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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."
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
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.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.)
Agreed. I usually go for XFCE on Linux, it's usually pretty snappy, though a snappy WM doesn't help with crufty chunky applications.
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.