Comment by whatever1
2 days ago
The only market for desktops is gaming. Hence nvidia will just slap a cpu on their board and use the unified memory model to sell you an all in one solution. Essentially a desktop console.
Maybe some modularization will survive for slow storage. But other than that demand for modular desktops is dead.
Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs.
There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation that are hard to beat with a laptop.
If you're compiling code, you generally want as much concurrency as you can get, as well as great single core speed when the task parallelism runs out. There aren't really any laptops with high core counts, and even when you have something with horsepower, you run into thermal limits. You can try and make do with remoting into a machine with more cores, but then you're not really using your laptop, it might as well be a Chromebook.
> There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation
I've historically built my own workstations. My premise is that my most recent build may be my last or second to last. In ten years, I will still have a workstation - but not one that I build from parts.
I also built my own, since the late 90s. But I'm not building my newest: a 96 core threadripper with 768GB ram. I went with a specialist to ensure it works compatibly. I expect it to last me a good few years, and I don't really anticipate replacing it with anything too similar.
All of these can be done much better on the cloud (I can spawn as big of a machine as my pocket can afford). And with today’s tooling (vs code & jetbrains remote development) you don’t even notice that you develop on a remote machine and not your local.
So the desktop developer market is for those who are not willing to use cloud. And this is a very small minority.
(FYI I am not endorsing cloud over local development, I just state where the market is)
Much of my PhD thesis was/is done traveling in places with poor, poor Internet. Currently on my laptop in rural Calabria, where I pull a blazing fast 60 kbps, sometimes. Would be very irritating waiting for the compiler/theorem prover to go brr, remotely… I can hardly edit a Google doc out here!
This doesn’t contradict your minority point, but it really does make me appreciate local-first.
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Yes, until the day you get an attack by a North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe, losing your gigabit+ connection and your entire set of tools with it.
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Indeed I use such a machine in my day job. 64 slow Epyc cores, presumably power efficient. But even on that machine, builds are slower than they could be, and distributed builds are the way.
> of these can be done much better on the cloud. If you forget about the latency, yes. Suddenly your "cc a.c -o a.o" becomes " issue the command, wait for the server to start it, ping pong between your teminal and server for messages, final file available on the cloud"
>The only market for desktops is gaming.
I disagree. My premise isn't that desktops are going away. It's that DIY custom-build desktops are destined for the trash heap of history since you'll no longer be able to buy CPUs and memory. We will be buying desktops like the HP Z2 Mini Workstation - or the 10 years from now equivalent.
>Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs
But only as a retro theme thing? Would enthusiasts just put a Z2 Mini, for example, inside the case, wire up the lights, and call it a day?
There is still lot of productivity stuff that benefits from power of desktops. Engineering (Ansys etc), local AI development, 3D modeling, working with large C++/Rust codebases, scientific computing, etc etc. And related to gaming there is of course the huge game developer market too. There is a reason why nvidia and amd still make workstation class GPUs for big bucks.
But all of that hinges on fast off-chip memory. If manufacturers agree that this memory and the SoC need to be soldered, there's not much left to swap out except PCIe boards.