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PC market shrinks for the first time in a decade
- Thread starter CAT-THE-FIFTH
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I will stick with the PC, I have a Galaxy S2 which does just what a tablet would do pretty much. My parents have just got an iPad and they seem to be loving it, but then again all they need it for is a bit of web browsing, emails and some games like scrabble etc.
But then again, my old man likes the Total War games, so he needs his PC (which I have pilfered while they have gone away!)
Have been getting by on a laptop but since 'borrowing' their PC, I am getting myself a build soon.
Can understand why it might be shrinking as for a lot of people it is just more convenient.
But then again, my old man likes the Total War games, so he needs his PC (which I have pilfered while they have gone away!)
Have been getting by on a laptop but since 'borrowing' their PC, I am getting myself a build soon.
Can understand why it might be shrinking as for a lot of people it is just more convenient.
Aka underpowered and overpriced laptops, see the quoted post.
Admitedly so are tablets (underpowered), hence my 'I want better' statement. I wouldn't buy one, yet that is.
Soldato
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Hmm, maybe I'm the only one that has a couple of uses for a 7" tablet.
Brill for holidays! Great for films on the long haul flight and great for reading books while there.
Apart from that, I'm struggling to justify a tablet of any description. But the 10" tablets in particular seem pointless, awkward sized things.
There's a couple that go in my local and bring a big white iPad with them to play with on the table. You can imagine what we all think of 'em but they do it because it makes them think they are cool.
Rock and roll eh?
Brill for holidays! Great for films on the long haul flight and great for reading books while there.
Apart from that, I'm struggling to justify a tablet of any description. But the 10" tablets in particular seem pointless, awkward sized things.
There's a couple that go in my local and bring a big white iPad with them to play with on the table. You can imagine what we all think of 'em but they do it because it makes them think they are cool.
Rock and roll eh?
Tablets are for the sick (and those who want to get high!). Only tablets that interest me are those from the doc
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It would be nice if there was more progression in the sub £200 graphics card market. Power consumption has improved greatly,but the actual improvement in performance has not been massive. Many people have probably ended up keeping older cards,until prices have dropped further or the next generation is released.
It's also because all they do now is release cards with roughly the same performance and cost of last years card but with slightly lower power consumption rinse repeat.
Drip feed us the occasional good PC game worth keeping a pc for but but the have to play pc exclusives are M.I.A
Drip feed us the occasional good PC game worth keeping a pc for but but the have to play pc exclusives are M.I.A
Current console somewhat holding back progress in terms of power requirements on games.
Nobody has any money and PC parts are getting expensive for minimal benefit.
An upgrade now means you play COD at 300FPS rather than 250FPS.
I'm sure as the new consoles hit and the games up the bar a bit and unemployment drops we will see a rise again.
Nobody has any money and PC parts are getting expensive for minimal benefit.
An upgrade now means you play COD at 300FPS rather than 250FPS.
I'm sure as the new consoles hit and the games up the bar a bit and unemployment drops we will see a rise again.
90% of PC's never run a 3D game. The vast majority of PC's and Laptops sold use integrated graphics. Gamers and new games have a releatively low impact on CPU sales. Even consumer CPU's are relatively low margin compared to corperate sales and server parts. Intel and AMD are being hit mostly because businesses are replacing hardware less frequently. This is due to the Economic situaton and the fact that CPU's have a much longer shelf life than they once did. Buy a top end CPU today and it will run everything you need it to for 5 years. Modern CPU's are over-engineered compared to today's software requirements.
While I think it's true that the last few generations of both CPUs and GPUs haven't brought much of an advance, there is a fairly sound reason for the companies to trickle updates though: progressive shrinks of silicon nodes are getting harder and more expensive.
That's not to say that 80nm, 65nm, 40nm etc were easy (I'm sure there were all kinds of technical difficulties) but by 22nm or 14nm it is quite possible that there will only be two players left When a factory costed $1 billion, it required very very careful calculation about how to make it viable. But the Wikipedia lists Intel's 14nm plant in Arizona for instance as costing $5 billion.
Obviously, those kind of figures do not go hand in hand with leaving fabs idle (which is basically what Intel announced - although they phrased it more along the lines of upgrading them to 14nm sooner etc.). The other major question is, if PC sales are slowing down how does Intel intended to keep their fabs busy? Intel are so used to their 60%+ margins that their shareholders have become used to them.
Since there are only so many purchases of $200 CPUs (and Intel's prices have not declined for years: I'm still on my old overclocked Pentium E5300 because for that kind of price, neither Intel or AMD have offered anything compelling) and even less demand for high-end server chips, they only growth area is really phones and tablets. But while those might keep Intel's 14nm+ fabs busy, the margins Intel is used to aren't really there. Of course, in theory being a process node ahead of everyone else should allow Intel to build cheaper and have better power usage - against them is that x86 still has an overhead and Atom is still not a good design.
