6 ms·

I'm not sure how much of an effect this would have, but from a consumer's point of view, there isn't as much of a reason to buy a new PC every few years anymore

I'm not sure how much of an effect this would have, but from a consumer's point of view, there isn't as much of a reason to buy a new PC every few years anymore. The laptop I'm using right now was purchased in 2011, and the prices in stores now are very comparable to what I paid back then. I've made up my mind to buy a new one a few times, but then when I go to the store, it just isn't worth it.

mjevans 11y ago
That's exactly it. The same performance isn't (that much) cheaper, and it's actually difficult to find any sort of high performance laptop (for cheep). Plus, the last few laptops I've purchased all seem to die JUST after the warranties (extended or otherwise) expire. Are they finally at least putting 1080p+ screens on these as a standard thing, or is everyone still stick on that crummy 1366x768 regression?
- robertelder 11y ago
  > and it's actually difficult to find any sort of high performance laptop (for cheep). I went to a computer store recently, and told them that I was interested in dropping about 2k on a laptop, and I brought a list of specs (at least 16gb ram, lots of cores, etc.). He suggested I should get a gaming laptop and never gave any suggestions from his store. It will be interesting to see what the future holds, because they're already getting close to the physical limits of what they can build in terms of processors. If they start slowing down financially, it may be the case that we'll still be using computers that are about as fast as they are today in 7-10 years from now.
  - golergka 11y ago
    128 cores?
    - khuey 11y ago
      Most software workloads can't use 128 cores in any useful fashion.
    - dragandj 11y ago
      The problem is that most applications have to be completely rewritten for parallel algorithms, which does not fit well to many application domains (does not bring additional speed).
    - sounds 11y ago
      Your laptop already has a GPU, which has more cores than that. Let's take the segment of the market with an NVidia GPU. They have CUDA, one of the most polished development environments for GPGPU today. When was the last time you wrote something in CUDA? What was it for?
      - dragandj 11y ago
        Interestingly enough, I doubt any of the GPUs actually has even 128 physical independent cores (cuda cores are not actual cores).
    - sgift 11y ago
      While a nice idea most software cannot even use 4 or 8 cores properly. That's one of the reason Intel CPUs are still king compared to AMD in desktop space. If you can use all of that cores AMD tries to cram in their CPUs you can get good performance for a good price, but the single-threaded performance is an absolute desaster at the moment (and the one thing AMD has focused most on for their next architecture, Zen), which is still what many workloads use.
      - golergka 11y ago
        That's why we have ML and AI scheduled.
      - imtringued 11y ago
        >While a nice idea most software cannot even use 4 or 8 cores properly No that's wrong. They simply don't need to use 4 or 8 cores.
- sbov 11y ago
  Much to my boss' disappointment, it's almost impossible to find a 1366x768 laptop, or more generally, one that isn't 1080p.
  - ericabiz 11y ago
    If you are in the United States, check Sam's Club. I was just there a couple days ago and they had several 1366x768 laptops--made by HP, if I recall correctly.
  - forgotAgain 11y ago
    Writing this on a Toshiba I got at Staples on sale last year. It has 1366 x 768.
- nikanj 11y ago
  Even if you get a high-performance processor in there, it's going to get seriously thermal throttled during any longer periods of serious work. I tried to do large-scale C++ on an ultrabook, but doing long compiles was super annoying. Not only did Qt take forever to compile, the whole machine was crawling while it was happening.
r00fus 11y ago
So Intel has had decades to become more than a PC parts manufacturer (albeit largest one ever). The issue is creating compelling reasons for buying a new PC. Intel/Microsoft have not been very successful at promoting those sales-drivers.
- dbcurtis 11y ago
  Yes, and Intel has been trying. Remember, there once was a time when Intel did not make CPUs at all. Intel has remade itself several times, and pretty much each time it required retrenchment and refocus. Intel has been trying for a long time to get wins in the mobile space, without much luck. High gross margin per wafer and high volume is a rare combination, and a difficult act to repeat. An interesting aspect of Intel culture is how it reacts to body blows, urgently seeking a path out of the darkness along many different paths simultaneously. Remember the legend of "operation crush" -- the sales force was tasked with getting 1000 design wins for the 8088, from whatever place they could find them. Some guy in Florida found a renegade group in Boca Raton working on a skunkworks project called the "PC". Meh, it didn't sound like much, but hey, only 999 more design wins left to go, eh? Bag the order and get on the road again... whoever that guy was, I sure hope he made his quota that quarter.
jernfrost 11y ago
Exactly the tech industry has been incapable of coming out with new functionality that really requires more power. The only thing I can see which is going to benefit a lot from CPU power is more advance AI or machine learning built in. But we are only seeing very gradual moves in this area now. VR and Games are also candidates of course, but most people aren't hard core gamers. They are fine with Angry Birds ;-) And with the bandwidth we got today, it wouldn't necessarily be a big problem to offload much of that processing to servers and do it as a service instead. In many ways we might be heading back to the dumb clients of old where the majority of processing happens on a remote server.
- dragandj 11y ago
  The problem for Intel is that AI and machine learning are going to be typically done on the GPU. So, Nvidia. Also, a chance for AMD to recover.
  - testic 11y ago
    Yep, Moore's law is still going on strong in GPUs.
  - gambler 11y ago
    Well, that's just another way of stating that CPUs have fallen way, way behind graphics cards in terms of power. At some point in the past the difference in power wasn't nearly as large. If there were consumer-grade 16- and 32- core Intel processors with reasonable prices I would consider buying them for the sake of certain experiments. It would save me from dealing with CUDA or OpenCL. But right now that's the domain of pricey high-end server stuff.
- Nullabillity 11y ago
  Even games are slowing down a lot in their requirements, aside from that VR garbage.
  - vacri 11y ago
    Interestingly, there's a strategy game series called Europa Universalis, which moved from a 2D map to a 3D map quite a while ago... the reason being that the 2D map was rendered by the CPU, whereas a 3D map could be shunted off to the GPU to deal with, freeing up precious CPU cycles for the game logic.
mark-r 11y ago
Moore's law may become irrelevant long before it becomes invalid. Without rapid increases in usable computing power, the reasons for upgrading have largely disappeared. In particular the chips at the top of the profit margin curve, where Intel loves to play, are much less compelling. Intel might eventually find itself in the same shoes Kodak did - when your primary business dries up, there's unlikely to be a follow-on that is successful enough to keep the company going.
- robertelder 11y ago
  Yes, this thought really makes me wonder about where the future hardware computing advances will come from. How long is it going to take for a new company to 'disrupt' the processor industry in a way that the behemoths of today wouldn't have expected or weren't able to do. I would guess at least 10 years from now.
  - akuma73 11y ago
    The end of Moore's Law has broad industry-wide implications. Imagine if Moore's Law had ended in the year 2000 - no smartphones... A lot of future technologies that rely on exponential increases in silicon capability will not be possible. It's almost impossible to replicate an exponential. The rate of progress will slow and look more like more mature industries such as aerospace.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  I'm not convinced that moores law has ended (using the processing power doubles not transistor count doubles). We've hit the physical limits of our current processes but we haven't remotely hit the physical limits of..well physics. It's possible that we are on the flat before the next curve starts whether that curve will reach the consumer space I don't know but at the top end of computing (supercomputers) there is still massive demand for more processing power.
  - mark-r 11y ago
    It doesn't matter if Moore's law still holds or not, it's become irrelevant for most of the PC market. That's the point I was trying to make. There are always good uses for more computing power, but not on the desktop where the big volumes are.

