Gaming Downturns

[Scarpia]

You live in contrafactual fantasy land.  And based on what you post, you clearly do not use much in the way of business software.

I can certainly imagine that gaming is the primary application driving PC video cards, and those processors are surprisingly fast.  There are major efforts to reprogram video chips to do scientific calculations, because some types of numerical simulations are well adapted to the architecture of those chips, which have a tremendous performance/cost ratio.

However, I would assume the primary driving force for faster and faster computation comes from the massive computational infrastructure of sites such as Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, etc.   Fast processors have become a commodity, so that companies whose business was based on high performance CPUs (Silicon Graphics, or Sun Microsystems and their SPARC architecture) have vanished.  The latest thing is networking vast arrays of fairly mundane CPUs into a cluster. 

Another big driver is mobile devices.  The Apple iPad blows every other tablet away because they have a CPU which was custom designed to integrate with their mobile operating system.  The efficiency they get from engineering them together facilitates huge reductions in power consumption, giving them their unparalleled battery life.   The stunning bloat and inefficiency of Microsoft Windows---which was based on the notion that processors would always get fast enough to make the performance seem acceptable---doesn't transfer well to mobile platforms, where the OS inefficiency causes the battery to run down.

[drogulus]

     The biggest influences on hardware development are the needs of big corporate clients for powerful servers and workstations. And for graphics subsystems I'd want to look at the sales of pro versus consumer cards. The best pro cards are far more expensive. And they often lack features gamers want. Most of these features are software based, but there are differences at the hardware level. I read that some corporate IT guys bought consumer cards and modded them and saved a ton of money. The biggest difference would be the drivers.

[Josquin des Prez]

I need to precise i was talking about home computers. Servers always used a different hardware architecture until very recently, where things became a bit more standardized across the board.

BTW, if anybody needs further proof that companies are out of touch with reality and completely and utterly blinded by their greed (to the point of insanity), just watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBPYdgy35KA&feature=player_embedded

This is the future envisioned by gaming companies, where every single thing you do in a game requires a micro-transaction, because, it enhances the experience, or something. Its like something straight out of the Onion.