Clock rates have peaked, yes, but that makes things MUCH MORE interesting than any time since 1990! It's no longer enough for Intel to simply spend their billions on a new FAB process and lazily crank out the same design as last year but at 50% higher clock speed.
Now they have to actually *think*.
So far Intel have mostly been thinking "Lets put more of the same old cores on on chip". That's reasonably exciting. It makes tasks such as compiling software or video transcoding or responding to a lot of web requests much faster without a lot of effort, but it's a very interesting challenge to figure out how to use this for other things.
But even more exciting is that YOU DON't NEED TO BE INTEL to innovate any more. Basic CPUs aren't getting faster any more which means that speeding up particular tasks often now requires special hardware to directly implement the main part of the task, with a conventional CPU there as well to supervise and control it.
There is an absolute *explosion* happening in people building this special hardware inside FPGAs, and the successful and high volume designs migrate to custom SoCs. Sometimes this special hardware can be done as a co-processor with relatively loose coupling to the main CPU (and you can license ARM cores for that), but often it works better if you can hook your special hardware up to custom instructions in the CPU and incorporate it in the normal program flow in a much more fine-grained way. You can't do that with ARM.
Some companies are creating their own proprietary and customisable CPU architectures and that's exciting to see that happening again (like in the 70s and 80s). But even though gcc and linux etc are pretty portable it's still a lot of work to actually port them, and that work doesn't actually add any unique value to your company. So more and more people are grabbing an existing open-source and license-free processor design and customising that with their own special sauce.
Mostly now, that means RISC-V, which is getting very good momentum.
And so I've made my way to a RISC-V startup where our business is making customised CPUs and SoCs. Exciting times!
9845 was the dream machine of its time. You could have purchased 50 or so big board based computers for the price they brought. Best I could do in that era was limited shared access to one, so I threatened to bring my own big board computer to work. My threat, with others was what finally started breaking the ice on the company actually providing computers for engineers to use at their desks.
Of course I'm not comparing the technical performance of an HP9845 of yore with that of a PC these days. That'd be ridiculous.
What I'm discussing is from the perspective of the user's experience.
PCs these days keep on being the same P.O.S. (and I don't mean Point Of Sales) they have always been.
People do not complain much because they know nothing better. Those of us privileged enough to happen to have had contact with such a consciously engineered work like the HP9845 can assess how far PCs (especially those running MS Windows) are from decent computing.
While I'm posting this message I've been struggling for three days with an update and a backup of a PC running a licensed OEM Windows 7. That's ludicrous.
The experience I had with HP9845 made me boost my career for serious work. The experience I have with PCs make me loose precious time and money. Sorry.
I agree with you.
What upsets me, about the modern day PCs. Is that they are all so similar to each other.
I could sit by my PC and do stuff on windows (not that I use it much, or at all, it varies), then fly to Australia and use someone else's. Which to all intents and purposes, the experience would be, almost exactly the same.
How is that a bad thing? If there is anything good in the (still ongoing) monopolization of the OS market it is exactly that. Being able to sit down in front of a device and recognize a familiar user interface and thus being able to pick up the operation of said device relatively quickly is something that is almost universally lauded.
One of the few ways one could complain about something like this is, if your usefulness relies on other people not being able to operate the device you are basing your livelihood on and that would be a pretty weak argument.
Having worked with machines that were so completely different that you basically had to start from scratch to do exactly the same thing has always been a pain in the arse.
What upsets me, about the modern day PCs. Is that they are all so similar to each other.
I could sit by my PC and do stuff on windows (not that I use it much, or at all, it varies), then fly to Australia and use someone else's. Which to all intents and purposes, the experience would be, almost exactly the same.
This is not very good, as I'd prefer there to be much more variety.
tl;dr
It is NOT a bad thing, it is a good thing for most purposes, except for enjoying the immense variety, types and operations, of computers, over the years.
You mean like Linux?
I'm sorry. I misunderstood you. Its just that I heard "every dumb idiot can use a computer nowadays" a lot when talking to other people about old computers.
No problem, and a very nice looking computer, you have posted there. I'm temped to go and see it, if I am ever near, there.
To some extent, Linux does do things better than windows.
To some extent, Linux does do things better than windows.
For instance, make Intel's hardware look less pathetic.
To some extent, Linux does do things better than windows.
For instance, make Intel's hardware look less pathetic.
Dont you mean make windows look like a huge resource hog?
I could care less about Windows 95 because I new it was just lipstick on a pig
To some extent, Linux does do things better than windows.
For instance, make Intel's hardware look less pathetic.
Dont you mean make windows look like a huge resource hog?
I was being a little sarcastic. But yeah, you can look it that way.QuoteI could care less about Windows 95 because I new it was just lipstick on a pig
Microsoft lost me with Windows 95. For those seriously working in the field that meant much more than a useless OS.
To some extent, Linux does do things better than windows.
For instance, make Intel's hardware look less pathetic.
Dont you mean make windows look like a huge resource hog?
I was being a little sarcastic. But yeah, you can look it that way.QuoteI could care less about Windows 95 because I new it was just lipstick on a pig
Microsoft lost me with Windows 95. For those seriously working in the field that meant much more than a useless OS.
To true, I couldn't comprehend why many folk thought it was so great, it's so called plug and play was just garbage - Mac OS and OS/2 had real plug and play that actually worked and it's multi taking was not really better than apples crude cooperative system. OS/2 also had true pr-emptive multi taking.
I could go on