The PC plateau [Reflections

Abstract

Desktop computers are no longer the polestar of the computing firmament, as people have embraced smartphones and tablets by the million. These portable devices have the obvious advantage of being with you wherever you go, but they are also empowered with a multitude of sensors–such as barometers, GPS, and accelerometers–that make no sense in a stationary PC. · Still, when at home or the office, I feel more comfortable interfacing with a physical keyboard, a large display, a powerful processor, and lots of memory. So, bucking the trend, I recently invested in a new PC. My existing PC was four and a half years old and was a packaged system from a large electronics retailer. I assembled the new PC myself from premium components–CPU, motherboard, memory, power supply, case, and so forth. After I got the new PC going, I studied the old and new systems and thought about what the comparison told me about the future of the PC. · My first thought is one of admiration for the design engineers who make heroic efforts to keep up with Moore's Law. Between the construction times of the two systems, Moore's Law predicted there would be three doublings of performance, for a potential gain of a factor of eight. But as we know, raw machine speeds have not been increasing at that rate. In this instance, the older processor clocks at 2.93 gigahertz and the new one at 3.5 GHz. That leaves a lot of ground to be made up through architectural improvements. The new processor has four cores versus two cores in the older one. The new processor uses 22-nanometer lithography, compared with 32 nm in the older. Combined with a considerably larger die size, this means it has about 1.4 billion transistors versus a mere 393 million in the older processor. In addition to processor improvements, significant improvement in peripheral and storage access speeds has been afforded by new standards in USB 3 and SATA 3.