The end of high power chips?

Posted on Thursday, April 23, 2009 by Erlik

A very interesting article on ARS technica seems to confirm what was already said earlier: the days of ever more powerful chips is nearing an end, not because of a technical wall in Moore's law, but because we fail to find usage for all that power!

Following the article there would be only 6 mains customers for high power chips: medical imaging, defense, oil and gas exploration, pharmaceutical research, 3D rendering for movies, and finance.

Now as pointed out in the article finance is one of the biggest consumer of chips, and it is coming to a close. What will this means for the other ones? more expensive processors and GPUs. And what about consumers? Since most of them have already a powerful enough PC that does everything most of them want, this shouldn't be a problem, on the contrary manufacturers will have to compete on price rather than on performance, which would mean cheaper atom and entry level processors.

For the aspiring media creator it is bad news however, as somebody who wish do do video editing or 3D rendering on his home desktop will benefit less from the "trickle down" effect of these high end processors.
Image cc by Olivender

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