At Zenatek Technologies Labs we don't know how to read the future but we do have our eye on what's to come and we thought we would share a bit about some amazing devices and advancements that will be here in 2003.

Optical Drives:

The optical drive is something that hasn't changed a whole lot in a long while. Yah it's gotten faster but what about more space, or smaller discs? 
Well you're in luck.

There are two words that are you're ticket onto the speed train: Blue Laser.  To give you an idea about how cool Blue Laser is, you have to
compare it with DVD, today's biggest from of optical disc. DVD discs hold 10GB of information where as the new Blue Laser discs could reach 50GB. We aren't 100 percent sure they will be here by the end of the year, but we would probably put money on it.

Why can they hold so much more space? It is because the Blue Laser beam diameter is much more fine-405 nanometers, whereas current laser beams are 630 nanometers.

Of course with the whole DVD-RW controversy with formats and players, it looks like the same problem will occur with Blue Laser. As of right now there are two main formats in development. Blue-Ray is one which is being standardized by Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sony and five others. This format can hold 27GB per disc.  Toshiba and NEC are also working on another format not yet named which will hold up to 30GB and be backwards compatible with today's DVD's, a feature which Blue Ray doesn't include.

SIZE! 'I just want to put it in my pocket'... We have all heard that one before.  Philips is developing smaller discs and form factors to be used in digital devices. These discs could be as small as 3cm and hold up to 1GB.

Don't get too excited.  If these make it here in 2003, it won't be till the end.

Hard Drives:

Hard Drives are one thing that seems to grow really fast. It always seems you go out and purchase a nice juicy drive and take it home thinking it's
the best there is and a month later there's one twice the size. That trend isn't about to stop.

Here at Zenatek's Lab we currently recommend the Western Digital 1200JB, because of its 8MB buffer. We don't expect that drive to stay Number One for too long though. You can expect to see more manufactures creating buffers larger than 8MB. You can expect to see gigantic drives by the end of 2003, probably with a size of 360GB or more. 

One thing currently slowing your drive down is that darn IDE cable. This year marks the release of SATA (Serial ATA). These cables will be smaller which results in better airflow and will also have a major speed boost, and they also finally dropped the Master/Slave hassle. Drives with SATA support will be appearing early 2003. Zenatek's line of Samurai systems already have integrated support for the drives which will allow people to upgrade in the future. We are unsure if any other computer manufactures have started to include SATA support.

Processors:

Processors are known for their insane speed increases. With Intel and AMD constantly battling for the fastest pro, you can bet you will see a huge
difference in speed at the end of 2003 than from at the beginning of the year.

As many of you know Intel just released their new 3.06 GHz Chip which is the first to include Hyper threading support. Also AMD just released their 2600+XP and their 2800+XP.  Intel is currently the fastest. What will happen in the next 12 months is a whole different situation.

This will be a big year of changes for Intel. The chipmaker will probably hit 3.26 GHz by May.  Sometime around June they are expected to release a chip code named "Prescott".  It will be built on a .09-micron foundation and will include new instructions, multiple cores, and huge amounts of cache. You can expect to see Prescott (Pentium 5) in speeds of 3.5GHz, although it
wouldn't surprise us if the Intel chips surpassed 4.0 GHz by the end of the year.

As you can see there's a lot of excitement happening in 2003, when it comes to computer components. Now can you only imagine what will come in 2004?

John Faires
President of Zenatek Technologies
"Creating Dream Machines"
www.zenatek.com
1-800-Zenatek
Zenatek@zenatek.com