Intel shortages, weak-ass consumer spending, 'peak' Win10 refresh. No, global PC market didn't grow in Q1 The Intel CPU supply constraints came home to roost in calendar Q1 as global PC sales shrank: only the top three largest manufacturers reported any growth after they muscled to source as many chips as they could. According to Gartner, shipments into channels – distributors and retailers – fell 4.6 per cent in the three months …
"I'd bet that sales will rise once Intel builds a CPU that eliminates all the current security flaws with a design that can be predicted to be secure."
Try "I'd bet that sales will rise once Intel builds a reliable 10nm/7nm process to reduce the current 14nm bottleneck that they have that restricts the number of units they can produce"
While the security flaws may put off some customers, they are a small percentage of the market because the compute requirement doesn't go away just because there is a security flaw...
As I said before in this article:
https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2019/03/26/brexit_shakes_hit_uk_pc_sales/
Bugger all to do with Brexit and lots to do with people don't need to upgrade and when they do it will be when CPU manufactures have properly sorted out their current security issues in the silicon and not just had a sticking plaster thrown on the problems. Until then, cash firmly stays in wallet and we can make do and mend.
I think there a few who owe me an apology.
Or that PC's are a very competitive market that is still transitioning to alternative mobile systems so that anything that makes them less competitive (i.e. a shortage of low-to-medium cost CPU's) results in a short term spike in the decline.
Combine that with expected new generations from both the Intel and AMD camps, a lacklustre show of new hardware features (i.e. no major software releases to drive an upgrade, nVidia GPU's were expenesive relative to the performance increase and in short supply, nothing really from AMD on the GPU front, NVMe doing little for home users over SSD with SSD pretty much already "standard") we get status quo. i.e. long term decline
And if you want acknowledgement for your insight, maybe attach your name to it? I know my insight is largely speculation and if I happen to be right it's a coincidence...
"still transitioning to alternative mobile systems"
This perception is INACCURATE. It is, however, what the market-droids have been citing for WAY too long.
The truth is simpler: people get mobile and slabs for different reasons than PCs, and the PCs don't need to be replaced (yet) [and the reasons for this were outlined in my previous post]. Simple.
in other words, mobile+slabs are NOT "replacing" PCs. they are really 2 different markets.
you are correct
Here's what I see as the top reasons why people aren't buying new computers:
a) don't have the disposable income or can't justify it right now [waiting for something to become unusable before buying a replacement]
b) Moore's law isn't giving '50% better' each year in technological growth any more
c) Win-10-nic on EVERY NEW PC [except for a few, and they often cost MORE]
d) Intel's (and to some extent, AMD's) security problems (meltdown, spectre)
e) chipsets with hidden "features" like REMOTE ADMIN that you can NOT easily shut off
In summary: new computers are NOT perceived as being significantly better than OLD ones. Save money, and upgrade/repair the old one instead.
I would hazard a guess that one of the prime reasons sales remain low is that there's often no need to upgrade or replace existing computers. My work desktop is coming up on six years old now and there's still no reason to replace it from a performance point of view. At home I had to replace my 5930k because either the cpu or motherboard decided to go the way of the dodo forcing me to replace them. If I had not been forced by hardware failure I had no plans to replace it.
There has simply not been the same increase in cpu speed and memory capacity there used to be so older machines are still speedy enough.
I have a 4-year old I7-6700K is more than adequate for home use. The only thing I'd vaguely consider changing at the moment is the video card and even that I'm putting off until the Crypto-craze dies off for good. Hell, I also have a quad-core PPC G5 that would be more than adequate for home use, if it weren't for the software supply chain drying up. Makes a good space heater that one does.
Refreshes on performance grounds have become more prevalent in environments dependent upon high security. The overhead associated with things like the Tanium client ruin the performance of low-to-mid range processors - we had to upgrade of all of our corporate Thinkpad T430's up to T470's for them to remain usable. The biggest bottleneck in recent years though, is network capacity. The volume of data shoved through browsers has gone up exponentially, what with ever more abstracted software creating bloat. Ahem, Office 365, SharePoint. Networks often still trundle along with just Cat5e and 10/100mbit to the desk. No wonder performance has gone to pot!