Intel wanted to move people to Ultrabooks of course (i.e. Macbook Air like with prices to match), but since Intel charges $250+ for ULV processors there's next to no margin for OEMs if they want to sell at a what people are willing to pay. Also, Macbook Air implies an IPS screen not some s##t TN panel. Everything in PCs has come down in price except for Intel CPUs and Microsoft's Windows.
That's not to say that 80nm, 65nm, 40nm etc were easy (I'm sure there were all kinds of technical difficulties) but by 22nm or 14nm it is quite possible that there will only be two players left When a factory costed $1 billion, it required very very careful calculation about how to make it viable. But the Wikipedia lists Intel's 14nm plant in Arizona for instance as costing $5 billion.
Obviously, those kind of figures do not go hand in hand with leaving fabs idle (which is basically what Intel announced - although they phrased it more along the lines of upgrading them to 14nm sooner etc.). The other major question is, if PC sales are slowing down how does Intel intended to keep their fabs busy? Intel are so used to their 60%+ margins that their shareholders have become used to them.
Since there are only so many purchases of $200 CPUs (and Intel's prices have not declined for years: I'm still on my old overclocked Pentium E5300 because for that kind of price, neither Intel or AMD have offered anything compelling) and even less demand for high-end server chips, they only growth area is really phones and tablets. But while those might keep Intel's 14nm+ fabs busy, the margins Intel is used to aren't really there. Of course, in theory being a process node ahead of everyone else should allow Intel to build cheaper and have better power usage - against them is that x86 still has an overhead and Atom is still not a good design.
Intel wanted to move people to Ultrabooks of course (i.e. Macbook Air like with prices to match), but since Intel charges $250+ for ULV processors there's next to no margin for OEMs if they want to sell at a what people are willing to pay. Also, Macbook Air implies an IPS screen not some s##t TN panel. Everything in PCs has come down in price except for Intel CPUs and Microsoft's Windows.
I'll add GPU's to that list as well.
Notice how the 3 items have just two dominent manufacturers?
Intel vs AMD (81% vs 9% market share)
NVidia vs AMD (59% vs 40%)
Microsoft vs MAC (83% vs 6%)
With Motherboards, RAM, Hard Disks, SSD's etc there are plenty of OEM's competing for the same business and competition is healthy.
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Thats is hardly dominance at all in the desktop market. You only have to look at the pricing to realise this.
If anything look at this:
http://www.legitreviews.com/news/13975/
In Q2 2012,Nvidia shipped 1 million less graphics cards.
However,consumer desktop GPU sales for Nvidia are under attack from both AMD and Intel. There is hardly any reason for most of the Nvidia low end any more, with the improved state of the AMD and Intel IGPs.
Also,the sales of AMD's own low end cards have been affected by their own APUs, and the improved Intel IGPs now. Despite this ,they still managed to keep sales flat overall,but it will be interesting to see whether they will see a sales drop too.
What will be also interesting to see is,whether the percentage of desktops with discrete cards has dropped or not.
With Haswell and Kaveri,anything under a GT640 or HD7750 will be rendered obsolete. Why add a discrete card to a desktop when you can have lower BOM going with a IGP??
The vast majority of the profits Nvidia has are from professional sales and Tegra sales.
The problem is that with Intel launching its own cards into the professional space and also introducing its own low power tablet and phone chips- Nvidia is also going to be affected in the long term not only AMD. AMD unlike Nvidia is in the x86 market,so has already suffered, but now Intel is trying to get into other markets in a big way.
In fact Intel's incursion into the professional market with Xeon Phi is actually a bigger risk for Nvidia(AMD has only a small share in that area) in the long term.
IMHO,it will be companies like Apple and Samsung who now design their own SOCs(and in the case of Samsung has their own fabs),who will be the major competition against Intel in the phone and tablet SOC market. There will be little incentive for them to use competing designs in their mobile products as they can cut out the middleman. Apple and Samsung themselves have a large percentage of the tablet and smartphone market,which is not surprising since they are the largest consumer electronics companies in the world.
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I bought an Asus transformer, think its great. My desktop requires me to sit at a desk, my laptop gets scorching hot (its clean) and requires a power cable. My tablet can be useful for reading the news, emails and shopping without committing to sitting at my desk and isn't cumbersome like my laptop. I was like you but being silly I bought one anyway but it turned out good.
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That's just not true tho, is it.
There are plenty of games that will, even at 1080p, drop modern cards below 60FPS.
Oh yea, this man gets it.
There are times (many for me) where you want to search/check/do something where the convenience of a tablet is perfect and you're not near your pc/laptop, and I hardly want to be lugging one around and faffing about with it. Its the portability of a kindle with a hell of a lot more funtionality. A long battery life is key. Think startrek tablet usage (steve invented nothing).