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Is it the end of Hardware era, or is it just me?

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Deadtrees

Platinum Member
Seven years, it really was different back then compared to now.
I'm talking about those days when we were crazy about Pentium 133Mhz, Voodoo 3D card, 2GB HDD, and 64MB of Ram (Anandtech was more like an personal homepage on Geocities back then)
Whenever new products came out, you could actually feel the change of the speed. Upgrading from 133Mhz to 200Mhz was such a change. Adding 256KB of cache memory was such a big deal. Tweaking BIOS was very important that every hardware freaks had to do. Adding a voodoo card was the Sh!t. Argument went on, and on with Voodoo freaks, and Riva128 freaks. Overclocking was the most important issue out of all; although it was mostly about boosting extra 5 ~ 30Mhz. Anand was busy

It was the beginning of the Hardware era. Even before, hardware market had never been this energized. It was all good through past six years. We?ve had many interesting issues that kept us inside of this market.

Now days, computers are ? of course - faster than ever before. We got Giga-Hz CPU, plenty of RAM, HDD which is just huge. There?s no need for squeezing extra Mhz from the system.
Hardwares are so advanced that if you compare three year old system to a brand new one, you wouldn?t feel much of a difference, unless you play 3D games. It?s all good, however things aren?t as interesting as before. It actually became boring.

How about you?

 
3 year old hardware compared to now is equivalent? I'd dare not go back to my 533 Celeron, or 200P1 either as a matter of fact.

Hardware is getting better, but software is behind, aka Games. I think it's more of a software issue now, You never realise how much of a speed increase you have, until you go back to what you had and play around.
 
Those were the days......🙂 I can remember when adding the math coprocessor to my 386 was a huge jump in performance and going from 2 to 4 meg of ram was like night and day.....

Speed
 
Originally posted by: Electric Amish
Naw...I still love it.

It's all about getting the cheap CPU and making it run at the speed of the expensive one.

amish 🙂
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I make more money per hour at work than I can save coaxing another bin or two out of a CPU.. guess which wins? 🙂
 
When you can buy a whole PC that's not even taxed by today's normal use for the cost of what a CPU alone cost 5 years ago, you can sort of see why hardware and getting the most out of it has died out.
 
Originally posted by: eagle
It actually became boring.
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Word. I have no idea about what's new in hardware these days. I haven't bothered at all. I rarely even visit the hardware parts of this forum.
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Yeah about a year or two ago I gave up following it. The advancements just weren't worth it.

About the only area making advancements are Video Cards, but the games are still way behind.
 
Actually I just got a Pentium 90 and I overclocked it to 100 :Q:Q

Its a great system...I agree I don't see the point a nymore. Anything over 1 Ghz.. will just run fine. A 1.2Ghz will not make any noticeable difference. BUT a 3GHZ system probably can. I can't speak of expirience because I'm on system -1Ghz. I only have a 1.3 Celery, Woe is me, but I'm planning on upgrading to Hammer next year and picking up a P4 also.
 
hardware's only boring if you don't have software to take advantage of it.

the hardware era isn't ending, it's just plateaued after 20 years. the next 20 years are going to knock your socks off.
 
I think the reality is that we've reached a bit of a plateau with diminishing increases in performance. Going from a 1Ghz PIII to a 2.5Ghz P4 just doesn't make a difference if all you do is use Office, email, the web, listen to some music etc. The only things pushing the envelope are the games.

It's about time for some really cool new stuff to be developed, not just a little faster incremental upgrade from the previous technology. P4 3.06Ghz ... yawn. How is it really any better than a 2.5? Not much difference. Software needs to catch up, new software needs to be developed that actually makes use of all these amazing amounts of resources we all have now.
 
Originally posted by: Geekbabe
Originally posted by: Electric Amish
Naw...I still love it.
It's all about getting the cheap CPU and making it run at the speed of the expensive one.
amish 🙂
Click to expand...
I make more money per hour at work than I can save coaxing another bin or two out of a CPU.. guess which wins? 🙂
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Same here, more money than free time (though I can nef during "rebuild all" 🙂 ). Until doom iii is out (assuming it's good) I have no real reason to upgrade my p3-933 and greforce3.

I'm putting together a quiet home theater PC for fun, but for my desktop adding more speed just for bragging rights isn't worth the OS reinstall. I'd rather watch a DVD or read a book.

I am happy about hard drive increases though, with 200-250 GB drives out it's finally practical to rip my CD collection to lossless (& open source) FLAC files for a true CD quality music server.
 
Once manufacturers were able to break the $1000 barrier on a complete system I knew that customizing would be falling away. Yes, you can still build your own box (and plenty of us do), but the effort you put into it (at an hourly wage) is equivalent or more than it would cost you to buy a prebuilt machine. Kind of like building a car. Yes, you *could* do it, and I'm sure it would be satisfying. But when you get done, is the end result going to be any better than a mainstream vehicle? It may be, but it will cost quite a bit more, too.

You'll still see hardware junkies going after performance, overclocking, etc. But for the most part I'd bet that they are making less than $10/hr, so it's worth their time for the extra performance.
 
I agree with you dead trees...


As a side note it costs 3x for the fab plant for 2x the speed....So look in the near future for speeds to start slowing also.
 
Originally posted by: notfred
Tweaking computer hardware got boring a long time ago.
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Yep, and you could feel the winds of change back around the time win95 was released and ATX motherboards became popular. No more IRQ/DMA tweaking, no more tweaking autoexec and config files to get all those device drivers to load efficiently and still have enough memory left under 640k (QEMM anyone?) After Win98, many people stopped caring about DMA drivers and which slot was used for which PCI card etc. And then you had the onboard I/O revolution...you no longer needed separate cards for audio, USB etc.

Nowadays its all about cooling, noise and style points--who's got the coolest case, with the best lighting, best PCB colors, etc.

EDIT: To continue, I think we're struggling to find out what the next driver of technology acceleration will be...

The PC accomplished its initial goals of speedy word processing, spreadsheet, and information management a long time ago. Then came the multimedia craze of the early 90s. By 1997, the average new PC could handle full-motion audio/video streams without dedicated hardware. With the advent of the Internet, it became more of a communications and content delivery tool, but the core hardware was already up to task--the lack of consumer-level broadband networking was the bottleneck. In the late 90's, 3D gaming emerged as a new killer app, but it wasn't readily embraced by the mass-consumer market because the prevailing paradigm of TV console machines still ruled the gaming market.

Nowadays its all about dynamic content and media management--the current impetus to upgrade being touted by Best Buy et al is broadcast-quality (DVD resolution) content creation--you should be able to plug your camcorder into a PC, edit your video and compose it into a dynamic presentation, and then burn it to DVD or encode it into some network-ready format. Windows Media Center pushes this concept further, pushing the integration of TV, VCR, DVD, PC and gaming platform and making the PC more of a household appliance than a home-office tool.

I think that by mid-2004 the broadcast quality media-management goal will be reached, and by late 2004 these capabilities will be extended to HDTV formats. Once that happens, we'll all be waiting to see what the next killer app will be to push hardware to its limits.

[/EDIT]
 
Honestly, if hardware was more expensive, It wouldn't just be another commodity and we would still be making a big deal out of it 🙂
 
Nowadays its all about cooling, noise and style points--who's got the coolest case, with the best lighting, best PCB colors, etc.
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And that's only for ricers, the rest of us just want the motherboard to be stable, the fans quiet, and maybe for the case exterior to look decent.
 
Moore's Law is also countered by (Microsoft) software bloat, so any actual speed increase is effectively neutralized by bad coding.
 
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