The Death Of The PC As We Know It
Times are changing. Our society isn't exactly sure
what the outcome will be, but the writing is on the wall. It has been recently
announced that the PC is experiencing the longest decline in sales since… well,
ever.
Let’s
zoom in on that last bit shall we...
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Ouch... Things didn't improve for very long after 2011.
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Our smartphones and tablets are taking over. You
know they’re powerful, but HOW powerful exactly? The results may shock you!
Consider this:
A high end 2013 smartphone has 3.35 times the performance*
of a 2007 Desktop PC CPU, 1.5 times the performance of a 2011 Desktop PC CPU
and can manage 12.5% more performance than an Xbox 360. Umm.. WHAT?! Most people
don’t even realise that there is a
mobile ‘revolution’ happening right under our noses. More exact details are in
the main article.
*performance as a measure of floating instructions
per second.
Now that I’ve got your attention...
Now that I’ve got your attention...
In order to understand the grand scale of this
‘revolution’, let’s take a look back. The computer is possibly man’s greatest invention, after
the ability to control the electrical current.
Here’s a brief but rather interesting overview of the origins of the computer
and its history The computer’s exact time of arrival into this world depends on
your own definition but it goes something like this:
ORIGINS
1812 | Charles Babbage had a vision for a general-purpose machine. The idea came to light when he notice a vast number of mistakes in a table of logarithms. Babbage realised that the work could be done by a machine much fast and more reliably than an any human.
1930| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a machine that could solve differential equations. A few years passed and scientists realised they could exploit the binary number system for use in electrical devices.
1938 | A German mathematician, Konrad Zuse, invents the "Z1". It had the makings of a modern computer, including a processor unit, memory and a binary number system in its operation.
1943 | America steps in with a 5 tonne calculator at Harvard University that caught the eye of International Business Machines (IBM).
Later that year, the famous 'Colossus' computer was born. It was the first programmable computer and arguably helped the Allies win WWII via its ability to decipher enemy codes. It was a fatty though, at about 1 tonne. It had the awesome processing power of 1500 vacuum tubes.
1951 | The Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) becomes the worlds first commercial computer. One of its first tasks was to predict the 1952 U.S presidential election outcome.
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| Above: Colossus computer running Battle Field 4 |
MODERN COMPUTING
1960’s
The Apollo 11 guidance computer, that helped take Man
to the moon, did so with just 2kb of memory and 32kb of storage, with an
incredible CPU speed of 1.024MHZ. Even though it was a powerhouse for its day,
let’s put this into context.
In 2013, a mobile phone can have not one, but four
CPU’s clocked at 2.3 GHZ (Snapdragon 800). That’s 2,246x times faster than the Apollo 11
guidance computer (not including multitasking which was done manually in 1969).
Let’s keep going. Modern phones can have up to 3 GB of RAM (that’s 1,572,864x
times as much!) with 64GB of storage expandable up to a possible 96GB (that’s 3,146,875x
times as much!!) Think about the next
time you see someone Google “kitty cat memes” on their phone!
Also in the 1960’s, one man was about 25 years
ahead of his time. His name was Douglas C. Engelbart. On December 9th,
1968 in San Francisco, the world was about to witness one of the greatest
visionaries of all time. While hippies were frolicking outside on Haight-Ashbury, Engelbart gave
a tech demo dubbed “The Mother Of All Demos”. It featured word editing,
hyperlinks, video conferencing, text and graphics, a mouse… It really was just
amazing for its time. Sadly Douglas Engelbart passed away on July 2nd.
Let his work live on...
1970’s
A great revolution is set in motion by the
introduction of the Intel 4004 chip in 1971 and the computer makes its way into
our homes. At the spearhead of this movement was the Apple II. Apple would have
forever been a fruit if it wasn’t for a little software package called
VisiCalc. It turned the cooperate industry on its head, no longer was the PC
just for hobbyists but it was now a real business tool. When accountants saw
VisiCalc, they literally broke down and cried. Their lives were changed because
all of a sudden, what previously took them countless hours of painstaking work
could now be done in seconds. The computer had become personal.
