Post-post PC: Materials and Technologies That Could Revive Enthusiast Computing

Dputiger writes "Given the recent emphasis on mobile computing and the difficulty of scaling large cores, it's easy to think that enthusiast computing is dead. Easy — but not necessarily true. There are multiple ways to attack the problem of continued scaling, including new semiconductor materials, specialized co-processor units that implement software applications in silicon, and enhanced cooling techniques to reduce on-die hot spots."

Comments

Arsenide is a material?

[Okian Warrior]

Of all the next-generation technologies that we’ve discussed at ET, including carbon nanotubes and graphene, III-V semiconductors that use materials like indium, gallium, and arsenide are by far the most likely to make an a mass market appearance within the next ten years.

[Emphasis mine]

Yeah, that article really seems to know what it's talking about.

Re:Arsenide is a material?

[bill_mcgonigle]

indium, gallium, and arsenide

See, that's why tech writers have editors, who can correct 'indium and gallium arsenide' to 'indium, gallium, and arsenide'.

Re:Arsenide is a material?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arsenides are indeed a class of materials containing the element arsenic that includes In-Ga-As semiconductors. But let me try to fix the original sentence, it's not as bad as you imply, though definitely incorrect.

Of all the next-generation technologies that we’ve discussed at ET, including carbon nanotubes and graphene, III-V semiconductors that use elements like indium, gallium, and arsenic are by far the most likely to make an a mass market appearance within the next ten years.

Changes in bold. Indium and gallium are the group III elements and arsenic the group V element that make up III-V semiconductors. Poorly edited yes, but not enough to disqualify the whole article, at least in my humble anonymous opinion...

Re:Arsenide is a material?

[wjcofkc]

Take a second look. I made a post in their Disqus comments pointing out this error. The author of the article replied in less then ten minutes acknowledging the error with a promise to fix it. The error was fixed by the time I hit refresh. Instead of being all high and mighty, perhaps next time you should help out. I did, and it worked. Consequently your entire post is now moot.

Re:Arsenide is a material?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a second look.

I already took a second look on your previous post. This would be the third.

Re:Arsenide is a material?

[Anonymous Coward]

At LeAsT YoU aRe StIlL hUmAn.
WaKiNg Up As A cOcKrOaCh WaS tRuLy A sHoCk.
BuT i FeEl As ThOuGh SlAsHdOt Is A hOmE.

Re:Arsenide is a material?

[asm2750]

GaAs semiconductors have been around for years. The issue is it sucks at oxide growth and therefore makes it expensive to fab.

You can get around this by adding aluminum to GaAs, creating a hetrojunction transistor. Other materials like Indium can be used as well.

The beauty of these materials is you can get different bandgaps making it possible to create a true multijunction solar cell bumping up the conversion efficiency to around 40% which is almost unheard of in normal Silicon solar cells. The devices also have the advantage of running at multi GHz speeds with little issue.

Re:Arsenide is a material?

[SuricouRaven]

The writer, having done the research, would be unlikely to make a mistake like that. It's more likely a 'correction' performed by the editor, who mistakenly interpreted the sentence as a gramatical error. Easy for someone to see 'gallium arsenide' and misinterpret it as the list 'gallium, arsenide' with a missing comma.

Nope

[Kjella]

Reality is that "enthusiast" computing today depends on what companies care to provide as "slightly ahead of the current state-of-art" at exorbitant prices. Intel's not going to launch a new CPU for enthusiasts. AMD isn't going to launch a new CPU for enthusiasts. If they do it's just because they can cherry pick some CPUs from their server process (Intel) or that can perform exceptionally well for equally high power consumption (AMD). It is so insignificant to the overall market that progress would happen the same with or without them. We're just not a significant enough portion of the market to really warrant a new process or capacity or whatever.

Re:Nope

[bill_mcgonigle]

"slightly ahead of the current state-of-art"

Just to pick nits, it is the current state of the art, and just slightly ahead of commodity on any non-miniscule timescale.

Re:Nope

[b4upoo]

The funny thing is that when lightning bolt like breakthroughs hit people almost never know from whence they come. Somehow I get a pic of a kid with a handful of Raspberry Pi units somehow feeding in and out of a multicore processor with a smartphone somehow involved crunching magical equations that leave my jaw hanging down. It is almost like the mathematicians at Oxford getting mail from an unknown person in a mud hut in India with solutions for equations that nobody has ever been able to do before. Genius is a sneaky quality. It lives where it likes and resides in unlikely meat bodies.

No

[The Cat]

There is no such thing as post-PC for the same reason there is no such thing as "post-doorknob" or "post-handle."

The PC is the correct form factor for getting work done by humans. Mobile devices are not. This will only change if human physiology changes, which is unlikely in any time frame measured in intervals shorter than 100,000 years.

The "post-PC era" is a marketing slogan designed to make you buy things. It is designed to get you back on the upgrade treadmill starting from the beginning again. It is not technologically accurate.

PCs are here to stay for a very VERY long time. Get used to them.

