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Technology is a forever growing with seemingly endless possibilities. People are constantly working on bettering technology, especially in computers. There are some drawbacks to this speed. Technology is growing so fast that it is becoming difficult for both creators and consumers to keep up with everything. Now, there are many great individual things, but the overall support for these things is often unsupported by other aspects, limiting their functionality. From fairly new technologies like SLI video support and dual core processors, to fairly old technologies such as 64 bit processors, all need to be better supported by both hardware and software to get full effect. The new SLI video system, developed by nVidea, currently allows the use of two video cards, linked together, for more video power. At the moment there is nothing on the market that can even attempt to use it at its full capacity. For more than double the price of a single video card system, there is only a moderately noticeable advancement. This technology even has the possibility to have even more than two video cards linked together, but no one is researching too heavily into that, because there no notable enhancements can be seen even with the two. Dual core processors are very similar to the prospect of SLI video. Where SLI has the potential to double video performance, dual core has the potential to double overall processing power. Having two full processors on one chip is an amazing feat, but it does no good if the software doesn’t even recognize that two processors exist. There are some limited tasks that take advantage of the dual core, but most programs treat it as a regular, single core processor. 64 bit processing is several years older than the brand new SLI video design, but it has little more support than SLI does. Basically, a 64 bit system can manage double the data in one cycle that a current 32 bit system can. This advancement is also basically useless since there is next to no software available to take advantage of it. If a program is written to perform in a 32 bit environment, it will not run at 64 bit just because it is on a 64 bit system. It needs to be ported, or re-coded, to run a 64 bit system at full capacity. This process isn’t as hard as it may seem, but software manufactures are still dragging their feet. Only minimal advances, like Microsoft’s sloppily thrown together Windows XP64, have been even attempted in the industry. On the leading edge of making use of the advantages of these new technologies is the open source community. (Start new paragraphy here.) Commercial software makers, who can devote all of their time to software development, should take the hint from the often part-time coders of the open source community and offer better support for new technologies. Although commercial software developers do have their setbacks, as far as copyright and things go, at this point they are still needed to keep advancements going. Their input would greatly speed the process of fully using current technology. Also, the backing of these big name software companies, such as Microsoft, is needed in order to help promote the making of further advancements in hardware. Their financial resources are invaluable in the technology advancement process. The hardware manufactures who designed these new, often not fully supported technologies are not likely to do as well with further advances. If the limits of current technology cannot be found, it will be difficult to better that technology. For this reason, commercial software developers need to be convinced of the need to better, (Delete the comma.) and increase support for new technologies. (I take it that's what you're going to try to do in the final project. If so, state that aim clearly.) Without their backing, hardware developers will not be as motivated to design new products because sales on unsupported hardware are significantly lower than those on well supported hardware. Big name corporations typically do their best to heed the concerns of their customers. A well put together argument of both written and visual media will get them (The consumers or the corporations? It's not clear.) headed in the right direction for better support of new technologies, allowing for better performance on the user end and more confidence in creation on the design end.

Preliminary Bibliography

Columbus, Frank H. Progress in Computer Research. Nova Science Publishers

Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware, Advances in Computer Graphics Hardware Springer-Verlag Publishers

What is 64 bit Computing?

History of Computing Hardware