One has been marketing that damages its own brand, particularly the "Atom" phenomenon. Intel had such an obsession with phones that it just had to make x86 processors that were too weak for phones, never mind anything else, full of bugs, etc.
It might be a classic case of "boiled frog" because few have realized that ever since Intel switched to PCIe, Intel chips have been starved for PCIe lanes. There has been no point to SLI in a consumer configuration because there just is not enough I/O bandwidth to support two graphics cards. In fact, Intel hopes you will settle on "integrated graphics" (the same as on a phone) so you won't have a reason to buy a computer instead of a phone.
Optane is a story like 10 nm. Just add tone-deaf marketing that makes a potentially revolutionary product seem like nothing.
Probably the thing that has hurt the PC industry the most is the slow transition to SSD. Given a choice to a brand new computer that has an i7 chip and an HDD which will show you a spinning cursor most of the time, or an eight year old computer with a new SSD which can boot before you get old, the choice is obvious.
If Intel had said something like "an i5 chip has to come with an SSD" or if Microsoft had required SSDs for the Windows 8 launch people would be like "Wow this is much better than what I had before." As it is, Intel has mandated a Meh experience for a long time and the tech press has let them get away with it. (It's murdered the tech press too since now all Tom's Hardware talks about is RGB lighted fans and the really cool monitors that might get released someday...)
> There has been no point to SLI in a consumer configuration because there just is not enough I/O bandwidth to support two graphics cards.
For what exactly use case there wasn't enough I/O? In case of gaming you can find dozens of tests that will show there is almost zero difference between 8x or x16 on PCIe 2.0 and in many games you can have x4 without any performance loss.
SLI / CrossFireX failed because they both were vendor lock-in technologies that depend on driver manufacturers doing adjustments for specific games since game developers wouldn't care to spend time to support 1% of PC user base.
I don’t believe vendor lock in has much to with the failure in the adoption of SLI/Crossfire. Lack of support for most games to take advantage of it and issues with games that don’t support the protocol are the main problems.
I don’t think that will change the math for most game developers since the SLI market will still be tiny. Every serious engine already optimizes for specific GPUs already, and Vulkan won’t change that need.
I meant because Vilkan can make it transparent to use a couple of function calls to enable a second GPU for higher frame-rates. It's a significant API improvement and is cross platform.
It's pretty clear the PC market went into decline as the smart phone market ate up their sales and I find it highly doubtful a faster harddrive was going to overcome the convenience factor of the smartphone.
Maybe but it was still stupid marketing too. Demanding all Core i* CPUs to be bundled with SSD would have been a brilliant move. Not enough to turn the ship around, but steering in the right direction.
Sure it would. Where I work, we’ve done piecemeal (15%) replacement of PCs since 2008. That saved us something like $100M.
Why? There was no reason to move past Windows 7 and almost no performance reason the get new gear. SSD everywhere would have pushed down the component costs earlier and cost justified the move 18-24 months earlier.
The justification there for me wouldn’t have been performance either — it would have been servicing costs on the PCs as SSD has a lower failure rate, and the power consumption is better on new PCs.
PCs are like the work trucks that contractors or facility guys use. If it can tow a mower and doesn’t break, you give zero shits about it, other than the $$$.
The smart phone has an SSD in it and that is why the smartphone has many convenience factors.
For instance, a netbook with an SSD can ride in your backpack and play music to bluetooth headphones, just like a phone. If either of those had an HDD you would have trouble with the music skipping caused by the vibrations of your footsteps. Probably you'd trash the HDD before long.
The fast responsiveness you expect from a phone also comes out of the use of SSD. Computers with HDD frequently "go out to lunch" and that's a convenience negative for a computer (if it doesn't have an SSD).
>> One has been marketing that damages its own brand, particularly the "Atom" phenomenon. Intel had such an obsession with phones that it just had to make x86 processors that were too weak for phones, never mind anything else, full of bugs, etc.
I'm not sure the low power offerings from Intel were the problem. They kept wanting to enter the mobile market with bloated software from Microsoft. It's not enough to make low power hardware, the software had to be there as well.
Netbooks were there first, though. The first wave of them is probably what spawned the Atom product line. (The very first of them had weird little Celerons that downclocked to like 660MHz for thermal reasons because there wasn't anything explicitly designed for purpose)
The fact Microsoft is subsidizing them to ensure they run Windows doesn't mean that a netbook as we know it wouldn't exist today without them. They'd still be on the market, likely running some poorly skinned Linux distribution like those "computers for seniors" they advertise in Parade magazine; or maybe Android-x86 would have gotten more support from OEMs and evolved into something usable as a daily driver.
The story has already been established for consumers: if you don't need games or performance, someone will sell you a portable device which will run an office suite and a web browser for USD200 or less. It's interesting to discuss how much "it runs Windows/uses an x86 CPU" is part of the narrative-- would a $150 ARM laptop running a nicely packaged Linux suite with LibreOffice sell?
I suspect there's no way out of the crappy laptop sector though. Even after the Vista Basic fiasco, I can't see Microsoft outright antagonizing OEMs by saying "Windows Next won't run on anything below some minimum spec that would provide an actually good experience, so goodbye $79 tablets with a gig of memory and 16 of flash"
Agreed, they definitely were. But those early devices like the eeePc were exploding the market segmentation of thin/light being a price premium. (Fujitsu and Toshiba were the players there) The customers were nerds and the OEMs were mostly bit players.
The iPad and Chromebook is where the market was exploded. Companies like Comcast were buying 40k iPads to displace laptops. That’s when shit got real.
Intel gutted their budget mobile Celeron/Pentium lines by replacing them with Atom based models.
This strategy makes sense for smaller laptops/netbooks but it makes for horrible user experience at 15inches. It is like putting an engine meant for an European city car into F150.
That is if a Acer/Asus/etc wants to build a budget laptop they have to choose the crappy atom based chip.
It is a crime that a budget 15 inch laptop from 2012 can run circles around a budget 15 inch laptop from 2018.
One has been marketing that damages its own brand, particularly the "Atom" phenomenon. Intel had such an obsession with phones that it just had to make x86 processors that were too weak for phones, never mind anything else, full of bugs, etc.
It might be a classic case of "boiled frog" because few have realized that ever since Intel switched to PCIe, Intel chips have been starved for PCIe lanes. There has been no point to SLI in a consumer configuration because there just is not enough I/O bandwidth to support two graphics cards. In fact, Intel hopes you will settle on "integrated graphics" (the same as on a phone) so you won't have a reason to buy a computer instead of a phone.
Optane is a story like 10 nm. Just add tone-deaf marketing that makes a potentially revolutionary product seem like nothing.
Probably the thing that has hurt the PC industry the most is the slow transition to SSD. Given a choice to a brand new computer that has an i7 chip and an HDD which will show you a spinning cursor most of the time, or an eight year old computer with a new SSD which can boot before you get old, the choice is obvious.
If Intel had said something like "an i5 chip has to come with an SSD" or if Microsoft had required SSDs for the Windows 8 launch people would be like "Wow this is much better than what I had before." As it is, Intel has mandated a Meh experience for a long time and the tech press has let them get away with it. (It's murdered the tech press too since now all Tom's Hardware talks about is RGB lighted fans and the really cool monitors that might get released someday...)