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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#421

Post by QuiEgo »

On the plus side, we've reached the end of Moore's law and are living in an amazing age of personal computing devices.

M1 Apple Silicon MacBook Airs are still good computers 5+ years after release.

Many games are still playable (and being released on!) the PS4, which is almost 12 years old.

The iPhone 15 pro has 8gb of RAM which will likely be sufficient for a long time.

Don't get me wrong, this whole parts shortage is exceptionally annoying, but we're living in a great time to weather the storm.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#422

Post by adrianwaj »

m3nu wrote: post #131
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.

This is so true. Convergence will continue. H/W miniaturization will keep increasing. In fact, new brands could easily appear and even overtake the largest players. For example, have you seen this massive range of docking technology.

https://us.ugreen.com/collections/usb-c-hubs - these docks only require a single USB port to connect to. That could be a SBC working as a handheld. These docks could end up being the largest cost component in the new era of all-in-ones. UGreen could be the next Apple as screens and processors snap-on to these hubs, in addition to their own range of power banks and SSD enclosures. Their quality is high too.

In fact, I would go so far as to say we are entering a tinkering culture, and free-energy technologies are upon us as a response oppressive economic times. Sort of like how the largest leaps in religious and esoteric thought have occurred in the most oppressive of circumstances.

People will reject their crappy thin clients, start tinkering and build their own networks. Knowledge and currency will stay private and concentrated - at least at first.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#423

Post by efficax »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

i thought i was crazy with a $7k threadripper w/ 128G of ram

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#424

Post by QuiEgo »

pcblues wrote: post #176

I think what many people don't realise is that there will be a glut of cheap computer parts including CPUs, GPU cards, and memory when the AI and AI-adjacent businesses go bust and a bunch of data centres get pulled down.

Unfortunately, data center computers are not something you can just use as a consumer. They usually have custom connectors, and the parts are soldered down into rack-scale computers. They use custom water cooling that needs building-sized pumps, and so on. A Blackwell rack uses 140,000 watts and weighs 3500 lbs. A typical house in the US has 40,000-50,000 watts of power max and can only support 40 lbs per sq foot. These things are never going to be useable by consumers.

If the AI boom slows, it will free up manufacturing capacity for the consumer supply chain, but there is going to be a long drought of supply.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#425

Post by CamperBob2 »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #402
CamperBob2 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while. Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.

High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed from usable performance. Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to mention most game devs are targeting an install base of $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the 5090 exists.

That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From the developers' point of view there's not much point raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#426

Post by nine_k »

adrianwaj wrote: post #422
m3nu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.

This is so true. Convergence will continue. H/W miniaturization will keep increasing. In fact, new brands could easily appear and even overtake the largest players. For example, have you seen this massive range of docking technology. https://us.ugreen.com/collections/usb-c-hubs - these docks only require a single USB port to connect to. That could be a SBC working as a handheld. These docks could end up being the lar…

RAM is going to be the most expensive component, I suppose.

But indeed, once you have USB-C support on your device, you can connect all kinds of periphery through it, from keyboards to 4K screens. Standardized device classes obviate the need for most drivers.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#427

Post by h4ch1 »

lpcvoid wrote: post #154
skydhash wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.

The only subscription I have is Spotify, since there's no easy way that I know of to get the discoverability of music in a way that Spotify allows it. For the rest: I agree with you.

lastfm is still a great way to discover music, countless times I've gotten great recs from a music neighbor.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#428

Post by underlipton »

joe_mamba wrote: post #392
GeoAtreides wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

> As cheap as it was a couple of years ago. I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#429

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

[dead]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#430

Post by nine_k »

random3 wrote: post #413
GeoAtreides wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

x86 going away wouldn't be surprising. Ignoring David Patterson was a mistake to begin with.

Looking at AMD's x64 server offerings, I don't see why that would go away.

But I can imagine that it would become less prevalent on personal machines, maybe even rare eventually.

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