5 Fascinating Technology Trends To Help Your Business Grow in 2018

In today's blog, I'll examine five technologies shaping the way we do business now and in the foreseeable future.

I'll also go over the the impact of playing it safe and waiting for mass-market adoption before taking the plunge yourself.

Sound good? Let's begin...

1. GPU Your Way To Success

AI, blockchain, cryptocurrency, data analysis…have I listed enough new, emerging industry buzzwords yet?

Most headline worthy technologies today hone in around really fast number crunching - or in technical terms - floating point arithmetic.

...which happens to be a GPU specialty.

Here's what I mean.

A GPU's talent, if you will, is going through large data sets and spitting out results at lightning fast speeds.

Now in business speak: faster results at a lower cost. Doesn't that sound attractive?

One look at NVIDIA’s stock price over the past year is all you need to understand the excitement around GPUs.

NVIDIA, AMD, and others are really pushing the limits (maybe the new Moore’s Law?) on the GPU’s quantity of cores and the capabilities of these power hungry cards.

The days of 'GPUs are just for gamers and bitcoin miners' are behind us.

Large companies across various industries (FinTech, government, healthcare, etc.) are actively leveraging the number-crunching power of GPUs to improve their businesses and propel the world forward to new technologies.

2. Change the way you use a computer with Intel® Optane™ Technology

In general, I’m fairly skeptical of crazy performance claims, but with Intel’s Optane memory and storage actually running in our lab, I’ll admit that the geek in me is getting super excited with the results we’re seeing.

Any PC running a 7th Gen Intel® Core™ processor and a hard disk drive will gain uncompromising system responsiveness.

What this means (in Intel's words): making everything you do fast, smooth, and easy.

Whether you are caching your data or just looking for large, scalable PCIe storage…you will be impressed with these NVMe drives!

3. At last, Intel® Rulers are here!

These modular Intel 3D NAND drives are a creative way to cram a LOT of really fast storage in a very small space.

How much is a lot exactly?

Up to 8 TB using PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.2

While this product is just beginning to ship now, I would expect you’ll see many new and creative storage solutions using this innovative “ruler” packaging design.

4. Persistent Memory

I have to be careful what I say here (NDA’s and lawyers…) since this technology is really cutting edge and not yet available in the market; so I’ll just talk about what is public directly from Intel.

Imagine having your operating system and other files that you use the most stored directly in the DDR memory socket, but the files are persistent (you don’t lose your Word document when your battery runs out of power).

Plus, it uses Intel’s newest 3D XPoint (3D CrossPoint)!

You can imagine some really exciting, high-performance applications across many different markets.

Okay, let's move on before the attorneys start knocking.

5. The boost we've been waiting for: PCI Express Gen4

What do most of the exciting technologies above run on?

The GPUs, the NMVe drives, and many more are running on PCI Express; and technology is always asking for more bandwidth/speed.

So, the PCI Express consortium, PCI-SIG, officially ratified and released the PCIe Gen4 specification in late 2017 (which runs at an amazing 16 Gb/s!).

When are you going to be able to start seeing PCIe Gen4 capable computers and plug-in cards?

It’s still a little early, but all of the big CPU companies seem to be pushing for an early 2020 timeframe.

I’d imagine in a few years the next generation GPU cards, NMVe drives, etc. will be blazing fast once we get to PCIe Gen4! Viva Moore’s law!

What does this mean for your business?

In the long-run, as more and more businesses make the move to these revolutionary technologies, don't get left in the dust.

Your competition is already working on implementation strategies to update their IT infrastructure. What have you done to prepare?

Take the time to map out key stakeholders, work out a plan, then come up with action items to achieve your goal.

Being an early adopter pays dividends and right now you have the rare opportunity to be a thought-leader in your industry. Are you going to take advantage of your position?