Is the PC dead? What do you think?

We're getting close. The tablet/laptops/desktops are similar in tech/power/speed nowadays. The only inadequacy is manual data entry, screen size, and battery power. But with voice recognition, google glass, and advancements in battery tech I don't think it will be too long before everybody is waking around in their own little virtual world.

 

Sorry, but the differences between the two are still miles apart. In both power, speed, and performance.

Tablets and similar devices only seem fast because the OS and software is so stripped of features and abilities that it seems that way. If you take that same software and put it on a PC, it would blow the socks off of you (a hacker friend of mine took a 5 year old computer and made it run the Android OS, it was so fast it was not even funny, booting in seconds which takes a minute or more on a tablet).

And take the PC version of the software and get it to run on a tablet, good luck. Out of memory and slow as molasses would be the response I bet. It would be like taking some old software made for an Apple II and trying to run it on an Atari 2600.

You just can't compare the two, different hardware, different OS, different programs. Now if we can get a version of WoW to run on a tablet, or Call Of Duty or some other program that does not even tax modern desktop hardware then we might see a fair comparison.

My PC:
Athlon 6000+, 64 bit dual core
8 GB RAM
BluRay Burner
2 dual screens, Radeon 6570

Samsung Galaxy Tab:
1.4 GHz ARM processor, dual core
1 GB RAM
single 10" screen

Anybody that knows anything about ARM processors knows they are not even in the same league as a real desktop CPU. Even the crappy Cyrix chips are more powerful when compared to an Intel back in the day to a Desktop and ARM processor.

 

[video=youtube;a6SdtJbNK0c]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6SdtJbNK0c[/video]

 

Yea, but the Surface Pro is also not your typical tablet either. Armed with an dual-core Intel i5 processor (1.7 GHz) and 4 GB RAM, this is less a tablet and more a micro-laptop.

The fact that the Surface Pro plays Guild Wars 2 is even more impressive, that requires much more power then WoW does.

[video=youtube;v8nt_rx0J5g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8nt_rx0J5g[/video]

But I wish somebody a lot of luck if they are even going to try that on the ARM CPU of the RT.

 

I notice you don't see him actually playing it. That keyboard looks tiny, and is it even really still a tablet if it has an actual keyboard attached? And what about a mouse - I doubt it is much fun to play using touch controls.

As to the topic, I will echo what most people said: PCs are not going to die any time in the foreseeable future - though it's market will continue to shrink, presumably reaching a plateau at some point.

 

Yes, they do play it. And the Surface has a USB 2 port, to it can handle standard keyboards and mice just fine.

And no, the Pro is not "just a tablet". The vast majority of tablets use ARM and other similar low processor CPUs. All that most of them are able to do is run in a terminal mode and play a game remotely. The Pro actually has an i5 CPU, so it can actually play the games (and not play them remotely on a regular machine).

[video=youtube;80P6-M8NAd4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80P6-M8NAd4[/video]

This is what is going on here. The game is not actually being played on the phone, it is being played on a real computer, the android device is simply acting as a terminal to the computer (with the lag associated with it).

 

I can't argue with any of that. Those ARM processors are very limited in what they can do.

But the Surface Pro does show that a tablet is capable of real computing.

 

Tablets have been capable of a lot for years now. But there are trade-offs.

You have a real CPU and the power that comes with it, in exchange for greatly decreased battery life and a higher price tag.

Or you have a tablet that can run for many hours on a single charge, but has a weak processor with limited capabilities and reduced cost.

The choice is yours which way you want to go.

 

Im quite happy with my Core i7 6 core 3930k, 16gb of 2133mhz ram, GTX 680 4gb graphics card, 10k rpm HDD, blu-ray burner, and of course the water cooling.....Yeah I don't think I will be buy a tablet anytime soon.

 

Agreed. Virtualization is what will kill the PC for most information workers. We're also seeing growth in sharing supercomputers among researchers as an alternative to giving them expensive, supercharged workstations. Especially in those instances where the software doesn't take full advantage of the multi-core architecture for some types of statistical number crunching.

I think what you said about home use is likely going to prove true as well. I'm 'old school', though - barely use my tablet; much prefer my PC. Especially since my PC now has a screen bigger than my old TV, can get more channels, has its own remote, and has a touchscreen as well. If they can just come up with a way to make them not only portable, but with an adjustable screen size...I'd love to be able to shrink my PC down to tablet size for research trips without having to synch data, deal with different operating systems and the headaches of software incompatiblity that come with them, still have access to all my data, etc. The availability of cloud storage helps, but I haven't quite wrapped my head around how to best take advantage of it yet, and by the time I do, it will all have morphed again.

 

Yep. I got so tired of the limitations of portable devices operating on a different OS and with such limited processing and storage that when I finally went to a tablet I opted for something that could run Windows 7 at an acceptable speed. But man, does it ever suck the juice out of the battery fast! For me, it's an acceptable tradeoff, though.

