Have we reached a Computing Plateau?

I

Iratus

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 16, 2003
Messages
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For the last 5 years I have been heavily into the high end consumer PC market, I've bought in excess of £10,000 worth of PC equipment over that time, and up until last December almost every upgrade opportunity had been taken and enjoyed but now I look at my computer and I think what is the point?

I have a 3Ghz P4 Processor running at 3.7ghz, a 6800GT and 400GB of hard disk space, apart from the graphics card I've had that same PC for over a year now, longer than I've ever had a PC. For hardware manufacturers this is a problem, you see the hard drives aren't filling up, even the newest games are running at very high frame rates and there isn't an application on it that makes it break a sweat and force an upgrade.

3 years ago it used to be the case that you could wait 6 months to a year and spend £300 on an upgrade and you'd have a real and appreciable difference to your computing life, a new processor provided a 20% performance jump, extra memory made a difference, you'd run out of hard disk space or perhaps you needed a new graphics card for that next Killer App.

In the case of the graphics card this still holds true to a point, however as the owner of a latest generation card can you honestly look into the gaming future and think of a game that's coming up before UnrealEngine 3 that is going to push the boundries on what we are going to be able to do. In the past I'd have argued that there was an application coming that we weren't aware of and it would push us to that next level but games development has changed, the cost of developing a new state of the art 3D engine is enormously expensive and takes so long to develop that because we've not really seen anything other than UnrealEngine3 I believe there isn't much coming before UnrealEngine 3.

So where does that leave people like me to upgrade, some processors are faster but will not improve my computing life in any meaningful way beyond bragging rights, no games are on the horizon within the next year to 18 months that will require or even particuarly benefit from a graphics card upgrade and at present rates my hard disks won't be full until 2007. There is only one upgrade to my PC that I want in fact, and it's the use of an old technology, I want Dolby Digital Live support on a non onboard soundcard.

So I have the money, I have the inclination to spend it but what motivation have I got for doing it. Very little these days.

What do you guys think, has a plataeu been reached?

Personally I think yes, it's by no means a final destination and in 2 years I have no doubt that games will come out that can make our PC's cry into their pillows but for now I see nothing coming up for the PC that will motivate an upgrade. I honestly think that for the first time in PC history the hardware development has actually outstripped the challange software places on it.
 
It's not like it used to be, that's for sure. The system I have now I don't plan to change drastically for a year or more. Will have to see what things are like a year from now... ;)
 
i would have to agree that pc power is starting to plateau. like a skyscraper which can only be built up so high, perhaps. so if you can only build so high, what next? well in my opinion build out.

if it were up to me, and i had money to spend, i would start expanding the capability of my computer, not just speed. think HTPC. perhaps integrate it with your television to perform PVR and live pause features. better yet, use those hard eard dollars (oh, sorry, pounds) to expand the experience, as in to a projector. move away from the monitor, and enjoy the experience of big screen gaming, and invest that surplus wealth into a formidable dolby digital 7.1 theatre, with clean crisp highs and a pounding@$$ sub. Augment this system with a leather easy chair or sofa and wireless mouse / keyboard.

expand on the experience. I have been in and watching the industry for several years, and am seeing this as well. intel is in a frenzy trying to eek out the next megahertz speed. (notice they even cancelled the 4ghz). amd IMO is already heading in the right direction, that being performance per mhz, and 64 bit. what's the new talk about processors? not raw mhz speed. it's dual core, logical processing. when a dual cpu setup can have 4 cores, and 2 logical cpus per core, and effectively run as 8 (2x2x2) processors. speed is hitting the ceiling, now its about ability.

regarding software, there will be a point, IMO, where things can only get so lifelike and cannot truly be improved upon to huge degrees. jagged edges move away, textures and shades and lights and reflections become so true and pure that it just doesnt get better. in short, youre looking at diminishing returns for improvement of software.

thats my 2 bits on the matter. this thread should be quite interesting...
 
I have been thinking tha same thing lately, i have wanted to upgrade again but its not worth the money. i have money i want to spend but dunno what i could buy, was thinking a new gfx card but myne isnt that bad, it still works good on all the new games. i think we are good processor wise and they need to start putting development into hard drives, that hasn't come very far, sure they added sata, but big deal, they should be making drives that are faster than old SCSI technology.
 
Just wait until Longhorn arrives. Then you will need the Geforce5 7900XP Ultra Golden Edition XT just to alt-tab through windows explorer and Notepad.
No Really!
 
