PC obsolescence is obsolete
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PC obsolescence is obsolete
1–10 of 124 posts
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#2Yep, seems pretty accurate to me.
In fact, my home system is pretty much identical to their hypothetical 2008 i7-920 system.
I have made a couple of upgrades over the years (Replaced the original Radeon 4870x2 with a GeForce 560 about 9 months ago when the ATI card died, recently upgraded from the original 6GB of RAM to 24GB.
Looking at what's other there now there's nothing that makes sense to upgrade to.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#3Yep, seems pretty accurate to me. In fact, my home system is pretty much identical to their hypothetical 2008 i7-920 system. I have made a couple of upgrades over the years (Replaced the original Radeon 4870x2 with a GeForce 560 about 9 months ago when the ATI card died, recently upgraded from the original 6GB of RAM to 24GB. Looking at what's other there now there's nothing that makes sense to upgrade to.
Raytraced games probably come closest to what would cause people to upgrade. But even Intel seems to be backing away from raytraced games off late.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#4I'd say that this is even more valid for home servers. Of the 7 spare boxes I have, five are 5+ years old while two are 2 year old shit home laptops (Inspiron yay!).
These were all under $50 a piece when you factor in that 3 were free. All of these guys sit on ubuntu server or archlinux and never have problems. Hell, you can go buy surplus/ old 620's from corporate shops for < $100 and build yourself a full Beowulf cluster for under $500.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#5No doubt it has been replaced by device obsolescence, where the screen, camera, wireless radio, etc. are bundled together and improvements in any one component compels the purchase of a whole new unit.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#6I am absolutely amazed, that picture at the beginning of the article seems to have taken on a life of it's own.
More on topic, quick PC obsolescence was always something of a myth. Parts were only really obsolete if you absolutely had to run the latest shooter at the absolute highest settings known to man. So it wasn't that it was obsolete, it was that the user needed to justify their desire to buy the latest for bragging rights.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#7I'd say that this is even more valid for home servers. Of the 7 spare boxes I have, five are 5+ years old while two are 2 year old shit home laptops (Inspiron yay!). These were all under $50 a piece when you factor in that 3 were free. All of these guys sit on ubuntu server or archlinux and never have problems. Hell, you can go buy surplus/ old 620's from corporate shops for < $100 and build yourself a full Beowulf c…
Home servers? I've always used incredibly out-of-date machines as home servers. There has never really been a market for powerful home servers.
I had a Pentium 166 with 80MB of EDO ram and a 1GB hard disk (bought new in 1996 as a P120 with 16MB of ram) until the end of 2005 as a home server, running Windows 2000.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#8I'd say that this is even more valid for home servers. Of the 7 spare boxes I have, five are 5+ years old while two are 2 year old shit home laptops (Inspiron yay!). These were all under $50 a piece when you factor in that 3 were free. All of these guys sit on ubuntu server or archlinux and never have problems. Hell, you can go buy surplus/ old 620's from corporate shops for < $100 and build yourself a full Beowulf c…
What's the power usage of old PCs like that? I've been using a sheeva plug as my server at home because it only uses something like 5 watts.
It seems like ARM servers are the best choice for home servers. They have adequate processing power and are cheap.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#9> Now, compare an early Core i7 system (Nehalem) against what’s shipping today (Ivy Bridge). Clock speeds are up a bit, and there are cheaper/lower-end options available, but the Core i7-920 that launched at 2.67GHz with four cores and eight threads is still absolutely capable of powering the latest games and applications.
A big, big factor in the slowdown of obsolecense is that the current generation of consoles has stretched out far longer than is normal. Because the consoles have fairly PC-esque capabilities (arguably more parity than there has ever been before), many games released today are released on consoles and PC, often on a single code-base, at the very least on a single asset base.
Once the next generation of consoles is out, we will see games taking advantage of that extra power, and in turn PC requirements for new games will start to climb again.
Re: PC obsolescence is obsolete
#10I used to do a lot of server work. Mostly virtualization in a lab environment. We created an elaborate test rig which literally the more computers you threw at the problem the faster you could iterate. About 4 years ago I left, but looked back at hardware a few weeks ago. It blew my mind how things have doubled since then.
I think servers for real work are still important, and they're not done at getting better faster.