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"Dying" is a pet peeve of mine. Usually it's not true. The desktop form factor is declining significantly in popularity in the mainstream market in favor of la
by api 11y ago
"Dying" is a pet peeve of mine. Usually it's not true.
The desktop form factor is declining significantly in popularity in the mainstream market in favor of laptops and mobile devices. The reason is obvious: laptops and mobiles are portable, and the average user (and even many pro users) do not need that much power in their local device.
It's still very popular in the gamer and professional workstation market, and likely will be for a long time. It's just hard to cram the processing power that gamers, hard-core developers, CAD and simulation users, etc. need into something as small as a laptop without creating what's comically referred to as a "ball burner" or "weenie roaster." I'm sure there's a female equivalent expression but it's even less polite. :P
Intel has many-core options for these machines, but they tend to lag a little behind. If you have deeper pockets and really want power you can always put a high-end GPU in a server board with 2-4 Xeons and put it in a tower case. Now you have a data center node with a 4K monitor on it.
- coldtea 11y ago>It's still very popular in the gamer and professional workstation market, and likely will be for a long time. It's just hard to cram the processing power that gamers, hard-core developers, CAD and simulation users, etc. need into something as small as a laptop without creating what's comically referred to as a "ball burner" or "weenie roaster." Gaming is a niche market mostly for younger ages (people with "game rigs" drops rapidly after a certain age) and most hard-core developers use laptops -- the laptops you see in each and every dev conference are their main boxes, with or without external monitors. As for CAD and simulation that's too niche to even mention. Of course some people will always have a need for a more powerful form factor. But if CAD users are part of the counter-argument for "it's not dying", then it very much is.
- hga 11y agoI'm not sure you're right, or at least as of late Supermicro has been selling X[9/10]SAE workstation motherboards, which will take a Xeon or consumer chip and ECC/non-ECC memory. No IPMI, lots of the sorts of slots we want, and onboard sound. The first X9SAE model, with which this message is being drafted, would appear to have been successful enough they repeated it in the next generation: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C216/X9SAE.cfm http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C216/X9S... http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SAE.cfm http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10... They didn't make such a class of boards in the '8' generation. Not dead yet!
- cookiecaper 11y agoThroughout my career I have enjoyed a desktop as my primary workstation except for an unpleasant 6 month period where I had only a MacBook Pro. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the laptop is also the primary workstation.