top-notch video quality? Soon you'll be able to do just that.

What is it? Wireless High-Definition Interface (WHDI) is a cable-free replacement for HDMI that uses a 5-GHz radio transmitter to send an uncompressed 1080p, 30-fps high-def video signal from a WHDI-equipped DVD player, game console, or set-top box, for example, to a WHDI-equipped TV across a distance of up to 100 feet. Because the WHDI signal is compatible with HDMI, you'll be able to buy HDMI wireless modems for your existing entertainment gear--and that means you can finally rearrange your furniture the way you'd really like it, without having to run additional cables through your walls.

When is it coming? Amimon, which manufactures the WHDI chip set, released the technology to electronics makers at the end of August. Now the race is on to bring WHDI to market. TV makers have already begun demoing new wireless-equipped HDTV models at trade shows, and fans of bleeding-edge tech should be able to get their hands on hardware by the start of the new year. WHDI is expected to add about $200 to the cost of a new TV, so expect to pay a premium for the technology in 2008. WHDI modems for your existing hardware will likely cost $300 to $400 for a pair of adapters (you need at least two--a receiver for the TV and a transmitter for your set-top box, for example--to get started). In a few years, says Amimon vice president of marketing Noam Geri, costs should drop to about $10 for inclusion in a TV and $60 for the adapters.

Five Terabytes per Drive

Even if you're not a digital pack rat, you probably still manage to cram a lot of data onto your hard drive. Digital photos, movies, music, and overflowing e-mail folders can pile on the gigabytes before you know it. But don't worry: Way bigger hard drives are on the horizon.

What is it? Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR (and a nearly identical technology called Thermally Assisted Magnetic Recording), uses lasers to heat the surface of a drive's platters, making it possible to pack a terabyte of data onto a single square inch of drive surface, roughly twice the current limit. As the drive's read/write head goes about its business, it briefly fires its laser at the surface, destabilizing the iron-platinum particles for reading and writing. With the platter heated, the read/write head can manipulate the surface on a very fine scale--in just tens of nanometers--letting it cram enormous amounts of information into a small space. A few nanoseconds after the work is done, the surface cools for long-term stability. The way data is organized on a disc will change, as well: Rather than having arbitrarily arranged disk sectors, HAMR drives will work with the natural grain of the disk surface, organizing data into self-arranging magnetic arrays that allow the creation of a single bit of data on every grain of the platter's surface.

When is it coming? HAMR is still very much a research project, but it should be coming to market in the next several years. Seagate expects to introduce 5TB HAMR hard drives by 2011, with capacities of up to 37.5TB to follow a few years after that.