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| Above: Behold. VisiCalc. |
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| Above: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak having some classic laughs with an apple II |
USER INTERFACE AGE
1980’s
It’s all about
being the fastest and the most powerful. Primitive graphics and user interfaces
first start showing up in 1981.You no longer had to be scared of the computer anymore
since the mouse and pointer system made it child’s play. Gone were the days of
typing instructions on a green screen. “You don’t even need to know how to
program to use one” well that’s the world Steve Jobs wanted anyway. IBM and the
big corporate side didn’t see the light however, they just dismissed the format
as “cute”. Meanwhile, in the home, the most dominant computer of the 80’s was
the Commodore 64. Strangely enough, the British had a huge computer market compared
to today. In the 80’s. In 1981, the British company Acorn Computers conceived
the ARM chipset. Boom. Today ARM chips power 98% of mobile devices!
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| Above: Bill Cosby likes the Commodore 64, it must be good. |
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| Above: Some cool cat's playing with a Commodore PET in 1983. |
INTERNET AGE
1990’s
By the 90’s, computers began to vastly improve in
their capabilities and the PC exploded into just about every western home and
became more capable with help from a little thing called the World Wide Web. In
1996, two guys casually set up a small research project that would later grow
to take over the world. Those two guys were Larry Page and Sergey Brin,
and that project was ‘Google’. Windows was dominant with Windows 95 and 98 capturing
the new concept of the “information highway” allowing absolute noobs to get
online easily.
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| Above: Bill Gates wearing all blue. A colour that he also liked to use in his error screens. |
2000’s
Now the whole world suddenly became smaller as emails
and file sharing became common place. For the first time ever, you could see
what the world was doing and instantly interact to it. We saw the rise of
Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Tumblr, Wikipedia…etc. The world suddenly
was full of worldwide interaction and information, and our PC’s were the only
real gateway. Until 2007. On January 9th, 2007,
one moment changed the world. During a Key Note, Steve Jobs calmly pulled a
small glass slab out of his pocket. He touched the screen with his finger and
flicked downwards with through a list of music. The crowd was shocked, they
could do nothing but gasp and cheer. No one had ever seen the human-technology
barrier broken so clearly; no more buttons, remotes, things to get in the way.
You can now interact with your machine physically.
This was of course, the introduction of the iPhone.
The iPhone’s slogan was “This is only the beginning”. You can’t argue with that...
But of course Android would later come along and beat its ass..
MOBILE AGE
In the 2010’s the landscape began to change. This
is where we really begin our story.
I
want you to shift your mind, just for the duration of what remains in this
article. You can put it back when you’re done reading- just bear with me.
I want to
propose an idea. What if I told you that the smartphone and tablet, those
things that you take for granted every day, were the very early form, the
infant stages - the next iteration (or continuation) of the PC.
“HERESY!!”, you scream. It can’t run Crysis 4, it can’t do video editing, you
can’t write code on it! It’s just a toy. It's forgivable to still see tablets
as those annoying things which SHOULD be able to do everything but somehow,
they aren’t QUIET hitting the spot. You'd be partially correct but not entirely
correct. Let me break it down for you:
There are two main groups of PC users: Content CREATORS
and content CONSUMERS Most people have used a computer but have never written a
line of code. I make videos, produce music, use word processors and have used
some specialist engineering software. If it wasn't for these tasks (and a
select few others), I could do almost everything else in my daily routine on my
smartphone, right now.
This is where the content CONSUMERS come in. The
content consumer demographic usually consists of people that are scared of/
don’t care about technology and are “casual users”. All those viral videos of kitty cat’s, looking up recipes of cakes, Facebook,
Twitter, browsing articles or news stories… I hate to admit it, but this
population of PC user dominates. Why else do you think the iPad and other
tablets are set to overtake PC sales?
