Computers
I've been hearing that AM4 platform development is being restarted across-the-board, because of the whole Sam Altman, OpenAI, DDR5 situation. Duncan and I were talking about this the other day: this is quite literally unprecedented! When I built my K6-2 system back in 1998, the world didn't suddenly restart original Pentium-era manufacturing in 1999-- the world just kept moving forward, to the Pentium III era and beyond.
I also wonder how much of this is just a natural plateauing of things-- Moore's law finally settling into a straight, horizontal line? Back when Nvidia unveiled the RTX 3080, I thought to myself "How are they going to continue to upsell consumers on new GPUs-- who would ever need more floating point math than this?" Remember that 3080 marble demo? I thought to myself, "Graphics really can't get better than this." And it was true!
Somewhat impressively, Nvidia and AMD managed to limp the business model along through the 4000 and 5000 lines, but it sounds like this is the end of the line-- if there ever is a 6000 series, it won't be until 2027 at the earliest, I've read.
So back to AM4 then: maybe it will just be like car engines? We're done now! Maybe there will be AM4 and DDR4 for the midrange, then AM5 and DDR5 for the high-end, moving forward into the indefinite future?
One really interesting parallel development taking place involves the enormous and rapidly-growing cottage industry for "new-old" computers. Regular readers will know how much I'm enjoying my Commodore 64 Ultimate; BBS's are coming back; and the resurrected "Compute!'s Gazette" has so much content and so many subscribers, I wouldn't be surprised if they have to split it into two magazines at some point.
So maybe alongside "mainstream" computers, we'll start to see "new-old" computers become popular-- "old" computers, but with full online functionality and other contemporary capabilities?
I also wonder how much of this is just a natural plateauing of things-- Moore's law finally settling into a straight, horizontal line? Back when Nvidia unveiled the RTX 3080, I thought to myself "How are they going to continue to upsell consumers on new GPUs-- who would ever need more floating point math than this?" Remember that 3080 marble demo? I thought to myself, "Graphics really can't get better than this." And it was true!
Somewhat impressively, Nvidia and AMD managed to limp the business model along through the 4000 and 5000 lines, but it sounds like this is the end of the line-- if there ever is a 6000 series, it won't be until 2027 at the earliest, I've read.
So back to AM4 then: maybe it will just be like car engines? We're done now! Maybe there will be AM4 and DDR4 for the midrange, then AM5 and DDR5 for the high-end, moving forward into the indefinite future?
One really interesting parallel development taking place involves the enormous and rapidly-growing cottage industry for "new-old" computers. Regular readers will know how much I'm enjoying my Commodore 64 Ultimate; BBS's are coming back; and the resurrected "Compute!'s Gazette" has so much content and so many subscribers, I wouldn't be surprised if they have to split it into two magazines at some point.
So maybe alongside "mainstream" computers, we'll start to see "new-old" computers become popular-- "old" computers, but with full online functionality and other contemporary capabilities?