Maximum PC

Hey all,

Maybe I'm just out of the loop and haven't been paying enough attention, but it seems to me that the hardware side of the PC industry as a whole is slowing down to a crawl.

Some years ago people were almost abuzz over something, a new GPU series, a new memory standard, the transition from single-core to dual-core, and the transitions from a FSB to an integrated memory controller and hyper-transport bus that went along with it. AGP moving to PCI-e, and the news of SLI, Crossfire, faster PCI-e standards, and newer peripherals that followed. IDE making way for SATA, Platter drives to SSDs, USB standards, on and on.


And perhaps it's just when you look at the tech industry close enough it just seems stationary, like some bizarre twist on quantum mechanics, but I'm wondering what's "the next big thing" that you're all looking forward to.

Along those lines, if you agree that the PC industry is letting off the gas, what's your thoughts as to why?



Personally, I'm suspicious the whole smartphone / notepad / ultrathin / tablet / mobile* "revolution" is taking a toll on the amount of attention PC hardware is getting. But is this really what's best for everyone?

As far as I know, most mobile variants of hardware are simply reduced versions of desktop components. What happens when we stop feeding the desktop component beast? Won't a push towards mobile devices lead to a stagnation or at least a slowdown of advancements for the mobile devices themselves?


And, this may be a conspiracy theory, but I don't think I'd be the first to suggest that cellular networks have a history of withholding advancements for the purpose of profit, IE, milking the cash cow until she's good and dry before upgrading her.

Thoughts?
Ideas?
Random babblings of incoherent nonsense?

Peace,
Dan O.

I personally think that more and more computing will be done on tablets and smartphones, eventually relegating many if not most new desktop PCs to business purposes. This will take a few years before this becomes widespread, but I do think there will come a day when this happens. Look at the advances in putting the GPU on the main processor, for instance. Another instance is Windows 8, blatantly designed for portables first, desktops almost as an afterthought. SSDs are good in desktops, but in portables, they shine. With no moving parts, damage to the storage drive will no longer cause busted r/w heads or shifted platters on portable computers.

I personally am not looking forward to much hardware at the present... I keep my parts running as long as I can and only shop for new ones when I need them. I'm not the type to upgrade a processor once I install it in a mobo. The only thing I'd be looking at would be a fanless PCIe video card for less than $50, but my present budget is literally $0.

It's not so much hardware that will allows to do new things that get me excited, but rather, new technology to replace what we currently are using. When is memristor technology going to come out (the closest candidate for us getting universal memory)? Optical computing? Wireless networks and internet that will use the spin of the signal to essentially bypass Nyquist-Shannon?

Though regarding tablets, I still hold to the idea that smartphones, tablets, and the like were designed for content-consumption. At least at the moment. I do see their use for content creation in the future, with ASUS Transformer like tablets coming out. But the main problem that they lack is screen size. So until we get over that hump, they'll remain forever as content consumers.

LatiosXT,

Funny you should mention optical computing and memristors, I remember reading news articles regarding these technologies and how they were the future in High School, and I graduated in 1999.

Optical computing, memristors, quantum computing, these were all purported to be here by around now 10-20 years ago when they were first researched.


At this point, I'd simply be happy if Moore's Law kept pace, and I'm not sure it is...

The Core 2 Duo was announced in July of 2006 with the release of the C2D E6300 and E6400. Moore's Law says that the transistor count should double every 18 months. And perhaps it has, there's been 6 years now, and 6/1.5 is 4. So, there should be 228 million * 2^4 transistors, or 3,648 million (3.648 Billion). There's currently 1.4 Billion transistors in the Quad-Core variant Intel Ivy Bridge processors released in June of this year.

Unless my math is horribly wrong, that's bad. It's also bad because I'm comparing a Quad-Core to a Dual-Core, and it still doesn't add up, despite there being a Quad released just 4 months after the Dual-Core I'm comparing against.

Worse though, one should be able to correlate performance with transistor count, but it's one thing to correlate, and another to have a linear, 1-1 relationship, newsflash, they don't.

Dan O.

No, it's in my opinion that you're just not paying attention.

Business is relative, and most won't touch tablets. It's nice for kids, can be nice for IT...but they're not interfacing a fucking iPad with real servers that do work. I guess there's an app for that though now. I know tablets rock for admin'ing racks but you'll just want interface to the horde and Mac doesn't fix that easily. From what I've seen personally and from watching TWiT's enterprise tech shows, you're not running a Mac server so you don't want a popular Mac Tablet to manage them based on an app.

IT personnel will figure out their own problems and why it's a "job" you get money sent to you for. Touchscreen, point and shoot...I just don't thing it should be in the App that tells the tech where to look. Not in industry any way. In Industry, we have Rosemont HART and Fluke that are dumbing down I&E techs already. When THOSE devices go wrong beyond calibration, the human has to figure it out. I've left the industrial field because of this and the frustration felt teaching how things work vise what the meter tells you.

You can level any plant or production facility by having a book reader on a meter. What they do with it, takes a person that knows how it works without the meter. Car guys...what's a failed MAP sensor mean? 9 other things that need human interaction.

We expect too much from social media than social interaction itself. I make great enemies here and an all social media sites, but really am a good person.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_ ... ether.html