The year kicked in with a sigh of relief from system administrators worldwide involved in saving their companies from the Y2k disaster. Fortunately there weren’t any fireworks during the transition. Perhaps the Y2k bug was overly hyped, but then had it not been so it could have resulted in disaster. The remaining year saw many technological triumphs. As usual, many didn’t do as expected and there are many still, which promise a brighter tomorrow.

Motherboards Integrated motherboards became the in thing this year. An integrated motherboard has all the common components, which you would otherwise buy separately, built in. These include sound, graphics, and even a network interface in some cases. Sound and graphics integration became common with Intel’s release of its 810 chipset-based motherboards. It put the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) function into the chipset itself, and gave the provision for putting the VRAM on the motherboard. Motherboards based on this chipset can’t take an external AGP card. The design has its limitations in terms of future upgrades. However, since you don’t have to add any cards to use the machine, it’s priced cheaper. Also, this change in technology made it possible to make PCs more compact.

Graphics nVIDIA’s hot GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) processor was in great demand, both among users and vendors. More than the chip, it was the technology it used that made the difference by freeing the CPU from tasks like rendering, transformation, and lighting. The CPU could then do what it does best—number crunching and floating point calculations to generate the graphics. The overall result has been better graphics quality and higher frame rates in games. The latest from nVIDIA is a mobile GPU called GeForce2 Go for notebooks, which gives better graphics to mobile users.

Bus speeds In the Pentium days, 66 MHz FSB (Front Side Bus) was the "in" thing. PII processors pushed this speed to 100 MHz, and with the PIII it went up to 133 MHz. The buck didn’t stop here. AMD introduced its Athlon processor that supported 200 MHz FSB. The future will see bus speeds going even higher, at 400 MHz thanks to Intel’s latest Pentium 4 processor.

Processors The most notable achievement was the level of integration in processors. In the Pentium days, the Level 2 (L2) cache memory was implemented on the motherboard. Therefore, its speed was limited to that of the motherboard. Later when the PII was launched, the L2 cache moved out of the motherboard and landed up on the same board as the CPU. Here, the cache ran at half the CPU’s speed. This year, the cache moved onto the same die as the CPU, thus running at the same speed as the CPU. This helps in a more compact design of the processor, and also makes it faster and more economical.

XML Extensible Markup Language was the most talked about Internet technology this year. The remarkable feature of this programming language is that you can define your own customized tags, which was not possible in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). So, it can be used for creating data structures rather than code to display data.

WAP Wireless Application Protocol was expected to become another hot technology this year. Various large service providers announced the launch of their WAP services this year. However, the technology failed to become as widespread as it was expected to. Perhaps this was because there is not enough of critical information that people will want to receive when on the move. Another reason can be the limited amount of data that can be displayed on today’s cell phones.