I must disagree with the game development scene. To give an example of this, look at the Quake3 engine and then look at all the games based on it. Many of the games that were built off of it require a lot more horsepower to play them than Quake3. You do not need a new engine to up the ante on the hardware needed for games. Two new engines have just come out. While they may not be bringing every piece of hardware to it's knees, some of the games based on the engines will compared to the original.

Also, there are many things out there that greatly benefit from extra speed even if it seems games and word processing doesn't benefit. I run folding@home on my systems. No matter what speed processor I have, I can always get work units done quicker with a faster processor. There will be no end for me on wanting more speed. You can look at many other areas that will greatly benefit from more speed. Sometimes, if you don't do these other tasks, you may not realize they are there, but they still are.

I don't see a real plateau being hit by any means. There are just too many things out there that can be improved upon and in many cases will require more horsepower to do them. Just because things seem to be better than ever, doesn't mean they can't be made even better. It's just a supply and demand situation. There is a large supply of hardware horsepower right now, but not the demand by the majority of software for it. Soon that will change with software being written to take adavantage of the horsepower out right now. Then we'll want more horsepower to run that software faster. It's just a cycle and it's normal.
 
IMO - sorta

However your statement;

"some processors are faster but will not improve my computing life in any meaningful way beyond bragging rights"

chills me to the bone. My God man, that IS the point, othewise unless you are a video editor etc. a system from last year will do the job, we have been walking the plateau for a year or longer based on "improving computing life". ;)

Btw it seems you have not investigated dual processor machines or high end Raid 5 arrays. There is a whole world of huge money sinks you are missing out on. If specing out, procuring, building etc. one machine is fun, you should try it with a duelly setup. Way more fun and nothing like running all your major OS processes, email, web broswer etc on one processor while having the second one run Doom3. Dual monitors of course. SCSI optional but if you really want to toss the cash away - highly recommeded. Redundant power supplies, hot swap multiple terabyte storage are additional options. I could go on and on. and stand ready to help you alleviate your overcashed dilemma. Havent even touched vapor phase cooling and overclocking. Rest assured that if you can get past the "improve your computing life" thing there are tremdous opportuntites to reduce your huge piles of cash to a more managable size.

All in fun :D
Regards
Bill Parrish
 
HardD99 said:
I have been thinking tha same thing lately, i have wanted to upgrade again but its not worth the money. i have money i want to spend but dunno what i could buy, was thinking a new gfx card but myne isnt that bad, it still works good on all the new games. i think we are good processor wise and they need to start putting development into hard drives, that hasn't come very far, sure they added sata, but big deal, they should be making drives that are faster than old SCSI technology.
Click to expand...

I agree that Hard Drives need work, nobody will invest money into it though, there are 3 fundemental problems with making faster drives for the prosumer.

1) Heat
2) Noise
3) Manufacturers won't make things good enough to compete with their flagship SCSI componenents even if it was physicially possible.

Really the technology for drives hasn't improved that much, it's all evolution rather than revolution and nobody will attempt a revolution because we're making nice profits off 20 year old technology thankyou very much.

One thing I can see driving the market is actually Longhorn, with a truly scalable desktop we can finally work on getting pixel density improved on LCD screens, if we can do that then we get finally raise resolutions to a nice level (>200dpi) on small screens which will actually require an exponentially faster graphics system coupled with a PC to power it.

Improvements on both of those are years away though and things like improvements on graphics engines still take a long time to provide a large improvement over its previous iik and will usually on release not be that stressful anymore.

Really all I want is something that makes me want to upgrade again, I was hoping that Doom 3 or Half Life 2 would be like Strike Commander back in the day, a real resource hog that brings your PC to its knees and makes it beg you to upgrade it.

But they aren't.
 
wwparrish said:
IMO - sorta

However your statement;

"some processors are faster but will not improve my computing life in any meaningful way beyond bragging rights"

chills me to the bone. My God man, that IS the point, othewise unless you are a video editor etc. a system from last year will do the job, we have been walking the plateau for a year or longer based on "improving computing life". ;)
[snip]
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:D I knew that would come up, I know I can spend an endless amount of money on my PC, I work for IBM Global Services, I do it for a living (Clients will testify) but all of those things are minor improvements at best and impercetible at worst. Take a Raid 5 array, I can spend £1500 and get a terabyte of Raid 5, fully resiliant, supposedly speedy goodness.

