As a system builder, I consider 2009 to be a turn around year for many reasons. First and foremost, the economic recession started to lift, and the entire PC market saw increasing revenues in the second half of the year. It even has affected Nordic PC, as we had our best quarter ever in Q4 this year. That means more awesome PC's to more awesome clients. Hardware also had some really interesting developments, including big changes in CPUs, GPUs and Windows.

This time last year, we were all reveling in the glory that is the Intel Core i7 processor for socket 1366. Core i7 increased instructions-per-clock (IPC) by around 10% or so over Core 2, lowered memory latencies by moving the memory controller onto the CPU die, and brought back Hyper-Threading while introducing new technologies like Turbo Boost and better Virtualization support for servers. They did all of this while reducing the overall system power consumption, which is great news for the server crowd. But let's face it, Core i7 in the 1366 socket was a server and workstation processor crammed into a desktop.

This year, Intel gave us the true desktop Core i7 in the 1156 socket. By removing the third channel of DDR3 memory, Intel was able to push Lynnfield further than Nehalem in the gigahertz department, while adding Intel TXT technologies for a safer desktop. With higher Turbo Boost speeds and higher IPC, the Core i5 750 is essentially a 3.4ghz Core 2 Duo in most workloads, which is a great improvement over our old favorite E8400 for about the same cash. And that's without overclocking it, which can push that little sucker to 4ghz and beyond. Overall a great year for Intel, and a great year to buy a PC.

On the AMD front, we saw Phenom II and Athlon II take over where Phenom and Athlon had once been. This was mostly a die shrink from 65nm to 45nm which allowed the L3 cache to be bumped up to a whopping 6MB from 2MB, but AMD also took the opportunity to tighten up their design a bit, allowing higher clock speeds and better overclocks. We're regularly seeing Phenom II cores run at 3.6ghz and beyond, which is a great improvement. The larger L3 cache also helped IPC a bit, but not nearly enough to catch up to Intel's Core 2 architecture, let alone Core i7. We'll have to wait for Bulldozer to get a chance at beating the big dog again, and that will be 2011 with current roadmaps.

The really good news for consumers is that Athlon II processors offer excellent performance without breaking the bank. Heck, they aren't even breaking the piggy bank these days, with an Athlon II X2 240 running $58 at Newegg. That little chip easily exceeds 3.0ghz on just about any motherboard, and does it under 50 degrees Celsius with stock cooling. Did someone say Home Theater PC?

By far the biggest shaker in the PC market this year was Microsoft. Any time a new Windows release hits RTM, everyone gets excited, and Windows 7 was no exception. With the flop of Vista, MS really needed something big to recapture our love for Windows, and 7 did it. The most used advertising slogan was "Simplify your PC," and I think that really does sum up Windows 7. Upfront, Windows 7's redesigned taskbar makes desktop shortcuts a thing of the past. Gadgets are really easier than full applications, and removing Sidebar's limitations was a great step forward. For notebooks, the new network connection utility is priceless, and sharing files over a home network with Home Groups is just too easy. Libraries also add to the simplicity, as you don't care where something is anymore, as long as it's in the Library, it's available and searchable. Behind the scenes, Microsoft simplified the underpinnings of Windows Vista to make it more of a lean, mean, fighting machine. A PC I am breaking in next to me is using a whopping 534MB of RAM right now, with Prime95 crunching small FFTs and AV installed and running. That number is pretty close to XP's, without sacrificing the Aero experience or any of the advanced protections built in. As far as gaming is concerned, Microsoft brought us DirectX 11 with Windows 7, and that leads us into the GPU story.

AMD is the big "winner in the court house," as my Mom would say, as they are still the only company with a DirectX 11 GPU available. In fact, they totally wiped the floor with NVIDIA this time around, beating them to market by nearly 6 months, if Fermi does even make a March release. The Radeon 5000-series GPUs are also the fastest things around, although they can't quite double the performance of GT200 like I would love to see. In fact, AMD's big problem is that they can't consistently deliver considerable performance improvements over NVIDIA until the $300 price point. For about the same price, you can get either a 5770 or a GTX 260, and the GTX 260 is probably going to give you a better experience in most of today's games. That means that NVIDIA still rules the mainstream and entry-level markets, and it's going to keep them in business until they can reclaim the performance crown with Fermi.

2009 was also the year of DDR3 for desktops. To successfully migrate to DDR3, we needed 3 things: performance, price parity, and supporting motherboards and chipsets. Performance means we can't replace DDR2-800 with DDR3-1333, we have to step it up to DDR3-1600 to get a real performance boost. Once 4GB kits of DDR2-800 and DDR3-1600 were within $20 of each other, we had price parity, or at least close enough since performance is so much better. Lastly, we needed the chipsets and motherboards to mature that support DDR3. This came with the P55 chipset for the Core i5/i7 in the Intel camp, and the 785/790 chipsets for AMD's Phenom II. I would still love to see Asus make an NVIDIA 8300 or 980a board with DDR3, since AMD's SB710 is pretty horrible, but we'll have to wait for that.

So what's to come in 2010 you might ask. The big deal is going to be NVIDIA's Fermi architecture, and the development of DirectX 11 gaming. We have a handful of titles already, with plenty more on the stove. Hopefully we will also see a resurgence in PC gaming, as the Xbox 360 and PS3 start to show their age. These consoles have roughly one-third of the power of a modern gaming PC, and I can't imagine that developers won't want to tap into some of that.

Besides gaming, we're seeing a movement towards the utilization of GPUs for more than just gaming, and Adobe's CS5 is an excellent indication of what's to come. They've utilized NVIDIA's CUDA to speed up everything from clip playback in Premiere to rendering in Illustrator and Photoshop. I can't wait to see what developers have in stock for us now that they have these excellent toolkits at their fingertips.

And lastly, I think 2010 will be the year of the SSD. With native TRIM support in Windows 7, the SSD is really an amazing addition to any PC, day in and day out. Hard drives will continue to be the kings of large storage, but SSD's will likely house our program files to keep load times down. As they continue to advance in speed and capacity, their price will also continue to go down and become more affordable.

Well that's it for me in 2009, see ya next year!