Re:No

[unkiereamus]

The PC is the correct form factor for getting work done by humans. Mobile devices are not.

I'd say, instead, that the desktop and laptop PC are the correct form factors for getting done the sort of work that you do when seated for a long time. There are probably people whose work is sometimes done while on the move and for which a desktop PC is obviously not going to work and for whom a laptop PC might not work very well; consider, for example, somebody managing a construction project who might need to look things up, enter data, do some calculations, etc. while on site. I suspect that a mobile phone would be the wrong form factor for them, but a tablet might be the right form factor.

I'll actually give you a primary source, real life example.

I'm a paramedic, every single patient for whom I have responsibility of care for, I have to generate documentation for. Up until about 2008, that meant actual paperwork, about then, the industry as a whole being phasing in electronic medical records. To the business office, they're great, because billing the patients, and keeping the records is much easier, and for me, the end user of the system, it's great because, especially when you're using a touch screen and a properly designed program, the computer is much faster and easier to use than a pen (especially for me, my handwriting sucks balls.)

Up until this point, and I imagine for a while into the future, the solution of choice has been to use the Panasonic toughbooks that will convert to a tablet form factor (CF-18s,-19 etc). The touchscreen is necessary, because we actually use it to collect signatures (quite aside from the fact that stabbing at options on the screen can easily cover 99.5% of the use cases), the portability was of course necessary, because I start my paperwork in the pt's house and finish in the ER, the keyboard was necessary because I have to type up a narrative for each pt, and the ruggedness was necessary because we beat the hell out of our machines. e problem is, even the older machines are WAY more powerful than we need, not to mention being heavy as hell (remember, I have to hand these to 96 yo pts to get a signature.)

These EMR suites are starting to be developed for tablets, both iOS and android, and the market is starting to come up with workable ruggedized tablets. nce we get over the industrial inertia we have (which is surprisingly significant, given how agile we're supposed to be), we're going to move to tablets with some sort of external keyboard (at a guess, at odds with the ruggedized tablet, the preference will be for keyboards cheap enough to be effectively disposable), and it will be the right solution for us.

No, my biller and office manager will still be using a full blown PC, but in the field, not so much.

Re:No

[rahvin112]

Yes and no. Tablets, phones and everything in between are replacing an aspect of computing, and that's strict consumption. Grandma doesn't need a PC to read email or look at grandkids photo's, she can use a tablet and have a much better user experience and gains the benefits of portability and reduced power use. People will use them to read books, watch movies or browse the internet. In general they won't be using them to create anything.

Almost everyone I know has a tablet, me and my wife each have one. We use them for light content consumption and casual entertainment. This is the use that the vast majority of people using tablets are using them for. That's a niche that isn't going away. Tablets are here to stay, just like PC's will continue to be used in business and computing that involves real work or creation of anything.

What's changed in this area and will likely be detrimental to the whole business is that PC's are now good enough. The CPU's are far more powerful than most people need except for special areas like engineering. But on the flipside Tablets aren't going to be yearly, bi-yearly or even tri-yearly purchases, people won't generally be buying to upgrade. They, for the most part, provide everything that's needed right now. The only way they will be able to drive sales is by making them lighter or have longer battery life. Otherwise sales will be related to breakage (or the hardware wearing out) and population expansion which will mean significantly less sales than the initial sales where everyone bought one. I personally expect tablet sales to drop off precipitously over the next 5 years.

So year, there isn't a post-pc world, but tablets aren't going anywhere either and the tablet form factor satisfies a LOT of general use among the general population. Combined with the fact that CPU's are generally good enough means PC's sales are going to remain stagnant for the foreseeable future. Tablet sales will also likely stagnate or decline significantly once the market has saturated. Neither will be seeing the sales the PC's have enjoyed for the last 30 years and it's going to be severely detrimental to the business as a whole.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

>> The PC is the correct form factor for getting work done by humans.

Unfortunately most humans just want to play Angry Birds while taking a crap.

Rumors of Si Death Have Been Greatly Exaggeratted

[BarneyGuarder]

The new semiconductor technology angle in the article seem highly fishy to me. Apart from the fact that the statement felt like it may have said "In 10 years we will all be living in colonies on the moon", III-V materials have been losing market share to silicon for decades.

The article mentions that great electron mobility of the III-V materials, which is true, but forgets to mention that they had poor hole mobility. Now I am not a process expert, so maybe there are new techniques to address this. However, over the past 20 years or so this meant that you couldn't make very good CMOS logic and had to use NMOS only architectures. This and the poor scaling has kept the III-Vs away from large scale integrated logic chips.

The III-V devices were used in RF circuits, but they were replaced by Si-Ge and now many RF circuits use regular silicon processes. The III-Vs are still useful for optics.

The truth is that silicon has many problems that may prevent the industry from continuing to scale circuits to smaller geometries and the available workarounds are generally painful. But, the other options are worse.

