Gaming on your Smart Watch is closer than you think!
What is the most consequential technological innovation from the last 70 years?
It is most definitely the ‘transistor’. Transistors are the most basic units of microprocessors, which are used to build essentially all computing devices today. The advent of basic electronic transistors in the 1940s and early 1950s marked the start of a global race to manufacture the smallest, most complex and fastest microprocessors in all of our devices. This global race gives us a pretty good idea as to how processors have changed in the past, and how they will improve in the future.
The shifts and turns of the global microprocessor race has been largely traced by Moore’s Law — the idea that the processing power of computers will double every 18 months. This essentially lays down an exponential growth path for the speed and efficiency for all microprocessors in general.
Smaller, Better, Faster, Stronger
For the largest microprocessor manufacturers in business today, the name of the game is to achieve the smallest possible transistor size, while at the same time maintaining a definitive path to making current devices more efficient. Apple’s M1 chip is probably the best example of the global microprocessor race progressing and giving consumers the best, fastest and most thermodynamically efficient chip to run all their applications.
The M1 chip signifies the most important leap in microprocessor development we can observe today. Apple effectively abandoned the 64-bit architecture provided by their Intel chips, in favor of a much less complex, easily manufacturable ARM microprocessor. What makes tech enthusiasts salivate over the M1 chip, is the PC-grade processing power that is now available to consumers in a historically small form factor. What this also means, is that the most intensive applications and processes of today, will run without any issues on the devices of tomorrow.
Take for example, GTA San Andreas. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was one of the largest and most stress-inducing titles on the PlayStation 2, almost 17 years ago. A measly little black box, the PS2 barely managed to push out enough pixels with its low end graphics card and 512mb of ram. Now, you can download GTA San Andreas, (a very similar mobile port) all in a few minutes on your smartphone.
Processors and tech in general have been becoming noticeably smaller, more efficient and cooler every single year. What this means for us, is the ability to play all the amazing games from our childhoods, use all the CPU-intensive programs we want, all on our smartphones instead. However, what seems more intriguing, is the possibility of tech advancing, with even smaller, more efficient and cooler processors. But what exactly does this mean for the current landscape of technological innovation?
Since the monumental jumps and leaps can be quantified (to a certain degree), it’s time for -
Speculation and Conjecture!
The future is extremely uncertain, especially in the dynamic world of tech development. However, the direction in which new technology will move towards, is actually quite accurately predictable. For one, the next foreseeable step for us 21st century humans, is to normalize wearable tech. Sure, smartwatches and wearable headsets do exist today, but exemplify only one layer of wearable tech in the future.
Envision a world, wherein the applications you use on a daily basis are all ported over to small, portable (and wearable) devices that attach to your body in some way. These (relatively) tiny devices would be responsible for carrying out heavy, CPU-intensive tasks, which won’t even be a challenge for them in the near future.
Think about how easy it is to run a GameBoy emulator on your phone. It occupies barely any space, but still gives you the exact same experience you had as a child, playing Pokemon with your friends. Similarly, the progression of tech and microprocessor capability makes it very easy to run GPU and CPU intensive games from a few years ago, without any issues, on a new system purchased in 2021.
Get ready to pull out your phone to play Red Dead Redemption 2 and CyberPunk 2077 soon!
However, we may still be thinking too small. Sufficiently powerful microprocessors, available at affordable costs, with good efficiency, can radically shift the ways in which devices are used today also.
With sufficiently capable smartwatches, and smart glasses, the need for a separate device like a smartphone may disappear entirely. We may find soon that it is more feasible to have several display platforms (screens) around, with a central wearable computer connecting to screens wirelessly, as opposed to having a separate device with its own display.
Laptops? Ugh. So 2020, amirite?
With microprocessors shrinking, and getting more efficient at the same time, the possibilities must be endless, right?
Not quite. Even though Moore’s Law had surprisingly held up for the better part of 50 years, scientists have seemingly reached the end of such progress, specifically with the release of the 7nm processors in the recent past. Continuously shrinking the size of the transistors, in order to accommodate more of them onto a silicon wafer, seemed like the perfect way to guarantee incremental growth in microprocessor capabilities. However, as scientists approach ways to manufacture chips with 5nm and 3 nm transistors, the entire progression model may be jeopardized by quantum tunneling — the phenomenon wherein transistors become too small to offer any reliable resistance to the flow of electrons.
However, as far as we consumers are concerned, transistors are getting smaller everyday. New processor architecture may be invented, which may put an end to the scalability and quantum tunneling problem entirely (think in terms of the discovery and use of mobile ARM chips). This is just another modern marvel, and is undoubtedly a cause for all of us to celebrate.
Project Tinker is a Bangalore based startup aimed at helping ideators with the tools they need to build amazing ideas. To learn more about our services and philosophy, visit https://www.project-tinker.com/
