yogibbear wrote:Anyone else able to bridge the gap further or similar to me skipping Sandy and Ivy bridge?
I just upgraded my laptop from 7 year old Thinkpad R51 which housed a Pentium M to a new Thinkpad T420 sporting a SB i7, so in that case I didn't skip the current procs.
My desktop is, I think, three years old now, and I still have plenty of headroom on it. I probably won't look at upgrading it for another four years or so.
Krogoth wrote:There's still excitement in computer hardware. It is just not found in the desktop space. The current rage is found in either portables or servers/workstation level hardware.
superjawes wrote:There is excitement...even in the desktop sphere...
That, and there are a lot of cool things going on in the mobile world. Ivy Bridge has created a lot of fairly powerful ultrabooks with okay/decent battery life ...., and then you can look at the smartphone races where Microsoft is a distant third to Android and iOS, both of which are doing cool things.
You're both right. Low power computing is exciting, ARM emerging is exciting, and servers/workstations have always been more fun then desktops. (I've always been a server junkie, so that statement is biased.)
Part of the fun for me has always been to get the max performance out of low end equipment. You learn a lot about how stuff works when you can easily hit the limits.
It's fun to watch ARM grow into an alternative platform. In the 90s there was PPC, MIPS, and SPARC (SPARC is still alive) as alternative platforms, but they have never edged into the mainstream with bare boards the way ARM is doing. There are problems, but that's part of fun in seeing the hardware mature.
Re-purposing desktop stuff for server duty is interesting because of the problems it introduces. Desktop stuff in inherently unreliable, compared to the over built server stuff, so it's interesting figuring out how to work around that.
I'm really interested in the Fusion-IO stuff, and I would be interested in seeing what I could do with it.