 

I'm not a computer expert, but I would think that the PC would always have more computing power than a tablet.

Y'all can fit more junk in 'der!

And besides, have you ever tried typing up a document on a touchscreen tablet? I'm typing this post with my Kindle Fire, and it's quite annoying -- tue screen bobbles away, the cursor magically jumps around, it's easy to hit the wrong letter (and HARD to change it), the keyboard will disappear while you're in the middle of typing a word. . .

Yeah, the keyboard and mouse ain't going away anytime soon!

 

Actually, let me touch on this and the misconceptions that you have fallen under.

First, the "Virtual PC" is never really going anywhere. It has been tried many times in the past 20 years, and has never gone anywhere. Windows Virtual PC has been through multiple revisions, and has never really been adapted. I even played with one a few years ago (I want to say it was based off Win2000), and it was a dog. It only had the base OS installed on the machine, and had to run everything from a server through Ethernet. Have you ever tried to load Word from another machine through 100mbs Ethernet? Go get a cup of coffee, it might be half way done by the time you get back.

I also remember the multiple "Java Desktops" that were tried in the late 1990's and early 2000's. All of them pretty much sucked. Yea, the idea was nice, but IT departments soon realized that the overhead and tech support costs soon overcame any cost savings in cheaper computers, even back then.

And now it makes even less sense. The idea often times was to prevent from having to buy multiple high-ended systems. But today where every new system is a multi-core 64 bit system, what is the point?

And also, Supercomputers are also dead. They have been replaced by "computer clusters", where either systems composed of multiple processors on one board (or groups of computers, like SETI@Home) do the same tasks faster and cheaper then Supercomputers of the past ever had.

You still have Supercomputers out there, but they are now generally very specialized systems that are used for only a single task (NOAA, Sandia Labs, etc), or made primarily for research purposes and not for distribution.

The fastest "Supercomputer" today is the Titan, which is composed of 18,688 AMD Opteron 16 core processors (299,008 processors).

Today, the only use for an "old school" supercomputer is for some cool retro furniture.

 

And I will similarly address your misconceptions.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. We learn from the past failures. Doesn't mean the idea is dead or not going anywhere. Server virtualization is very much a working reality. We've also been using virtual desktops for PCs for a handful of years with admittedly mixed results. That said, the cost of putting thousands of PCs on desks may not be sustainable in comparison to the potential of virtualization in the long term. There will be some bumps in the road to realizing that potential, but I seriously doubt that the idea is dead or going nowhere. I'm witnessing the exact opposite - growing interest in pursuing alternative solutions to the "PC on every desk" scenario. More likely is that there will be a transition period. Right now we connect via remote desktop to various servers to run a number of database applications. The data itself resides on a separate server. Not such a giant leap from that scenario to other applications. I use a similar process to connect to my work computer from home.

Instead of licensing software separately for each and every desktop, we use concurrency licensing, managed by connecting from the desktop to a licensing server to enable the application, where possible. We can then monitor usage to determine whether we need to purchase additional licenses for the pool.

Of course, there isn't a "one size fits all" solution. Issues like network traffic and where it makes the most sense to handle the processing will have to be addressed, as well as security concerns. I don't think anyone has said that the death of the PC has arrived. We have a ways to go before that happens. But the possibility of moving from "a PC on every desk" to alternative solutions is already happening, and it will continue. Standalone workstations will probably never completely disappear, but they may become far less commonplace.

It's also not what we're talking about. Windows Virtual PC was what we used to use to allow someone to have a virtual Windows system residing on a Mac. It has since been supplanted by stuff like Parallels and VMWare Fusion.

Not at all the same thing as the kind of virtualization we're talking about.

Actually, I connect to my work computer from home all the time to perform work-related tasks remotely, and speed isn't an issue.

You're talking about technology that is 15 to 20 years old. Hardly comparable to what's happening today.

The point is that we don't want to pay for full multi-core systems when the average user has no real need for that kind of processing power. There will always be people who need dedicated workstations, though - such as graphic designers, people editing video, etc.

Well, you've got me there. 'Supercomputer' was the incorrect terminology, so I'll admit to that error. What I'm talking about is really what you describe - clusters of high-end servers - not independent 'supercomputers'.

 

I admit, I used the wrong term, I said "Windows Virtual PC", when I actually intended to talk about the CE environment. This is pretty much what you are talking about I assume, a "stripped down" computer (nothing more then essentially a dumb terminal with Windows) that got everything from a remote server. It was interesting, we played with it, realized we had no real use for it and stuck it in the lobby for people to browse the internet from. And even as a web browser it sucked. It reminded me in the old days of trying to check code on an old Token-Ring dumb terminal back in the day. That is one reason there was always a waiting list to actually access "the computer" instead of a terminal.