mjevans 11y ago

That's exactly it. The same performance isn't (that much) cheaper, and it's actually difficult to find any sort of high performance laptop (for cheep). Plus, the last few laptops I've purchased all seem to die JUST after the warranties (extended or otherwise) expire. Are they finally at least putting 1080p+ screens on these as a standard thing, or is everyone still stick on that crummy 1366x768 regression?

robertelder 11y ago
> and it's actually difficult to find any sort of high performance laptop (for cheep). I went to a computer store recently, and told them that I was interested in dropping about 2k on a laptop, and I brought a list of specs (at least 16gb ram, lots of cores, etc.). He suggested I should get a gaming laptop and never gave any suggestions from his store. It will be interesting to see what the future holds, because they're already getting close to the physical limits of what they can build in terms of processors. If they start slowing down financially, it may be the case that we'll still be using computers that are about as fast as they are today in 7-10 years from now.
- golergka 11y ago
  128 cores?
  - khuey 11y ago
    Most software workloads can't use 128 cores in any useful fashion.
  - dragandj 11y ago
    The problem is that most applications have to be completely rewritten for parallel algorithms, which does not fit well to many application domains (does not bring additional speed).
  - sounds 11y ago
    Your laptop already has a GPU, which has more cores than that. Let's take the segment of the market with an NVidia GPU. They have CUDA, one of the most polished development environments for GPGPU today. When was the last time you wrote something in CUDA? What was it for?
    - dragandj 11y ago
      Interestingly enough, I doubt any of the GPUs actually has even 128 physical independent cores (cuda cores are not actual cores).
  - sgift 11y ago
    While a nice idea most software cannot even use 4 or 8 cores properly. That's one of the reason Intel CPUs are still king compared to AMD in desktop space. If you can use all of that cores AMD tries to cram in their CPUs you can get good performance for a good price, but the single-threaded performance is an absolute desaster at the moment (and the one thing AMD has focused most on for their next architecture, Zen), which is still what many workloads use.
    - golergka 11y ago
      That's why we have ML and AI scheduled.
    - imtringued 11y ago
      >While a nice idea most software cannot even use 4 or 8 cores properly No that's wrong. They simply don't need to use 4 or 8 cores.
sbov 11y ago
Much to my boss' disappointment, it's almost impossible to find a 1366x768 laptop, or more generally, one that isn't 1080p.
- ericabiz 11y ago
  If you are in the United States, check Sam's Club. I was just there a couple days ago and they had several 1366x768 laptops--made by HP, if I recall correctly.
- forgotAgain 11y ago
  Writing this on a Toshiba I got at Staples on sale last year. It has 1366 x 768.
nikanj 11y ago
Even if you get a high-performance processor in there, it's going to get seriously thermal throttled during any longer periods of serious work. I tried to do large-scale C++ on an ultrabook, but doing long compiles was super annoying. Not only did Qt take forever to compile, the whole machine was crawling while it was happening.

