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> reflecting a slump in personal-computer purchases and product delays. People bought a lot of new machines during the pandemic, and now I see institutions l
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> reflecting a slump in personal-computer purchases and product
delays.
People bought a lot of new machines during the pandemic, and now I see
institutions literally throwing out desktops by the bin-full as
offices remain empty.
Maybe we should think carefully what that means for software. The
driver of hardware sales has been ever less efficient, hungrier
applications and a constant churn of compatibility. That's over, for
now at least. People can't afford that now. And they're much more
wary of energy costs. Successful software will be efficient enough to
run on last year's computer, and remain compatible
- necovek 4y agoTop-level CPU hardware from 10 years ago is only half the speed of top-level CPUs today in single core use (relevant for most "regular" applications): gains have mostly been in power efficiency and adding more cores (both closely related, since you can only add more cores if you can cool them down). Laptops see a regular churn because of degrading batteries, but servers and desktops only get upgraded for better efficiency which takes a few generations to make any sense. Thus, with the slow down of new companies being established, there is less of a need for new CPUs, and existing users can easily postpone their upgrade cycle without much effect. If big customers simply switch to replacing their desktops to every 5 years instead of 4, that's a downturn of 25%.