Crossing my fingers that this boom jumpstarts 90's like improvements in computing hardware.

I feel like part of the reason for the relative stagnation in hardware over the last twenty years was simply the lack of use cases to justify hardware refreshes by businesses.

Most of the money and energy went to mobile for the last fifteen years.

Affordable local inference might be the gravy train the server, desktop, and laptop manufacturers need to get back in gear.

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BobbyTables2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, even Windows managed to not drive terribly dramatic upgrades in general computing (besides Windows’ absurd RAM usage and now requiring a TPM).

In the old days, Microsoft Entertainment Pack games were somewhat visibly taxing on some lower end systems.

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0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Definitely the stagnation was due to a lack of use cases, but this isn't a bad thing. We don't need most of the hardware advancement we got.

Business hardware got beefier because businesses demanded more data (or more specifically: the industry told businesses they needed more data), with no idea of what to actually do with it once they got it. To get all that data, bandwidth needed to be increased, with more iops to read/write it, more storage to keep it, and more memory and cpu to process it. But 99% of the data is junk. Companies have "data lakes" so big they need to come up with excuses to use the data, or risk somebody pointing out that they're spending a fortune hoarding bits.

Consumer hardware hasn't had a new use case since like 2012. Faster wifi for broadband & local file transfers, and higher-resolution video, are the only reasons one needed newer hardware. We actually got a resolution so high it makes no perceivable difference. And yeah we got faster CPUs and memory, but as soon as we did it got all eaten up by the most inefficient, wasteful software conceivable. Same use cases as 13 years ago, just more expensive, harder to use, and buggier. We should've gotten a new CPU architecture that was faster and more energy efficient. Finally it was delivered, but with a moat around the golden Apple.

Here we are two and a half decades into the Internet era, and my damn bluetooth earbuds and webcam microphone don't work half the time that I open a video conferencing app. Hardware can stay exactly like it is for the next few decades and I'd be happy. I just want software that works, and doesn't get continuously slower, forcing me to buy bigger hardware; or more draconian, locking me out of being able to use it how I want.

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gruez 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I feel like part of the reason for the relative stagnation in hardware over the last twenty years was simply the lack of use cases to justify hardware refreshes by businesses.

No, we're running into limits of moore's law, and it's showing in prices for new nodes, where they're getting denser but not cheaper.

	▲	horsawlarway 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's true we hit limits, but I feel like a lot of it was "limits" in the sense that the tradeoff stopped being worth the cost, so we optimized in other areas. So we hit limits on clock speed in the early 2000s (ex - the 4ghz wall) but it also turned out that mobile as the driver for sales meant no one really cared much about clock speed compared to performance/watt. Clock speed mattered, but only relative to how many watts it took to get it (and above 4ghz... too many watts). But we've seen a 15x improvement over the last 20 years. Performance/Watt is WAY up. My guess is that LLMs are going to drive another "improvement cycle" in areas that we didn't care much about before. I've built about 10 personal desktop machines (1 every ~4 years) and I can honestly say that I didn't care much about memory bandwidth prior to 2021. In the same way that I didn't care much about how many watts my pentium 4 was using in 2005. But now... now I care a lot about memory bandwidth. I care about memory speeds and total system ram in a manner I really, really didn't before. So I think we're going to see a big shift to machines built on unified ram with a crazy focus on squeezing memory bandwidth and total ram capacity as far as we can. My bet is that we'll get a similar 10-15x improvement by 2040 in unified system ram designs. I fully expect to see 2tb unified ram desktops and 200gb unified ram phones be relatively common on a 20 year timeline, assuming we see similar levels of geopolitical stability (ex - world war 3 throws a wrench into things).

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linzhangrun 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Physical limitation of the manufacturing process may be more significant factor, starting from the TSMC 10nm ten years ago