r00fus 11y ago

So Intel has had decades to become more than a PC parts manufacturer (albeit largest one ever). The issue is creating compelling reasons for buying a new PC. Intel/Microsoft have not been very successful at promoting those sales-drivers.

dbcurtis 11y ago
Yes, and Intel has been trying. Remember, there once was a time when Intel did not make CPUs at all. Intel has remade itself several times, and pretty much each time it required retrenchment and refocus. Intel has been trying for a long time to get wins in the mobile space, without much luck. High gross margin per wafer and high volume is a rare combination, and a difficult act to repeat. An interesting aspect of Intel culture is how it reacts to body blows, urgently seeking a path out of the darkness along many different paths simultaneously. Remember the legend of "operation crush" -- the sales force was tasked with getting 1000 design wins for the 8088, from whatever place they could find them. Some guy in Florida found a renegade group in Boca Raton working on a skunkworks project called the "PC". Meh, it didn't sound like much, but hey, only 999 more design wins left to go, eh? Bag the order and get on the road again... whoever that guy was, I sure hope he made his quota that quarter.

jernfrost 11y ago

Exactly the tech industry has been incapable of coming out with new functionality that really requires more power. The only thing I can see which is going to benefit a lot from CPU power is more advance AI or machine learning built in. But we are only seeing very gradual moves in this area now. VR and Games are also candidates of course, but most people aren't hard core gamers. They are fine with Angry Birds ;-) And with the bandwidth we got today, it wouldn't necessarily be a big problem to offload much of that processing to servers and do it as a service instead. In many ways we might be heading back to the dumb clients of old where the majority of processing happens on a remote server.

dragandj 11y ago
The problem for Intel is that AI and machine learning are going to be typically done on the GPU. So, Nvidia. Also, a chance for AMD to recover.
- testic 11y ago
  Yep, Moore's law is still going on strong in GPUs.
- gambler 11y ago
  Well, that's just another way of stating that CPUs have fallen way, way behind graphics cards in terms of power. At some point in the past the difference in power wasn't nearly as large. If there were consumer-grade 16- and 32- core Intel processors with reasonable prices I would consider buying them for the sake of certain experiments. It would save me from dealing with CUDA or OpenCL. But right now that's the domain of pricey high-end server stuff.
Nullabillity 11y ago
Even games are slowing down a lot in their requirements, aside from that VR garbage.
- vacri 11y ago
  Interestingly, there's a strategy game series called Europa Universalis, which moved from a 2D map to a 3D map quite a while ago... the reason being that the 2D map was rendered by the CPU, whereas a 3D map could be shunted off to the GPU to deal with, freeing up precious CPU cycles for the game logic.

mark-r 11y ago

Moore's law may become irrelevant long before it becomes invalid. Without rapid increases in usable computing power, the reasons for upgrading have largely disappeared. In particular the chips at the top of the profit margin curve, where Intel loves to play, are much less compelling. Intel might eventually find itself in the same shoes Kodak did - when your primary business dries up, there's unlikely to be a follow-on that is successful enough to keep the company going.

robertelder 11y ago
Yes, this thought really makes me wonder about where the future hardware computing advances will come from. How long is it going to take for a new company to 'disrupt' the processor industry in a way that the behemoths of today wouldn't have expected or weren't able to do. I would guess at least 10 years from now.
- akuma73 11y ago
  The end of Moore's Law has broad industry-wide implications. Imagine if Moore's Law had ended in the year 2000 - no smartphones... A lot of future technologies that rely on exponential increases in silicon capability will not be possible. It's almost impossible to replicate an exponential. The rate of progress will slow and look more like more mature industries such as aerospace.
noir_lord 11y ago
I'm not convinced that moores law has ended (using the processing power doubles not transistor count doubles). We've hit the physical limits of our current processes but we haven't remotely hit the physical limits of..well physics. It's possible that we are on the flat before the next curve starts whether that curve will reach the consumer space I don't know but at the top end of computing (supercomputers) there is still massive demand for more processing power.
- mark-r 11y ago
  It doesn't matter if Moore's law still holds or not, it's become irrelevant for most of the PC market. That's the point I was trying to make. There are always good uses for more computing power, but not on the desktop where the big volumes are.