I challange you to actually spot the difference though.

That's the problem,
Overclocking - Is becoming less of a requirement because games aren't challanging stock pc's anymore
Vapor Phase Cooling - See above
Dual Screen - I have triple screen but it's only a convenience at best and hardly a catalyst for change as it will only ever be a minority option.
Redundant Power Supplies - Great. Why?

Back in the day I was on the crest of a wave with all of it because there was a reason to do so, I remember actually competing with DigitalJesus to get 10,000 on 3DMark 2001 (I had sample Geforce 3 Ultra's and couldn't do it but didn't know he was spouting bullshit :) ) because my games could run at top res and it actually was making a difference by doing it. Now improvements are merely points in a graph and don't make it better for me.


Shit I sound jaded, someone please release software that beats HL2 physics whilst using fully displacement mapped, 64 bit coloured, dynamically lit textures. Please. I'm losing my [H]
 
In response to wwparrish, without quote,

Of course there are multiproc systems and redundant power supplies and hotswappable multiterrabyte systems and as you put it, money sinks to invest in. But the point Iratus is trying to make is that there is no point. At his level of computing, which has been around for quite some time, he has no reason to upgrade. Software just isn't demanding enough to warrant an upgrade.

edit: yeah, he beat me to the punch while i was typing.
 
Manufacturers won't make things good enough to compete with their flagship SCSI componenents even if it was physicially possible

Huh ? I direct your attention to the new WD Raptor 10,000 rpm Sata drive with Tagged Command Queueing (sp ?). I am not saying the Raptors are faster or even as fast as SCSI, just that we are getting there. Until solid state memory drives are cost effective there are some pretty hard physics barrers to improving the current rotational platter based drives. Thats why the improvements are minor steps. Physics revelations/breakthroughs are not a common thing. That is why the recent improvements are in interface and software/command schemes. These improvements have been coming pretty fast in the consumer maket. However keep in mind Joe Sixpack doesnt need or want to pay for an consumer drive with server storage specifications. Consumer drives and server storage systems are completely different aminals in general and have evolved along different paths due to the needs of the different markets with different technical requirements. .

BTW there is nothing from preventing you from putting a scsi array on any decent PC other than having an open slot for the controller and a big pile of cash.
 
I meant physically possible within the constraints of the first 2 fundamental problems. Sorry.

Otherwise yeah I know but again, no real point.

Hard drives as it stands are screwed, they cannot significantly advance on what they currently have because they can't spin fast enough. Solid State hard drives will be great but even in the highest end corporate environment the requirement for them is tiny as they are so prohibitively expensive and won't get cheaper because the drive manufacturers have no reason to develop better yields or lower price points because they can sell many multiples of their high profit, high yield SCSI drives to get the same benefits and unfortunately that is why I think even in 5 years they still won't be proliferating in any great numbers.

Anyway, I'm going to step away from the discussion for a little while, I hate threads where the starter responds to every point so I'll leave it to see how it develops as I am genuinely intrigued as to what other people think.
 
"I challange you to actually spot the difference though"

OMG you have caught on to us. :(

Shhhhhh not so loud.


My situation is almost exactly the same, in a fortune 100 IT department since before there was an IT department. I am sitting in front of a water cooled overclocked NF-2 setup and cant even justify going to a 64 bit platform. Sigh, Hey ! wonder where I stashed that old 4.77Mhz IBM PC XT, I got a clock crystal here that might just fit.

Seriously, it is looking bleak for a bit, and I agree with you 99%, but some genius will come up with some useless application we think we need that will bring our machines to their knees. If its not Win OS 64 bit, just wait till they migrate Office to 64 bit and toss in more useless bells and whistles. That might do it. Unfortunatly the game guys have to make sure (or the marketing guys I guess) that a new game will NOT do a complete tapdance of death on our machnes or they couldnt sell enough of them. Microsoft has no such worries, they just discontiue support for the older version. :eek:

Microsoft to cease support for Windows NT Server 4.0 on January 1

Bring out your Dead !
Bring out your Dead!
(Scene of filthy villager pushing a hand cart of P3 800MHz boxes down a muddy row of huts while administrators in rags bring more machines with NT Server 4.0 service tags out and pile them on the cart. )

Best Regards to all.
 