People simply no longer need a netbook, and (perhaps) soon will not need an ultrabook to do most of this stuff. For $120 you can by a Tegra 3 Quadcore tablet that can do 80% of the stuff you need as a content consumer. Let’s put the stakes up a bit - what if we have a top-of-the-line smart phone? Can we account for the content creators? Assume we couple the device with an efficient dock that takes 4 USB ports, card readers, full size Blutooth keyboards and mice, output’s 5.1 surround sound and plug it all into a 30” monitor and you’ll have something like this:
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| Above: Smartphone acting as a computer running Ubuntu. |
The concept is already here today. The only thing
missing is the software and apps. Today the software side is simply NOT up to
scratch, the gap between PC and mobile devices will only narrow as app
developers begin to realise this and really cash in on “killer apps.” A killer
app for example, may be a full version of Microsoft office with no compromises
for the mobile space. A killer operating system may even have to be someone’s
brainchild. It’s coming, but we still have to compromise for now.
Speaking
of compromises, a lot of the technologically literate readers out there are
probably poised over your keyboards ready to fire off a comment about the CPU
architecture. Yes, this is the one thing holding us back from TRULY being in a
post-PC era today. Let me break it down once again. 98% of mobile devices use
ARM architecture (remember that small British Acorn company in the 80’s from
above… yeah). ARM processors are insanely power efficient but do not allow the
same apps that run on say, Windows or Mac OS These apps just simply don’t readily run without severe modifications. Desktop PC operating system platforms use X86 architecture which is a world away from ARM. The only way I could see the two worlds coming together is if chip manufacturers such as AMD and Intel step up to the plate and produce ultra-low power, high performance X86 chips in the coming decades. Or if the apps developed on ARM portable devices become so capable that the need for X86 chips vanish all together (once again, decades away). The bottom line is that ultra-portable devices will continue to outsell PC’s and it’s just a matter of time before the big app developers/ CPU companies see the shiny new cash cow. These are my thoughts, no one can predict the future, except Marty Mcfly.
This is all truly amazing because the modern smart device has only been around for 5 years… 5 YEARS!! To clarify, a modern smart device is one that has a dominant capacitive touch screen input featuring the “App-dictates-all” concept. Digging deeper, the “App-dictates-all” concept means that the device is really just a blank canvas and it’s really the APPS turn it into WHATEVER the user wishes .It’s just starting, give it a chance. The hardware and, most importantly, the software will vastly improve from where it is today.On the topic of hardware, let's go back and look at the relative performances of PC's and desktops in more detail.
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| Above: Table of comparative performance. |
When we look at the full picture, we see that we
still have to be 3x the power of today’s smartphone to catch up to a 2007 PC’s
graphics card (PC CPU’s obviously aren’t good at floating point calculations).
Mid 2015 anyone? As for the Millions of Triangles Per Second (MTPS), I couldn’t
find any info on the Adreno 330 in the Snapdragon
800 but Qualcomm said it featured 2x the performance of the 320 which can
push 275 MTPS. With this in mind, 300+ MTPS is a safe bet.
The bottom line is that our 2013 smartphones can be readily compared to the Play Station 3 and Xbox 360... that idea alone blew me away. It must be noted that PC CPU's are still much more capable than mobile chipsets when it comes to multitasking due to hyper-threading technology and the like.
The bottom line is that our 2013 smartphones can be readily compared to the Play Station 3 and Xbox 360... that idea alone blew me away. It must be noted that PC CPU's are still much more capable than mobile chipsets when it comes to multitasking due to hyper-threading technology and the like.
I hate to be the one to predict the future and seem
a fool, but I’m fairly certain that the time will come when we have one device
that does it all. A device so small it fits in your pocket but has 5 times the
floating operation calculations and graphics performance of today’s PC’s. I’m
talking 2030 here, we still have to get over the problems of heat and power
consumption, but computers were once the size of rooms so hey, what’s the harm
in an open mind.
Next time you look at your phone, and you get frustrated when the GPS takes 10 seconds to find a lock, just remember that it’s going all the way to space and back! The computer that first sent the human race out there would probably take 6.24 hours to do the same thing at the very best!
Next time you look at your phone, and you get frustrated when the GPS takes 10 seconds to find a lock, just remember that it’s going all the way to space and back! The computer that first sent the human race out there would probably take 6.24 hours to do the same thing at the very best!
Enjoy the rest of your day!
-CF
Krazit, Tom (April 3, 2006). "ARMed
for the living room".CNet.com.
