2013 - Most Boring Year Ever for PC Hardware?

[RaistlinZ]

2013 year seems like it will be pretty boring as far as new hardware releases. Intel is basically a one-man show. They have Haswell coming out, but it doesn't look like it will offer anything amazing over Ivy Bridge.

AMD has said they plan no major GPU releases for the rest of the year, which puts little pressure on Nvidia to release anything new. Titan is a joke at $1,000.00.

SSD's are pretty much tapped out on SATA 3 and have almost the exact same performance.

So what exactly is there to look forward to this year for desktop PC hardware?

 

[mfenn]

If you think Titan is a joke, that's just because it isn't for you. Titan is the best thing to happen to GPU computing for a long time. I can get what is practically a Tesla board (no artificial crippling) for 1/5th the price of the real thing? Sign me up!

 

[Sleepingforest]

Haswell is a pretty big deal for mobile computing. You'll be able to play more games with just an iGPU, plus get better battery life. It means a ton for Ultrabooks and tablets with x86 CPUs.

 

[Midwayman]

You'll see a lot more of this in the desktop market. Focus is shifting to mobile. Pretty much every person I know who isn't a techie buys laptops for their primary computer now. Then there are phones and tablets.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

The need for these things has dropped off. Gaming and other complex processing jobs were typically the driving force for newer, faster hardware but this demand has simply gone away.

For most desktop applications now things like disk access, memory, and processing time are all solved problems, we can encode/decode bluray in real time, we can fit entire application/games into RAM (and even VRAM in Titans case), and disk access with SSDs is not really a limiting factor for anything. Even games stagnate due to the console market, the Titan GPU represents a 20x increase in speed since the Xbox and PS3 GPUs (do the numbers of the floating point operation capability of these parts) but most games are console ports, in some senses why waste the R&D geting 25x the speed we need over 20x the speed?

So the question is, outside of hardware enthusiasts, who cares? Until the gaming market diverges significantly from consoles, or we see a new console refresh, or until we see increased "killer app" demand...it's simply not relevant.

The next massive step will be new consoles but I expect their hardware will be significantly behind the PC hardware at launch, even more so than previous generations (as a relative comparison), it probably won't be until we see widespread adoption of 4k monitors will we see any significant demand for additional hardware speed. That's a long way off being generally affordable and I suspect GPU power will be "there" by the time the price comes down anyway.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you think Titan is a joke, that's just because it isn't for you. Titan is the best thing to happen to GPU computing for a long time. I can get what is practically a Tesla board (no artificial crippling) for 1/5th the price of the real thing? Sign me up!

You don't think that they will cripple DP FP in drivers? I think that you are being a bit naive.

 

[sm625]

"Budget" haswell is still more than 6 months away. The new amd bobcat replacement is probably not going to be in any budget offerings so that is surely a dead end. The new atom is still a year away. All-in-all yes its pretty lame.

 

[piasabird]

XEON Processors: 15 cores, 30 Megs of Cache.

 

[Zap]

So what exactly is there to look forward to this year for desktop PC hardware?

Innovation drives people to purchase new stuff. Without innovation, how will companies get people to part with their money?

Lower prices? :awe:

 

[mfenn]

You don't think that they will cripple DP FP in drivers? I think that you are being a bit naive.

No, I don't think they will and I don't think I am.