This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That's why I play using a PC and not a console. Though PC components have also been overpriced for years.
Is it Moores law failing or have we finally reached the point where capitalists are not even pretending to advance technology in order to charge higher prices? Like are we actually not able to make things faster and cheaper anymore or is the market controlled by a monopoly that sees no benefit in significantly improving their products? My opinion has been leaning more and more towards the latter since the pandemic.
This has little to do with "capitalists" and everything to do with the fact that we've basically reached the limit of silicon.
While blaming anything and everything on "capitalism" is disingenuous, it really does have to do with a lack of competition in the space. None of the incumbents have any incentive to really put much effort into improving the performance of gaming GPUs. PC CPUs face a similar issue. They're good enough for the vast majority of users. There is no sizable market that would justify spending huge amounts of money on developing new products. High end gaming PCs and media production workstations are niche products. The real money is made in data centre products.
I mean, when the definition of economy can be "how the species produces what it needs" then the answer to a problem is probably capitalism even if that answer explains very little
Moore's law started failing in 2000, when single core speeds peaked, leading to multi core processors since. Memory and storage still had ways to go. Now, the current 5nm process is very close to the limits imposed by the laws of physics, both in how small a laser beam can be and how small a controlled chemical reaction can be done. Unless someone can figure a way to make the whole chip fabrication process in less steps, or with higher yield, or with cheaper machines or materials, even if at 50nm or larger, don't expect prices to drop.
Granted, if TSMC stopped working in Taiwan, we'd be looking at roughly 70% of all production going poof, so that can be considered a monopoly (it is also their main defense against China, the "Silicon Shield", so there's more than just capitalistic greed at play for them)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po-nlRUQkbI - How are Microchips Made? 🖥️🛠️ CPU Manufacturing Process Steps | Branch Education
Very interesting! I was aware of the 5nm advancements and the limitations of chip sizes approaching the physical limitations of the material but I had been assuming since we worked around the single core issue a similar innovation would appear for this bottleneck. It seems like the focus instead was turned towards integrating AI into the gpu architecture and cranking up the power consumption for marginal gains in performance instead of working towards a paradigm shift. Thanks for the in depth explanation though, I always appreciate an opportunity to learn more about this type of stuff!
The consoles unless you root or jailbreak them are too restrictive anyway. For older games you can just use an emulator on your PC or mobile.
No, it turns out that lying to the consumer about old tech is profitable.
