As I'll be giving my predictions on the next episode of Bad Voltage (I'll also post them here), I thought it would be interesting to see what tech predictions LQ members have for 2016. Post them in this thread and next year we can look back and see how prescient the LQ community is.

--jeremy

The world will be taken over by one or more AIs who view the human race as massively inefficient and largely irrelevant save for comic relief.
But then again, that might have already happened....

3D printers and modern robotics (controlled with Arduinos, etc) lead to a renaissance of practical effects for movies.

Your Refrigerator and the Grocery Store will have a relationship.

While you should listen to the full episode, I've broken out just the 2016 tech prediction segment here: https://soundcloud.com/linuxquestion...16-predictions

--jeremy

Have you looked at 2015-2016 chips that are going into smartphones? They have fast multiple CPUs, up to 4gB RAM, 64-bitness, and ~2gHz clocks. That blows away desktop systems of just a few years ago. At the same time folks are making 8-10 core systems for mini server boards which can fill a rack with enterprise-ready computing power at good performance/watt/rack/dollar... Developers' boards for these systems are available now and affordable. Some have sockets for ECC RAM, and a bunch of SATA connectors and multiple gbit/s networking. We are there. Intel has competition. AMD has responded by putting forth an Opteron that's ARMed, the A1100 series. Are you tired of paying Intel's prices? Are you tired of your desktop machine whirring and blowing hot air and vacuuming up dust bunnies? Switch to ARM for everything this year: smartphone, tablet, desktop, and server.

I think the all-in-one concept will be the new desktop and docked smartphones won't be far behind. All they lack is multiple hard drives or SSDs and they can go in a NAS or server or cloud. These ARMed systems are so small they can go in the keyboard, monitor or mouse with room to spare. The old box or slab is obsolete except as a case for storage.

Oh, I almost forgot. All these little gems run */Linux so we can rely on them to give good performance for a decade or so unlike That Other OS on Intel's hair-driers. 2016 is going to be a great year. I'll be replacing a bunch of legacy x86/amd64 systems this year and ARM will be on all the units.

I think spinning disks will become less and less common, and will be replaced eventually by solid state devices.

On the consumer side of things, I see machines coming out that are smaller and smaller. One only has to look at the trend with Intel, etc. and what they are doing with things like the Intel NUC, the Compute Stick, the Dell Inspiron Micro Desktop, etc. to see that this is going to continue. With the advent of drives in the mSATA standard, this has become a truly feasible thing. I think that RobertP is on the right track to some extent in the case of ARM, at least on the consumer front. I don't think it will "take over everything" but I believe it will eat up more of the market share.

It may not happen in 2016, but probably by the end of 2017 we should be seeing SSD prices dropping to equity pricing versus spinning platters. That is going to cause quite a surge in the above direction of smaller computing platforms.

On the server/enterprise side of things, I really don't see much changing. We will most likely see a steady increase in the use of SSD's for either accelerated storage (cache drives, etc.) or full-blown SSD storage arrays. In the CPU side of things, Intel will remain king. AMD is effectively dead in the water for the enterprise, and ARM hasn't reached a level where they are even remotely competitive. I want to see more ARM popping up, however. Intel needs a competitor, and ARM seems fit to do so. I figure that the tide will have started turning in the processor market when you see a 2nd tier vendor (Penguin, AdvancedHPC, SuperMicro) providing a solution that features ARM processors. Sadly, I don't see that happening this coming year.

On the network front, I expect there to be an increase in the use of 10gbit networking. A large cluster (928 nodes) I just helped deploy this past fall was connected via FDR infiniband, gigabit ethernet for management, and dual 10-gigabit fabrics (two separate fabrics) for data and VM communication, and it was not expensive (relatively) to implement.

Windows 10 will switch to systemd

SSDs at thirty cents US per GIGAbyte. 256gig SSD for $85.00.

And if HPs technology comes to market with magnorestrictive technology, we could see lifetime SSDs at ten cents per gigabyte

More embedded linux devices in transport equipment that moves like cars, boats, locomotive, airplanes,
rocket ships.

Siri finally answers a question correctly.

YMMD. Thanks for letting me begin the day with a laugh and a smile .

I think stuff like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino will continue to do to hardware vendors what Linux did to Software Vendors. It's all very exciting. The information age is just starting.

Also...
The mainstream media will go on about A.I. and robots taking over jobs. Which hopefully will be true for jobs
where you don't need a brain, like the mainstream media.

http://emunie.com/

This is still in BETA - but will be released in 2016.
I predict this project to be a major future financial player worldwide.