PC's and the future, where to from here?

[Vlerkies]

So I have been following the CPU Core thread for interest and amusement sake.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=104441

 

In response to the questions ED came back with a pretty coherent answer that would satisfy almost everyone however one line intrigued me and got me thinking about the role of pc's moving forward and I am interested in what other people think or believe will happen.

 

The question about effective use of multicore is of course a pretty legitimate and a hot one.

C++ code base of DCS is >1.5M lines of non-trivial and sometimes very complex code, which was mosty architectured in the single-CPU era.

The size of the team can be easily estimated using the about box of the game.

 

We are definitely moving to multicore, obviously it's the present and the future (if there's a future for PC's at all).

But DCS is our bread and butter and we just can't throw it away.

 

So the things are definitely moving, but not as fast as everyone, including us, wants.

 

Personally I believe the mobile environment and devices will evolve and morph at a rapid rate, it's already happening and more and more people are using these devices at work/home rather than personal desktop computers.

 

At work we have moved from big old pc's to laptops to tablets with centralized servers over the years.Tablets are great but its not easy working full time off them form a desk. Laptops you just dock.

 

At home though we have pc's for numerous reasons, a lot of which can be accomplished on more mobile or portable devices now like tablets. On this forum the main reason we have pc's is mainly gaming I would expect.

But what is this going to look like in 10 or 20 years time. Will there still be PC's or will they slowly die? Will consoles (or are they already) cannibalizing the gaming market to such an extent that the PC is under threat?

 

I would like to think they will never die and just evolve in the roles and functions they are used for in the home, centralized control of various things etc.

Anyway, I'm just interested as to what other people think the future holds for us.

[Cookie]

Well, the first time I heard the PC will die was back in the early 90s, when I got my shiny brandnew 386 DX 40 with a whopping 8MBb of RAM and an expensive 3,5" floppy drive (because clearly, 3,5" floppies would be the future).

 

Now, 20 years later, I still hear the PC will die rather soon. Also, about ten years ago it was a hard fact within the simming community that there would never be a hardcore sim like Falcon 4.0 anymore, because nobody would be able to afford the development costs.

 

Yet here I sit today, in front of a pc, flying around in the DCS A-10C using things like the TM WH and TrackIR. Just ten years ago that stuff would have blown my mind.

 

So yeah, I take all those predictions about how the pc will die rather soon with a HUGE truckload of salt.