Maybe in 10 years we will all be using cell phones that use carbon nanotubes... in our colonies on the moon.

owning your machine

[Gothmolly]

An enthusiast wants to own his hardware, he doesn't care about 5.1 GHz uber-core machines. What the enthusiast wants is open specs, common interfaces, accessible GPIO, non-DRM memory or hardware, and open source code. Someone who buys the latest stuff from Intel and slaps Win 8.1 or Ubuntu on it so that they can run WoW is not an enthusiast they're just a rich consumer.

Re:owning your machine

[Kjella]

Both those with vintage restored spit polished classic cars and the ones with souped up race track cars are enthusiasts just in a completely different fashion. In your world only the tinkerers are "real" enthusiasts and the people who want a car that can handle 150 mph well are just rich customers. Nobody but an enthusiast would ever start tweaking DRAM timings or the BCLK or look at anything considered "exotic cooling", even if squeezing the last FPS out of their closed-source game with DRM on closed-source OS with DRM on closed spec hardware with DRM isn't your kind of enthusiast. The millionaires that simply buy the best computer money can buy are extremely few compared to all the hardcore overclockers and tweakers who really do care and invest time and effort into building the computer version of a dragster car.

Non-enthusiasts don't care about much of anything anymore, they don't push the limits any more than soccer moms driving their kids to soccer practice. Maybe there was a time when the average computer user felt the difference, but it was a long time ago. Any modern computer is fine, it's like the car that's just supposed to get you from A to B. And if you start talking to them about a walled garden, they think of it more like only being able to drive on roads while you praise the virtues of an off-roader. Sure it can go more places, but not any they know or care about. Most of them are very happy letting everything go through the cloud now, easy backups and synchronization of everything. Not even the NSA revelations will win over convenience. If you've handed over the keys to all your data you might as well hand over the keys to the computer too...

The article wasn't written for techies

[Taco Cowboy]

... processor units that implement software applications in silicon ...

Isn't that the definition of an ASIC ?

With the gaffe the OP has pointed out (Gallium Arsenide becomes Gallium and Arsenide) and this ... I get the impression that the article's target audiences shouldn't be the techies

enthusiast computing is getting smaller

[kawabago]

arduino, raspberry pi, et. al. In fact my next desktop may be a cluster of ten or more SOCs.

Lack of a use case

[Animats]

From the article:

Programs like "Mail" or "Messages" could be implemented in reprogrammable silicon.

You need how much compute power to read mail?

Most users just don't need that much power. Once everybody could play streaming HDTV, the couch potato market was covered. Rendering in gaming could still improve, and NPC behavior could get smarter, but really, GTA V pretty much has that nailed and it runs on last-generation consoles.

There are people who need more power, but they're running fluid dynamics simulations or rendering movies or simulating new ICs or something like that. I've run Autodesk Inventor on 24-CPU workstations. That's one of the few interactive programs that can usefully use a 24-CPU workstation. It's not a mass market product.

The applications that need vast amounts of additional compute power are there, but they're not high-volume applications. Nor are they "enthusiast" applications. There's not enough volume there to justify heavy investment in faster CPUs.

This may change as we have better robots or something like that. But speeding up existing desktop apps, no. (Program load times are still ridiculous long, but mostly because of stupidity like phoning home for updates, waiting for the license server, fetching ads, or using virtual memory in a world where memory is cheap.)

Re:So, enthusiast computing switches to ...

[westlake]

Doesn't really matter - how many companies cater to 'horse-and-buggy' enthusiasts, after all?

Quite a few, actually. Horse Drawn Hearse

A bit off base, IMO

[Just Brew It!]

We're hitting a wall on single threaded performance due to clock speed limitations, but CPU cores keep getting smaller and more power efficient. In a few years, we'll have the ability to put 32 or more cores in consumer CPUs, and it wouldn't surprise me if we have 8 core CPUs in smartphones and tablets. The key to continued performance improvements is better multi-threaded code, to allow us to effectively split up the workload across more cores.

Re:Latency.

[eriks]

Agreed. I usually go for XFCE on Linux, it's usually pretty snappy, though a snappy WM doesn't help with crufty chunky applications.

no tablet could serve as my daw

[jsepeta]

my digital audio workstation runs Logic Pro X, Pro Tools 11, and Cubase 6.5. no tablet or phone can replace the desktop, which has not only several hard disks and lots of RAM, but an operating system capable of running plugins from a variety of 3rd party sources. I'm in no position to junk this thing for whatever might happen to be "hot" in the next couple of years, because enjoy working with older versions of software which are no longer supported. IOS comes close to OSX and Windows 7 as far as being able to run basic audio and midi recording, but the musical instrument industry still hasn't completely cracked the nut on integrating hardware and software instruments, providing a comfortable recording, mixing, and mastering workflow. to my knowledge, enthusiasts like myself will still be needing enthusiast computer hardware for the foreseeable future.

Re:High and mighty?

[Joining Yet Again]

Historically speaking, helping out doesn't help.

It sounds like you're a cunt and have no idea how to help people.

IME, helping out nearly always helps.