Also, software still kind of sucks. It’s better than it was, but we need to improve it, the bloat is just barely being handled by silicon gains.
The incentives are all wrong for this, except in FOSS. It’s never going to be a priority for Microsoft because everyone is used to the (lack of) speed of Windows, and “now a bit faster!” isn’t a great marketing line. And it’s not in the interests of hardware companies that need to keep shifting new boxes if the software doesn’t keep bogging each generation down eventually. So we end up stuck with proprietary bloatware everywhere.
Let’s be fair, Ms was vastly outrunning Intel for a long time, it’s only slowed down recently, and now the problem isn’t single-thread bloat so much as it is an absolute lack of multicore scaling for almost all applications except some games, and even then windows fights as hard as it possibly can to stop you, like amd just proved yet again.
Yes, mostly the applications aren’t there, if you need real cpu power (or gpu for that matter), you’re running linux or on the cloud.
But we are reaching a point where the desktop has to either be relegated to the level of embedded terminal (ie ugly tablet, before it’s dropped altogether), or make the leap to genuine compute tool, and I fear we’re going to see the former.
The incentives are all wrong for this, except in FOSS. It’s never going to be a priority for Microsoft because everyone is used to the (lack of) speed of Windows, and “now a bit faster!” isn’t a great marketing line. And it’s not in the interests of hardware companies that need to keep shifting new boxes if the software doesn’t keep bogging each generation down eventually. So we end up stuck with proprietary bloatware everywhere.
“what intel gives, microsoft takes away”
dates from the mid 90s, still relevant.
Let’s be fair, Ms was vastly outrunning Intel for a long time, it’s only slowed down recently, and now the problem isn’t single-thread bloat so much as it is an absolute lack of multicore scaling for almost all applications except some games, and even then windows fights as hard as it possibly can to stop you, like amd just proved yet again.
Yes, mostly the applications aren’t there, if you need real cpu power (or gpu for that matter), you’re running linux or on the cloud.
But we are reaching a point where the desktop has to either be relegated to the level of embedded terminal (ie ugly tablet, before it’s dropped altogether), or make the leap to genuine compute tool, and I fear we’re going to see the former.