And yea, Virtual Machines are great. They are now basically the norm for servers, where a small business can have their main server, their e-mail server, and several other servers running on a single machine. On my test unit at home (dual processor Opteron blade) I frequently run Server 2008, Server 2012, some flavour of Unix (Mint or SOlaris), and at the moment Win8. This I expect to see continue in growth, but this still will not supplant the desktop PC that I can see.

And mostly it is just economics. Computers have gotten so inexpensive that a company really can't save money by going to a "dumbed down box" anymore. When a decent computer was $2,500 and a dumb box was $700, it made economic sense. But now with bulk purchases running at under $1,000, I don't think there would be any real savings going that route (not to mention the additional storage that would be required on the servers, since these units usually do not have storage devices of their own).

When I was a Hughes in 2000 there was a group looking into these as a possible solution to bring down licensing costs. But when the Network gurus at CSC were brought in, they explained what that would mean to server storage. All of the petabytes of data stored on user machines (1GB was standard, multiplied by everybody in the corporation) would have to be moved to gigantic servers full of nothing but hard drives to store all of this data, from documents and drawings to email and everything else. The bandwidth they said would be an issue but solvable, the storage requirements would have been absolutely insane though.

Yea, I kind of do in a way. Primarily I administer remotely Ubuntu systems scattered around the country. I can set up 2 way visual interfaces with a VNC client, and administer it through a command line. And yes, speed is not an issue.

Now imagine a company with 300 employees, and they are arrive in the morning and try to open Word. I remember seeing the networks at Hughes and other major companies slow to a crawl in the morning and afternoon after lunch, when everybody got back to their desks and checked their email again and checked their stock prices. Improvement in network technologies and increased segmentation have helped that, but so has reducing traffic in the first place as much as possible.

I can't see many administrators of large organizations wanting to see that trend reverse itself again.

As for the clusters, if somebody needs that much number crunching power, they can find ways. Some of the first clusters were really weak computers, discarded desktops (80386) at college campuses. Today you can pick up 2 processor 1U blade servers for $50. Even with such "low end" systems, you can pack a 24U rack with more processing power then most people can dream of for less then the cost of a single standard desktop system (not including the rack).

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/item/62021

 

Still talking about really old technology. I think we're more likely talking about a form of smart terminal.

Well, that is the direction we're moving, so I don't know what to tell you, other than it's happening.

And I'm not talking about a company of 300. More like an organization with a workforce number in the high 10s of thousands.

 

far from it

 

In my opinion, PCs aren't dead...yet. The demand for them just declined and will no longer be the same as what we have seen for the past 20 years.
Anyway, smartphones and tablets are PCs too. It's just in different form. Possibly PCs will die but I think it is more likely to evolve.

 

I think you're just about right, though I question how long a person could use touch screens in one sitting without having a sore arm. Most apps are quick things, it would more than likely be a pain to use something like that all day everyday. Same with the keyboard -- hard to type a 10 page paper on an iPad, and probably most other heavy use applications would end up the same way. iPads are great for short burst uses, but not so much for something that would take an hour to complete.

 

I have multiple uses for computer. At work I use my workstation PC for CAD design and blueprint creation, and occasionally some rendering and animation if our customer wants a pretty picture and video of our concept that we've designed for them. None of that is doable on a phone or tablet, and laptops have to sacrifice speed for power and heat conservation.

My home PC is built for gaming and the games I play aren't going to be run on any tablets/phones any time soon. Heck, even if I could play Starcraft, Battlefield, Eve, or any of the other games I play on a phone/tablet, I sure as heck wouldn't.

For people who have the specific uses for PCs, they are not replaceable.

But I can see how tablets/phones/laptops would be a more feasible purchase for someone who just uses them casually for the internet or word processing and stuff. Gotta say though, if someone came and told me they were a gamer and when I asked what they gamed on, they said a phone/tablet, I'd probably still be laughing the next day.

 

Not anytime soon. Tablets and Smartphones are still a long way from being Mother Boxes and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

This isn't due to the technology, which right now could give us a whole new environment but to the excreable wars between the various manufacturers who refuse to recognize they could all make a lot more money if they would adopt some universal standards and the nutter Luddites, who take the LoJacs off their cars cause they think the NSA gives a damn about how much they go to MacDonalds

My own circumstances are such that I have no use whatsoever for social media and thus none for a laptop. I got a tablet free at a store opening some months ago and haven't turned it on yet. OTOH I AM looking for a new Desktop, because the one I have is slowing perceptibly, particularly on newer software.

The only development I see which may make a difference is that Samsung is coming out with a wristwatch type which is waterproof. Since Dick Tracy saw the utility this would have in the 1930's I've wondered why in hell we've all been walking about with easily loseable boxes that go dead after a good rain. Go figure.

 

My laptop is nearly useless compared to a fullfledged desktop. And my smartphone with a big screen is still too small for practical purposes, You can't beat a desktop PC for home use. We have four in our home. And they'll stay until they get replaced with new ones. Everything else is just a gimmick.