[quote=180146:@Louis Desjardins]The first generation core I7 system I purchased several years ago still works sufficiently well that I don’t need to change it. It used to be that the system you bought 6 months ago was outdated. Lately, new processors generations do not offer very noticeable improvements . The old model works just fine, the new model does not offer huge improvements. Why replace the old one? One gets a much larger improvement boost by replacing the old magnetic hard disk with a SSD device, for much less money than a whole system costs. This is primarily why sales of PC’s are slowing down.
I read elsewhere that tablet sales as a whole are also slowing down, same with smartphones in general. I suspect the reasons to be similar in that space, too. Owned models are currently good enough, new models do not offer enough real improvement (once you wipe all the hype off) to justify the expense.[/quote]
Tablets have slowed down http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2954317 but the forecast for 2015 remains 233 Million units, as compared to 77 Million PCs.
But what you say is perfectly true. Analysts think tablets will not be updated as often as phones.
As for PCs, Moore’s Law insured for the longest time regular upgrades and renewal, whereas the multicore thing does not mean in most cases such a quantum leap in performances. Certainly not doubling execution time.
One of the main challenge for years to come will be for system designers, to find a solid, more efficient and elegant way to distribute tasks amongst parallel processors. For the moment, it falls on the application to manage the cores. It is well and good to have 8 cores, but each is not much faster than a Pentium, and rare are the applications taking full advantage of the 8 cores on the latest generation. Case in point : Xojo uses but one core. Hopefully after 64 bit we will be able to use more cores. Eve, just one would be a huge improvement.
I could not find a comparison of performances of one core in a recent i7 against a single core Pentium (or one core in a dual core). Amazingly enough, it went up to 3.7 Ghz or so, when the most common i7 usually stays under 3 Ghz. I do have a PC at 3.4 Ghz, but frankly, I see little improvement as compared to my previous machine as far as Xojo is concerned.