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Traditional PC Sales Continue To Slide (zdnet.com)
Sales of traditional PCs continue to decline, although the overall PC market is likely to grow slightly next year. From a report: Traditional PC shipments are forecast to drop by nearly eight percent this year, and another 4.4 percent in 2018, predicts analyst firm Gartner. Which means that, by 2019, 16 million fewer traditional PCs and notebooks will be sold than were shipped this year. However, much of this will be offset by the rise in spending on high-end notebooks like Microsoft's Surface and Apple's MacBook, so that the overall PC market will by 2019 be at pretty much the same level it was last year. Tablets -- defined by Gartner as basic and utility ultramobile devices -- will also decline over the period to 2019.
Based on the traffic at places like Microcenter I'd offer this: more people have the basic skills now to build a computer on their own rather then buy one. I haven't met a single person in over 10 years that bought a computer, everyone built their own. Corporations are buying laptops for telecommuters and staff versus bulky PCs that are easier to transport, deploy, and use less power for the workloads they deal with.
It isn't "most like" the case. It is the case. Fifteen years ago I was changing out processors or memory every 6 months. Now I design my personal workstations with a 5 year lifespan. I have a friend that did the same thing. Now he has a 5th generation i7 that is almost 3 years old. He said he has no intention of upgrading anything till something fails or some radical advancement in technology comes out.
I'm in the same boat. I have a i7-6700K which is a 6th generation processor. Intel just announced they are about to release the 8th generation i7. From looking at what is being release I see no real performance gain over my 6th generation.
My linux server is a centos 6 running on a AMD 8350. As a server it has different requirements than my workstation. Its my file/plex server. It's been doing that role since 2013. It is entering its 5th year in that role and I see no reason to update it for the next 3 or 4 years.
As for your mundane computer users, the PC used to be a oddity. Now they treat a PC more like an appliance than a oddity. Its more like a refrigerator than a computer. You don't upgrade your refrigerator every year or so. This is even if they have a PC. Most now have laptops and treat them the same way.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
You can blame that on Intel and their sandbagging
No you can't. I doubt that Intel is sandbagging anything. If they where then AMD would be running away with clockspeeds. But if you look at AMD processors you will see they are running at the same clock speeds as Intel.
The reason processors are not going any faster is we have hit the limit of what can be done with the current technology. Over the next few years we might see a increase in a few hundred mhz here and there. But there will never be another leap of 2 or 3 ghz again. Not with what we have.
To go any faster it will take a radical shift in the basic process of comptuer. Quantum processors maybe.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Nah, you can just get a $15 adapter and put it in any PCIe 4x slot. By the way, if you really want crazy performance get a X399 motherboard with PCIe bifurcation and load it up with quad NVMe cards and you can go nuts with 28GB/s in an 8-way RAID 0 configuration. Not that you'd really notice at consumer queue depths.
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