"Networks often still trundle along with just Cat5e and 10/100mbit to the desk. No wonder performance has gone to pot!"
Your cabling (assuming it was installed to a certified level and tested) will handle 1G/2.5G/5G speeds, so it shouldn't be holding anything back although price might be an issue for multiGig.
On the switch/client side, maybe your network is overdue for a refresh? Fast Ethernet/GigE have been cost equivalent for around 10 years with the only real advantage for fast ethernet being lower power usage, particularly in a quiet office with no separate comms space (i.e. a wall cabinet).
The other possibility is that you use PoE phones that only support fast ethernet and no one wants to spring for the upgrade because the PBX has reached end of service life and mobile calls are so common now, no one wants to pay for the upgrade?
If the LAN is fine and the bottleneck is your WAN or Internet connection, that's a separate story if you aren't well served by fibre.
"Unless your organisation outsourced networking and has to pay through the nose for GigE..."
Difficult to blame the technology for that... I suspect you probably have GigE hardware configured to run at only 100Mbps...
I'm surprised management hasn't dropped you to 10Mbps as part of a cost cutting exercise.
Hell, I have a much-older-than-that i5-2500k desktop (conservatively overclocked) that still performs well enough that I can't tell the difference between that and my i7-8750H laptop for CPU-related stuff. They're both about the same for anything I can detect without using a benchmark.
Now, of course, I would expect a full desktop Coffee Lake setup to outperform the laptop, especially if I overclocked the new one as I have with my Sandy Bridge, but that doesn't change that the laptop is brand new and in the form factor that makes up most of PC sales these days. It still can't give me a convincing reason to upgrade from a motherboard that is seven or eight years old, despite having two more CPU cores.
If I had tried that same comparison with my first PC, a 386-33 that I built in 1990, with what was normal gear in 1997, it wouldn't be difficult to tell by the seat of the pants which one was quicker. The Pentium 233 MMX was available that year, and even if you go lower in the spectrum to about Pentium 133 level (which at the time cost a little more than a third what my 386-33 cost, board and CPU, even without adjusting for inflation), it's still night and day. A Pentium 133 ran Windows 95 and games like Quake quite well, but trying either on my old 386(DX)-33 was agonizing (using the same video card in each case), with the same amount of RAM (8 MB, which was a huge amount when the 386 was current. People kept asking me what I planned to do that needed that much!).
I remember it clearly, as I did keep that old 386 until 1996, and I remember trying to run then-current stuff on it. I soon upgraded to a Pentium-133, which is why I can remember offhand what it used to cost back then, and how well it performed relatively.
I will make a prediction about the PC and phone markets. They will show a downward trend in sales for a few more years (phones longer than PCs) as the refresh rate stabilizes with device life. Once the sales stabilize both will be flat or very slow growth (population growth/increased wealth) over the long term with monthly/quarterly spikes. Basically both are mature markets and are acting like mature markets. Why any would pay these idiots any money for 'analysis' when historical behavior of durable goods is an excellent example of what is happening the PC and phone markets.
another way of saying this: the advancement in software to take advantage of the capabilities of modern hardware, from GPUs to multi-core, is WAY behind. It kinda reminds me of how it took FOREVER for a 32-bit Windows '95 to show up, even when most computers had 32-bit capable CPUs long before that.
Typical 'tricks' to consider, threaded and GPU-based algorithms, but NOT background busywork...
The thing that concerns me (and I'm not a programmer or developer...just a hardware guy) is the amount of software that now relies on tens of thousands of micro files to work. All those masses of 2-4Kb files that sit in folders growing and growing and basically crippling even the fastest NVMe storage to KBps performance.
Not to mention it makes my life a misery when I have to back all this crap up and it takes two hours to back up 5GB of micro files.
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