I think if anything, we have slowed down. The timeline on things has expanded from once every 6 months to once every 18 months. I haven't been one to stay on the crest because I can't afford it. I think there have been some sectors of computers that have been accelerating faster than others. Take video cards and cpu's. The 6800U and the X800XT-PE both get CPU bound on certain games in certain conditions. If anything, we still need to pump up CPU IPC. AMD has been touting that for a long time and now its paying off. Intel has been pushing raw MHz or GHz and they have been taking it in the chip in regards to the gaming sector. We still have a lot to improve on, but those developments will take more time that 6 months to achieve as we are all used to. Eventually, we will hit a point in time where we will have to make the jump to quantum computing or something else we don't know about right now, but will be viable in 20, 30 or 40 years from now. I have a feeling that we will look back and laugh at ourselves drooling at "Top of the Line" of our time when there will be crazy things out in that time unimagineable to our technology right now. So what is my position? Yes we are coming to a plateau, its just not going to be here as fast as some would have you believe.
 
Great topic. This is something I've been struggling with for almost a year now as well. My system isn't that spectacular (barton 2500+ oc'd to 3000+, 9700pro) but I've been hard pressed to justify upgrading. For one, I don't exactly have the $ to do so with each new product that comes along and even though Doom III only plays at 800x600 on my machine it aint terrible. I did post earlier today a question of which upgrade path is better, new 64 bit subsytem or new 6600gt video card. The biggest attraction in them is that they'll give me some improvement but not cost a lot. But I can't honestly say I need them or even that the improvement would be greatly noticed. I game and I'm getting into video capture and editing and all of this works pretty darn well on what I have, and it's all on at least 2 year old components now. I had been toying with waiting a year for all the pci-e systems and components to be in place and do a proper overhaul and still may. About 2 weeks ago I purchased a 120gb WD SE HDD for about $70 and the clerk who rang me up said parallel ata was too slow for him, he only used sata and I could only look at him and think that may be the dumbest thig I've heard in a long time. Could you honestly tell the difference? Maybe with the 10,000 rpm raptors sure but... :rolleyes:
 
I definately think we are coming to A plateau, but certainly not THE plateau. With hardware becoming so amazingly fast these days, I think the software developers have some catching up to do before our hardware begins to hold us back. Computers, as they are now, are capable of doing so much more than they are currently doing its just silly. With even a mediocre of the shelf PC, we could be controlling basically everything in our house (TV, Heat, Alarm System, Lights, Music, etc.). Its just a matter of integrating everything, now that the raw processing power of our machines isn't what's holding us back anymore. Not too many years ago, doing any one of those things with a computer might have been thought impossible. The computer hardware industry has been moving way, way faster than any other industry out there for some time now. We just have to wait for the other industries to catch up. Name another industry that has seen as many innovations as the computer hardware industry has in the last 5-10 years. There are a few, but not many.

A good point that has been brought up is just how slow hard drives really are. With Internet2 coming out at multi-gigabit speeds, just about the last bottleneck is about to be removed, leaving the hard disk at the top of the list (or rather the bottom). In my opinion, the next thing after hard drives that needs to be tackled is the slow-assed speed of the external connections to a PC (usb, firewire, etc.). Everything inside the computer is fast as shit (with the exception of the aforementioned hard drive), but there's not much bandwidth going in and out of the computer yet, as there hasn't been much need for it.

We, as consumers, need to start thinking up new things to do with our computers before manufacturers start making products to make those things easier to do. The only reason gaming has become as popular as it is is because when games came out for the computer, we started wanting more, better, more realistic games. If not for that, and other similar things, the personal computer would most likely not have become as fast as it is today. There's just no demand for faster hardware, so why push it? Just keep throwing out 3 ghz processors until you need to do something different, right?

I don't know, these are just my opinions. Personally, I can see many amazing things we could do/be doing with our computers that we're not (not blaming people or something, just suggesting!) and I for one am very optomistic (sp?) about the future of the PC.
 
3 years ago it used to be the case that you could wait 6 months to a year and spend £300 on an upgrade and you'd have a real and appreciable difference to your computing life, a new processor provided a 20% performance jump, extra memory made a difference, you'd run out of hard disk space or perhaps you needed a new graphics card for that next Killer App.
Click to expand...

I agree completely, well, almost completely. When I jumped from my P3 to athlon it was like going from a pinto to a camaro. When I went from my athlon to my athlon xp barton it was like going from a camaro to a corvette. When I switched out to my opterons, it was like going from a corvette to a corvette with slicks.

