Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building my childhood dream PC

fabiensanglard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#31

Post by pja »

Aurornis wrote: post #24
endgame wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possible reason: to achieve the performance improvements, we are seeing more integrated and soldered-together stuff, limiting later upgrades. The Framework Desktop from the modular, user-upgradeable laptop company, has soldered-on memory because they had to "choose two" between memory bus performance, system stability, and user-replaceable memory modules. If the product succeeds and the market starts saying that…

That’s a laptop. It’s soldered for space constraints. There are high speed memory module form factors. It just adds thickness, cost, expense, and they’re not widely available yet. Most use cases need the high speed RAM attached to the GPU, though. Desktop CPUs are still on 2-channel memory and it’s fine. Server configs go to 12-channel or more, but desktop hasn’t even begun to crack the higher bandwidth because it’s…

The Framework Desktop is not a laptop. The clue is in the name...

https://frame.work/gb/en/desktop

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#33

Post by barrkel »

whatever1 wrote: post #26
dingnuts wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, you tell us why you think the next ten years are going to be different than the last thirty

The only market for desktops is gaming. Hence nvidia will just slap a cpu on their board and use the unified memory model to sell you an all in one solution. Essentially a desktop console. Maybe some modularization will survive for slow storage. But other than that demand for modular desktops is dead. Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs.

There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation that are hard to beat with a laptop.

If you're compiling code, you generally want as much concurrency as you can get, as well as great single core speed when the task parallelism runs out. There aren't really any laptops with high core counts, and even when you have something with horsepower, you run into thermal limits. You can try and make do with remoting into a machine with more cores, but then you're not really using your laptop, it might as well be a Chromebook.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#34

Post by zokier »

whatever1 wrote: post #26
dingnuts wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, you tell us why you think the next ten years are going to be different than the last thirty

The only market for desktops is gaming. Hence nvidia will just slap a cpu on their board and use the unified memory model to sell you an all in one solution. Essentially a desktop console. Maybe some modularization will survive for slow storage. But other than that demand for modular desktops is dead. Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs.

There is still lot of productivity stuff that benefits from power of desktops. Engineering (Ansys etc), local AI development, 3D modeling, working with large C++/Rust codebases, scientific computing, etc etc. And related to gaming there is of course the huge game developer market too. There is a reason why nvidia and amd still make workstation class GPUs for big bucks.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#36

Post by thw_9a83c »

Honestly, that IBM PS/1 model 2168 computer case looks retro, but also classy and nerdy. I miss the days when computers had enough free slots for external media drives. I really like physical media like CD-ROMs, Blu-ray disks, and floppy disks (I don't use those anymore). It's getting harder and harder to find a computer case that has a slot for a Blu-ray/CD drive.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#37

Post by scns »

endgame wrote: post #12
dingnuts wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, you tell us why you think the next ten years are going to be different than the last thirty

One possible reason: to achieve the performance improvements, we are seeing more integrated and soldered-together stuff, limiting later upgrades. The Framework Desktop from the modular, user-upgradeable laptop company, has soldered-on memory because they had to "choose two" between memory bus performance, system stability, and user-replaceable memory modules. If the product succeeds and the market starts saying that…

> The Framework Desktop from the modular, user-upgradeable laptop company, has soldered-on memory because they had to "choose two" between memory bus performance, system stability, and user-replaceable memory modules.

No need to pick on Framework here, AMD could not make the chip work with replaceable memory. How many GPUs with user replaceable (slotted) memory are there? Zero snark intended

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#39

Post by pjc50 »

intrasight wrote: post #9

Honest question: Will building a high-end PC still be a thing in 10 years? I've built all of mine in the last 20 years. Just finished my first AMD build. But I don't think it'll be possible or allowed after a few more CPU iterations. Sure, you'll be able to do builds with the CPU tech available up to when it stops, but I seriously doubt that the cutting-edge chip tech ten years hence will be available to hobbyists. T…

You're going to have to unpack "allowed". Are you saying that the Apple model will win so heavily that separate parts will not be available? What change are you expecting?

NVIDIA not selling cutting edge other than in bulk is a phenomenon of the AI bubble, which will eventually deflate. (I'm not saying it will go away, just that the massive training investments are unsustainable without eventually revenue catching up)

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#40

Post by whatever1 »

barrkel wrote: post #33
whatever1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only market for desktops is gaming. Hence nvidia will just slap a cpu on their board and use the unified memory model to sell you an all in one solution. Essentially a desktop console. Maybe some modularization will survive for slow storage. But other than that demand for modular desktops is dead. Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs.

There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation that are hard to beat with a laptop. If you're compiling code, you generally want as much concurrency as you can get, as well as great single core speed when the task parallelism runs out. There aren't really any laptops with high core counts, and even when you have something with horsepower, you run into thermal limits. You can try and make do with remoting…

All of these can be done much better on the cloud (I can spawn as big of a machine as my pocket can afford). And with today’s tooling (vs code & jetbrains remote development) you don’t even notice that you develop on a remote machine and not your local.

So the desktop developer market is for those who are not willing to use cloud. And this is a very small minority.

(FYI I am not endorsing cloud over local development, I just state where the market is)

Post reply on HN