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2017 top tech improvements

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sfx2000

Part of the Furniture
Just thought I would start the conversation...

IMHO - the major innovation for the home in 2017 has been Mesh/distributed Wireless networks for the home environment. Orbi, Eero are highlights, but others like Plume

Other items...
  • Wave 2 for BHR's has been a bit of a bust with MU and 160Mhz - mainly due to diminishing returns and client availability and performance if available.
  • We're seeing more WAN bandwidth this year - gigabit pops up more often these days.
  • 11ad (60Mhz) has been a bit of a bust, again, due to client side availability.
  • IoT is stepping forward - just a bit - getting beyond the hobbyist level, and the "smart home" with monitoring and what not.
    • my little science project worked to get ahead of that, just to be honest
  • VPN is still a big conversation topic...
  • In the BHR realm - seeing bigger/better chipsets this year - ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A15
  • GigE is still the dominant play - lots of chatter about 10Gb, but prices are still high
  • SoC vendors - Qualcomm Atheros is strong this year, Broadcom later in the year after some challenges with Wave2, but early results with their new platform are encouraging - Marvell keeps pounding out odd things that are interesting, sad part is that it's most Linksys in the SOHO market - it's good hardware there
  • More interest moving away from BHR integration into components on the high end - ER-X and hEX have drawn a lot of interest from the forums.
  • From the forums - AsusWRT-RMerlin is still very popular within the devices he supports, Voxel's NetGear private builds have come to the forefront for that community.
  • For NAS - this year has been mostly small steps, and big steps for some vendors - the low end stuff is changing and evolving, and the big players (QNAP/Synology) have taken some very big steps on the high end.

Thoughts and continue the thread?
 
On a more general computer point of view, two things I retain from 2017:

- AMD is back in the game, and is lighting a fire under Intel's butt, forcing them to become a bit more aggressive rather than their recent lousy "let's add 2% performance gain and 5% power usage improvement, and call that an improvement". We're seeing Intel now also looking at offering 6 cores CPUs at a reasonable price (999$ for their HEDT platform was just a rip-off).

- NVMe/M2 SSDs have reached a price point making them viable options for a mid to high end desktop, providing the biggest performance jump since the first SSDs appeared to replace mechanical HDDs. I can tell you that running an rsync between my development tree and my build tree is really fast when I want to do a new test build. I have a Samsung 960 Pro as my main SSD, also holding my development VM's disk image.

And Microsoft is still struggling in their transition of Windows to a SaaS model with bi-annual feature updates. Every single feature update, I have a number of customers ending up with crashed machines, reverted personalized network settings that need to be redone, some unable to install the new update and wasting 2+ hours of their (work) time as it tries to install, then fails, and rolls back, only to try again a week later. More paid work for me, but also I hear more frequent customer cussing on the phone, which does not make my job more enjoyable.

From the forums - AsusWRT-RMerlin is still very popular within the devices he supports

The biggest news there is probably that I succeeded in making the transition from the 380 code base to 382, despite everything and without losing my sanity. Although the migration development period was certainly... "something" if you look at my activity during last September on Github... And this is still an ongoing process as only a few models were migrated so far.
 
Continuing the thread...
  • AMD's revival - Jim Keller and Raj Kodari - they led the CPU/GPU renaissance at AMD, and made them relevant again with Zen and Vega - both have moved on to other things - Keller, last I'm told is at Telsa, and Kodari landed at Intel
  • The IOT - or should I say the Internet Of Insecure Digital Things - mirai and other DDOS botnets grabbed some headlines here
    • Voices in Tubes grabbed a lot of attention this year for digital "assistants"
  • Industry Consolidation - this was huge in 2017 - up and down the stack, from ATT/TW to Avago/Broadcom and QCOM/NXP and more - and we're looking at more in 2018
  • AI, Machine Learning - big stuff this year with nvidia and intel - which is a battle worth watching
  • The "Cloud" - continues to grow - and a fair amount of competition in the US with Azure/AWS/Google being the dominant players, but in Telco space - ATT and CenturyLink, along with Verizon are strong players there - watch out for Chinese and Indian companies, slow to start, but catching up extremely quick
    • Virtualization and Containers - huge amount of development there...
  • Cloud and the Edge - edge computing is more interesting these days - it'll start with large/medium enterprise, where more functions are pushed to the premises
    • CPE at the Home/Small Business are going to be more capable, but not to the end-user
  • Getting back to some things of interest to our community
  • Single Board Computers/IOT
    • Raspberry Pi Zero W a big deal - nice follow up to the Pi Zero - the Pi Zero W made it useful - and the backstop of having a solid armhf distro behind it made it more interesting
    • ESP32 - the Espressif platform for WiFi embedded controllers in many ways is changing the game on the low end - these have become much more interesting with recent IDE improvements
 

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