Posts by Nubs

The last PC replacement cycle is about to start turning

Re: Re: Weak points...

"... On the other hand, I do believe a really good assembly programmer will produce shorter and/or faster code than a really good higher-level programmer every. single. time. No exceptions. How much longer it would take him is another matter..."

Pretty much! After working in this industry for just a couple years I noticed how the moment a customer realizes he has more processing power at his disposal he IMMEDIATELY wants an easier way to code and wants to double or triple the capability of what ever his code is doing. It's like watching a kid deciding to wallow in a giant bowl of jelly beans to eat them because using his hands is too hard.

On one hand i understand that man hours are more expensive than silicon, on the other hand it just seems like we are disgustingly wasteful with our resources.

Weak points...

As someone who works in the semiconductor design and failure analysis field I can safely tell y'all there is no end to the demand for more power. So, here is my view on things;

For something as simple as a toaster they are using micro controllers for more exact temperature control. For cars they want tire pressure sensor modules that can sense finer pressure changes more frequently and send updates to the car's engine controller micro which now in most cars controls the transmission, the main consoles, and a slew of other things.

People ALWAYS want more power faster than the industry can shrink down the chip architecture. In many cases the customers(businesses making appliances or gizmos in our case) are opting for a more powerful chips that are larger and use more power. The situation is made worse by people not wanting to learn how to program in assembly or machine code as much as they used to. Coding in higher level languages will ALWAYS produce programs that are slower than what they would be if they had been written in assembly. The reasons for this are obvious; Assembly is difficult and time consuming to code in.

That last problem mentioned is ever more apparent in the computing world; people want more complex programs that do more and people want to make games or programs with piss-poor coding skills. Hell, even in the laboratory equipment scene there is a very high demand for higher performance and more capable equipment. Most test equipment these days is controlled by PCs rather than having a built in primitive proprietary computer. It's bad enough that everyone wants more power than ever before. It becomes a clusterfuck when people forsake assembly programing for convenience and speed in coding on top of the demand for much more power.

Why do y'all think video cards have become so massive? That giant heatsink you see on most higher end graphics cards isn't for show. The heat dissipation on modern video cards alone isnt even comparable to how it was 10 years ago because the demand for power has grown so much.

What this all comes down to is that there is no replacement for displacement. A larger chip will ALWAYS be faster and more capable than a smaller chip of the same architecture. With the demand for more power bigger than ever before, I don't see portable devices being sufficient for any higher performance demands anytime in the foreseeable future.

On a broader scope I will say that it is likely that 99% or more of the PC market is composed of people who don't need a PC. They simply got a PC because at one point it was the only device that was "affordable" that would connect to the internet and let them go through emails. I believe that once this section of the market leaves the remainder will be of high demanding customers that actually need the PC for it's capabilities not found on portable devices. At this point the price, performance, and size of desktop PCs will grow.

That's just my two cents based on my line of work, I could be completely wrong!~

Cheers!