New Information Technology

Staying up to date with everything that's going on in PCs and tech is almost impossible, so these are the ten technologies that you should be most aware of, as they're the ones that'll make the biggest difference to your life.

3Dgaming:
An Acer Aspire 5738 laptop with a 3D display costs about £550 at the moment, not bad for something with cutting edge technology that adds depth to any DirectX 9 game. The screen is of the polarized filter type, which is the new norm for extra dimensions. 3D doesn't actually require any work on behalf of games developers or publishers, as the stereoscopic image is created at the driver level. On the other hand, that means there's no massive push by the people who make and sell games to encourage us to adopt it.

Streaming games:
The advancements in superfast broadband haven’t just helped the cause of downloadable games. It will also have no some small impact on the future of streaming games over broadband, or at least that's the theory. There are several companies pursuing and a significant amount of money invested in the idea that one day, your precious PC will be almost entirely redundant as a games machine. The concept is simple: all the game's data is hosted on a central server and all you will have to do are receive the display and send back input commands. It's a little like the technology used for MMORPGs, except that the rendering engine isn't on your PC, it's actually in the same server farm as the core intelligence.

Six core processors:
Intel's West mere CPUs may be hanging around with the dregs of processor society at the moment, chucking their chips in with the integrated graphics crowd, but they're about to grow up  and fast. Sometime over the next few months Intel will go two better than the current lineup of quad-core CPUs by launching a six-core version of its high-end Core i7 line.

Wireless power:
The good news is that the Wireless Power Consortium are going to be finalizing a standard for wireless power called Qi later this year, which should mean prices drop and manufacturers have the confidence to build the technology straight into devices, rather than requiring an adaptor.

Wireless display:
The first, Wireless is being pushed by the usual line-up of TV and DVD player manufacturers as a replacement for HDMI. It uses a short range, high bandwidth in the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) spectrum to transmit HD video and audio from a set-top box or media centre to a TV screen.