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The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

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Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#41

Post by RussianCow »

fiatmoney wrote: post #23

"For what" is the obvious question. Web development with a remote testing environment, office applications, email, web browsing - sure, a Core 2 Duo is more than good enough if your software environment is kept in order. Audio / video / photoshop, gaming, developing software that does math, data analysis - you can never get fast enough. The limiting factor is if your computer's feedback loop is tighter than your brai…

Very true, but the vast majority of computer users aren't pushing the limits of their systems, and I think that's what the author is getting at. If you look at the market as a whole, the need for more powerful computers isn't nearly as big as it used to be.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#42

Post by rndmize »

I think the issue is that the rate of improvement has fallen pretty hard. I remember when nvidia moved from the 5 series to the 6 series, their new flagship card doubled the performance of any current card on the market. The same thing happened with the 8 series. Processors before multicore would show direct improvements in the speed of the machine, especially if (like the average consumer) your machine filled up with useless, constantly running crap over time.

These days I just don't see that. Graphics cards seem to improve by 30-50% each generation, and because so many games are tied to consoles now, they often aren't even taking advantage of what's available. With multicore processors and the collapse of the GHZ race, there's no easy selling point as far as speed, and much less visible improvement (now all that useless crap can be offloaded to the second core!) and most consumers will never need more than two cores. Crysis felt like the last gasp of the old, engine-focused type of game that made you think "man, I really should upgrade to play this"... and that was released in 07. Without significant and obvious performance improvements, and software to take advantage, why bother upgrading?

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#43

Post by gtaylor »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #40
usaphp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~$1,000 sounds quite cheap for a gaming machine which can still run any modern game at highest settings. I remember I built mine at about the same time (2010) for $2500, top notch video card, fastest cpu, lots of ram, but its 2013 now and I can not say that it runs any modern game at highest settings.

You overpaid. You're better off spending $800 and upgrading 3 times as often.

Particularly with GPUs. I wouldn't touch something like Nvidia's Titan unless I just had gobs of money lying around.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#44

Post by eco »

wisty wrote: post #38
gtaylor wrote: post #8

I built a dev/gaming machine back in early 2010. It's stout, but not a ridiculously expensive (~$1,000) behemoth. The only thing I've done since then is toss some more RAM in so I could have two sets of triple channel DDR3 instead of one. I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings. The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound f…

> I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings. AAA games mostly target the console. Look at GTA5, which isn't even out on the PC. Most AAA games will run on a PS3, which came out in 2006, and has 512MB of RAM (combined system / graphics). That said, there's a point of diminishing returns - making games look much more realistic will take obscene amounts of resources.

I expect there to be a system requirements explosion for PC games now that the new consoles are right around the corner and AAA game developers can finally target much higher specs.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#45

Post by carterschonwald »

fiatmoney wrote: post #23

"For what" is the obvious question. Web development with a remote testing environment, office applications, email, web browsing - sure, a Core 2 Duo is more than good enough if your software environment is kept in order. Audio / video / photoshop, gaming, developing software that does math, data analysis - you can never get fast enough. The limiting factor is if your computer's feedback loop is tighter than your brai…

Emphatic agreement. I wind up helping folks a lot with writing high performance software, and it's very easy to get to the point where the time to run a model is totally determined by how fast the CPU and IO are. I'm talking problems where naively written C would take an hour, but if I'm careful and use some blend of very clever c or Haskell, the computation is done in 2-5 minutes

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#46

Post by UVB-76 »

People snack on smartphones, dine on tablets, and cook on PCs.

A lot of people don't want to cook, so are happy with smartphones and tablets.

