An idea that seems to come from the Star Trek universe

Nov 3, 2005 11:00 GMT  ·  By

The future of wireless communications might be one without mobile phones, where voice commands are received via Wi-Fi by a chip located in your shirt pocket. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) converts voice signals to data and sends them through the Internet to powerful servers that can identify the callers voice and connect automatically to the person he/she is trying to reach.

The idea seems to come from the Star Trek universe. Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia CEO, says that all these visions are possible in the near future. It may seem strange that a graphics company CEO like Jen-Hsun Huang makes this kind of previsions, but he says that all these innovations are based on technology available today, like Wi-Fi, VoIP and voice recognition software.

Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, also predicted innovations in the graphics industry. Nvidia's CEO says that in ten years there won't be any differences between a movie and a video game. Huang said that current technologies need a lot of time to render graphics similar to a movie, but in a decade, it will be done in real time.

Chips that can make this possible need billions of transistors, and Nvidia hopes to reach the 1 billion transistors on a single GPU barrier by the end of 2008. Now, Nvidia's GeForce 7 GPU includes 302 million. By comparison, in 1993 Nvidia GPUs included only 1 million transistors.