Even though I am getting much faster processors, the differences seem smaller (not counting the fact the opteron is a dually while the others were singles). I haven't upgraded my video card in years and I can still play doom 3 pretty damn well.

However, I do run out of hard disk space. I fill up a 250GB drive in a little over a month. Now that I have over 1TB, I am starting to burn everything instead of just saving it, so I am filling up a 250 about once every 2 months now.

bout 2 weeks ago I purchased a 120gb WD SE HDD for about $70 and the clerk who rang me up said parallel ata was too slow for him, he only used sata and I could only look at him and think that may be the dumbest thig I've heard in a long time. Could you honestly tell the difference?
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Truthfully, I could tell a big difference between my 120gb western digital special edition and my 250gb sata maxtor. Considering I deal a lot with files and file transfers, I was able to notice a pretty big increase. However, it wasn't because the maxtor was an sata drive, but because it could just put out more mb/s than my 3 year old WD drive.
 
i, for one, think that it will be a marvelous day when manufacturers cant produce faster and better computers. everyone will have the same computer and will be able to run everything on all the high settings and everyone will be happy. u guys have been in the computer game for years and forgot about the more important things in life. life isnt about haveing the best but being able to experience it. go outside more, the sun wont kill u(but it might give u cancer). life isnt about athluenza(pardon my spelling but it is a word, means always wanting more). think about life in a different way and u will be much happier with what u have.

and if having left over money is bothering u......u can always give it to me ;)
 
Brad4321 said:
Truthfully, I could tell a big difference between my 120gb western digital special edition and my 250gb sata maxtor. Considering I deal a lot with files and file transfers, I was able to notice a pretty big increase. However, it wasn't because the maxtor was an sata drive, but because it could just put out more mb/s than my 3 year old WD drive.
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WTF? i dont get what u are saying... liquid-paper was saying he doesnt think there is a noticeable difference between sata and ide, then u say u noticed a big difference, then say its not because it was sata, so what are you trying to say? or are you just trying to brag that you bought a 250gig sata?
 
According to Anand Shimpi(in CPU magazine)the present day solutions are limited, as far as CPU clock speeds. We've got just about all we can out of the single core CPUs and the only hope for more power is through the multicore processors.
 
gamekid said:
i, for one, think that it will be a marvelous day when manufacturers cant produce faster and better computers. everyone will have the same computer and will be able to run everything on all the high settings and everyone will be happy. u guys have been in the computer game for years and forgot about the more important things in life. life isnt about haveing the best but being able to experience it. go outside more, the sun wont kill u(but it might give u cancer). life isnt about athluenza(pardon my spelling but it is a word, means always wanting more). think about life in a different way and u will be much happier with what u have.

and if having left over money is bothering u......u can always give it to me ;)
Click to expand...

I don't think you're in the right forum... :p
 
haroldmeyer said:
According to Anand Shimpi(in CPU magazine)the present day solutions are limited, as far as CPU clock speeds. We've got just about all we can out of the single core CPUs and the only hope for more power is through the multicore processors.
Click to expand...

..... but the question is WHAT IS THE POINT? :p
 
WTF? i dont get what u are saying... liquid-paper was saying he doesnt think there is a noticeable difference between sata and ide, then u say u noticed a big difference, then say its not because it was sata, so what are you trying to say? or are you just trying to brag that you bought a 250gig sata?
Click to expand...

Typically I would take this time to explain logic, reasoning, and spelling. However, in your case I will just let you take a look at this link and see what you can figure out from there, with a little explanation to help you along.

http://storagereview.com/php/benchm...&numDrives=1&devID_0=260&devID_1=204&devCnt=2

Now, it should be pretty obvious that the 250 (WD brand instead of maxtor; I so am sure that is making this all in vain) can put out more mb/s than the 120.

Now, the question is whether or not this is because of the new sata interface or because it is a newer, "faster" drive. Well...

http://storagereview.com/php/benchm...&numDrives=1&devID_0=260&devID_1=236&devCnt=2

Seems to indicate that moving to the sata interface really didn't affect performance that much (with the exception of a single benchmark), so I would be willing to suspect that the performance increases are because of the differences in the drive itself, not its interface.

The next time you so desire to bitch and whine, feel free to do so. However, consider researching the topic slightly before making wild accusations, and pretend to make decent sentences.
 
i have alot to say in return to your post brad4321, but this is not my thread and i dont wanna wonder off topic, so i guess ill leave it at that....
 
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