Why buy a desktop or laptop when an iPad will do everything you need for a fraction of the price? That's what people mean when they sound the death knell for the PC.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#47

Post by mortenjorck »

Five years ago, I bought a MacBook Pro to replace my PowerBook G4, which was itself five years old. The list of obsolescences was enormous: It had only USB 1.1 in a market teeming with new USB 2.0 hardware that couldn't have existed with the slower speeds; it had a single-touch trackpad just as OS X was introducing all sorts of useful multi-touch gestures; it relied on clumsy external solutions for wi-fi and Bluetooth; it had a slow-to-warm CFL LCD that had been supplanted by bright new LED backlit screens; it was even built on a dead-end CPU architecture that Apple had traded for vastly more powerful, energy-efficient, multi-core x86 processors.

Today, the calendar says it's time for me to upgrade again. Yet the pain of obsolescence of a five-year-old laptop in 2013 just isn't the same as in 2008: USB 3.0? What new applications is it enabling? Anything I need Thunderbolt for? Not yet. New Intel architectures and SSDs at least promise less waiting in everyday use... but I'm hardly unproductive with my old machine.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#48

Post by bane »

gtaylor wrote: post #8

I built a dev/gaming machine back in early 2010. It's stout, but not a ridiculously expensive (~$1,000) behemoth. The only thing I've done since then is toss some more RAM in so I could have two sets of triple channel DDR3 instead of one. I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings. The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound f…

I built mine in early 2007 for around $2000 (+-$300, can't remember exactly) and it's just now really starting to show its old age. It could use more RAM and an SSD (maybe), but for 99% of what I do, including gaming, it's plenty fast enough. I can't run the very absolute latest AAA games on highest, but if I turn the resolution down a hair or turn off antialiasing they run fine.

In fact the only thing I really want a faster machine for is some of the latest emulation techniques (Higan) and a vague desire to play around with some virtualization odds and ends.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#49

Post by RussianCow »

usaphp wrote: post #13
gtaylor wrote: post #8

I built a dev/gaming machine back in early 2010. It's stout, but not a ridiculously expensive (~$1,000) behemoth. The only thing I've done since then is toss some more RAM in so I could have two sets of triple channel DDR3 instead of one. I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings. The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound f…

~$1,000 sounds quite cheap for a gaming machine which can still run any modern game at highest settings. I remember I built mine at about the same time (2010) for $2500, top notch video card, fastest cpu, lots of ram, but its 2013 now and I can not say that it runs any modern game at highest settings.

IMO, you don't need the fastest CPU for gaming. I saved a ton of money by getting an AMD FX-8350 (I already had an AMD motherboard on hand, so that helped too), and although it does bottleneck in really CPU-intensive games, I can run almost all games on the highest settings at 2560x1440. The graphics card is really the only component that you need to splurge on for a gaming rig these days, because it's the bottleneck for the vast majority of games.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#50

Post by protomyth »

The PC market isn't dead, but then again, the Mainframe market isn't dead either.

The Post-PC devices[1] (tablets / smartphones) are it for the majority of folks from here on out. They are easier to own since the upgrade path is heading to buy new device and type in my password to have all my stuff load on it. If I want to watch something on the big screen, I just put a device on my TV. Need to type, add a keyboard.

The scary part of all this is that some of the culture of the post-PC devices are infecting the PCs. We see the restrictions on Windows 8.x with the RT framework (both x86/ARM), all ARM machine requirements, and secure boot. We see the OS X 10.8+ with gatekeeper, sandboxing, and app store requirements with iCloud.

The PC culture was defined by hobbyists before the consumers came. The post-PC world is defined by security over flexibility. Honestly, 99% of the folks are happier this way. They want their stuff to work and not be a worry, and if getting rid of the hobbyist does that then fine. PC security is still a joke and viruses are still a daily part of life even if switching the OS would mitigate some of the problems.

I truly wish someone was set to keep building something for the hobbyist[2], but I am a bit scared at the prospects.

1) Yes, I'm one of those that mark the post-PC devices as starting with the iPhone in 2007. It brought the parts we see together: tactile UI, communications, PC-like web browsing, and ecosystem (having inherited the iPods).

2) I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if the HP-16c had kept evolving.

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