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On 7/11/2010 12:24 PM, Rich Braun wrote: > The whole thing runs out of gas once enough consumers make the same decision > that Stephen made: what I have is good enough that I'll wait longer before > making the effort to do an upgrade. > Consumers aren't being driven by performance upgrades, but other reasons: bigger screens, new OS, their current system broke, etc. At best, consumer-grade systems are getting close to being like refrigerators or TVs or cars. The one you have now works fine, but this year's models are out and they have things you think you need. Remember that a large portion of the consumer market buys the entire system at one time and probably never cracks the case open. If Word doesn't open in 15 seconds, they're going to want a new system. I think we're also getting to a point where instead of each family having their own PC, you're seeing each family member having their own system. They may be netbooks or laptops, but that will help drive sales over the next few years and provide greater upgrade opportunities ('Sally's system died, so let's put on our coats and go to Best Buy' 'Yay!') > What about corporate buyers? I personally believe that industry innovations > since the first TRS-80 came out 30+ years ago have been led primarily by > consumers. That trend continues today: graphics adapters and subsystems are > front-and-center where the action is, not just today but for the past few > years. VMware and its cousins can only go so far to drive demand on the > corporate side. At my own workplace, demand is coming not from our internal > requirements but from--*consumers* who want to download more and more video. > Nope. In the days of the TRS-80 when general-purpose computers were rare, that was probably true. It's a commodity item now. Businesses are perfectly willing to buy a data center full of equipment to do whatever kind of processing they need. Google started with off-the-shelf systems with no cases. Sun was advertising a complete data center in a shipping crate. There were news reports yesterday of how inexpensively the movie 'Despicable Me' was generated. Think that when they start on 'Despicable Me 2' they'll use the same cluster? Not a chance. Clusters of systems are appearing everywhere for every purpose and that demand has not dropped, nor will it drop. That means more systems with more cores in a smaller amount of space and that will continue to provide the revenue for AMD and Intel to keep battling it out. The demand from your customers is for content, not performance. A lowly Intel integrated GPU will be able to display YouTube content or other video on your screen as well as a $500 NVidia monster. The reason that GPUs are advancing so quickly is because of gamers who want the latest and greatest (and that hasn't changed for 15 years) along with businesses who are finally able to take advantage of the specific processing power of the GPU (yay CUDA). Even there, GPGPU support seems to be pretty spotty unless you're a programmer. My users so far either don't have the skills to do it, or the applications they want to use don't support GPGPU yet. > Once you have enough computer capacity in your house to drive roughly 5 > channels of 3-D HDTV to every room in the house, what else will you need? > Content (and the massive amount of computing infrastructure that provides it) -Mark
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