While smartphones and tablets have lead the innovation in consumer electronics for many years, it will likely be the car that sees the biggest advancements in electronics in the future, reports influential technology blog GigaOM.
Just follow the chips. Firms like Nvidia and Texas Instruments are increasingly building special chips for car dashboards, and the overall cost of chips used in cars is rapidly rising.
One reason the car will surge ahead is because the hefty cost of the automobile can absorb some of the cost of innovation in electronics.
Also, there’s a ready battery supply so you don’t have to worry about a 10-hour battery drain. That means a quad-core chip works better in a car than a phone where the battery is taxed.
“…I think in the next year or two we’re going to see cars with services that redefine technology, much like the iPhone redefined touch screens or the Xbox 360 redefined video game consoles that are now full-featured entertainment machines,” said GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham.
Plus, as cars go driverless (or semi-driverless), as they may in the next 10 years, then the need for more processing, will make the car an even more attractive target for chip development and innovation. The same is true as cars begin to “talk” to one another in V2V (vehicle to vehicle) communication.
For example, chip maker Spansion should offer a co-processor for speech recognition. It can work with a Nuance system to speed up voice recognition, said GigaOM.
See the full article from GigaOM here.
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