For years Intel got to ride the rocketship of routine chip-density doubling. For years the new chips were so much superior to the old ones that it paid to replace them and the machines into which they were built.
Now, not so much. I can put a SSD and more RAM in my eight-year-old laptop and make it work just about as well as a new one.
I can switch off the old HP DL380/G5 boxes in my colo, hand them over to the steel recycling guy, move the data to some cloud service, and come out ahead electricity bill vs. cloud bill. I'm not buying many processor chips anymore. Neither is anybody else, except maybe the cloud services. And their bargaining power makes Dell and HP look like the guys in the white-box computer shop down the street.
The processor chip rocket ship has entered orbit; its occupants are now in microgravity. Some other rocket ship will be the next big ride.
It's too bad those folks are out of work. It's too bad plutocrats always behave as if les bontemps rouleront toujours.
> I can put a SSD and more RAM in my eight-year-old laptop and make it work just about as well as a new one.
I did exactly that with an old i3 based all-in-one Sony Vaio PC my dad handed down to me. It previously had a 3.5" 5400rpm spinner and 4GB of RAM and would take a month of Sundays to boot. I installed a 250GB SSD and another 4GB of RAM and it totally transformed the machine. All it cost was GBP62.00 (I got an amazing Black Friday deal on both SSD and memory). Hell, the thing can even run Visual Studio 2015 and a couple of CentOS VM's on Virtual Box and still feel quite responsive.
Now, not so much. I can put a SSD and more RAM in my eight-year-old laptop and make it work just about as well as a new one.
I can switch off the old HP DL380/G5 boxes in my colo, hand them over to the steel recycling guy, move the data to some cloud service, and come out ahead electricity bill vs. cloud bill. I'm not buying many processor chips anymore. Neither is anybody else, except maybe the cloud services. And their bargaining power makes Dell and HP look like the guys in the white-box computer shop down the street.
The processor chip rocket ship has entered orbit; its occupants are now in microgravity. Some other rocket ship will be the next big ride.
It's too bad those folks are out of work. It's too bad plutocrats always behave as if les bontemps rouleront toujours.