News - Intel issues sales warning as PC industry declines

[HEXUS]

Says revenue for Q3 will be about $1bn less than previously forecast.

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[pctech2012]

Lets hope its not terminal decline as I sure as hell don't want my only choice to be a tablet or ultrabook.

[spoons33]

My thoughts entirely, I dont know what I would do without my desktop and the ability to upgrade it to whatever I want.......I am sure that day will come and we will all end up with a smart phone and a console

[popoyskie]

if they can place two gtx 690 on a tablet and smartphones. well goodbye desktop

[pctech2012]

Seems the market dances to Apple's tune (first to get rid of the floppy drive, made touchscreens popular so now you can't get anything but on mid and high end mobiles, phasing out optical drives) so might well be the case I fear.

Those buying this tablet hardware today are so short sighted its alarming.

These devices are but dumb terminals so if the company supplying the system they connect to goes under a lot of the functionality will go bye bye too.

[Scainer]

I think Ivy Bridge was a real disappointment, and a lot of potential upgraders skipped it.
Lots of enterprise computers especially in education have a two year cycle, but any upgrades are waste of money as the performance isn't lagging.
Its like a performance saturation point has been reached. The SSD seems to be the most worthwhile upgrade in todays market, not a CPU.

[pctech2012]

I made the jump from a 6 year old Presler Pentium D 940 3.4Ghz to an Ivy Bridge i5 3450 3.1 Ghz and the performance difference is remarkable but I think CPUs have reached the point where they are fast enough for pretty much anything and the problem now is keeping them fed with data.

Speaking about CPUs in general I'm quite surprised the Cell CPU as used in the PS3 didn't do better (IBM marketed a line of servers using it and then canned them as it wasn't selling enough) as its a remarkable bit of engineering.

Intel have also fabricated an engineering sample of an 80 core CPU and each core has circuitry that acts like a router to communicate with the others. http://news.cnet.com/intel-shows-off...3-6158181.html

I'd love to a see a PC with one of those but it would probably cost more than I would earn in 10 years,

[OilSheikh]

Maybe they shouldn't have released too many socket types?!
LGA 1156 > 1155 > 2011 in the space of a few years ?

Socket 775 lasted from Pentium 4 > Pentium D > Core2Duo > Quad core, why couldn't the i3/i5/i7 chips last in one socket ?

People aren't willing to upgrade as their chip on the latest socket becomes obsolete way too quickly.

[saltyzip]

I think its pretty obvious what is happening. More and more of the needed computer power is moving into the cloud, so there is less need for a more powerful desktop or laptop at home, and soon to be at work too.

The needs at home for the majority of people require no more than a low powered arm cpu and 512MB or RAM.

We are slowly moving back to the dumb terminal mainframe style world, so this decline isn't going to slow down at anytime, it will only accelerate as internet speeds increase.

[hwarda]

Intel, not all of us PC minded..

PC hobbyist will grow up, more and more grow bored, move on to the next toy.
Our nowadays brothers/sisters more busy with social network, less hardware play. Processor/Board/Chipset are no longer central of their life, relationship is.

[HalloweenJack]

and AMD saw this coming with moving into APU`s - 1 chip that can do all....

[Malphas]

Hardly surprising. Other than heavy media editing work and gaming, PC hardware has been in excess of requirements for years now. More processing power isn't a selling point anymore when all the average consumer needs a computer for is web browsing, email, instant messenger and light word processing.

[Willzzz]

Hardly surprising. Other than heavy media editing work and gaming, PC hardware has been in excess of requirements for years now. More processing power isn't a selling point anymore when all the average consumer needs a computer for is web browsing, email, instant messenger and light word processing.

As you say all of those basic tasks haven't over taxed a processor for over a decade, so I hardly think that is the reason for a decline now.

There are a number of factors all working together, the rise of tablets, smartphones and other mobile computers, the general economic climate and the pre Windows 8 slowdown.

[OilSheikh]

What about cost ? i7's cost way tooo much!

[Malphas]

As you say all of those basic tasks haven't over taxed a processor for over a decade, so I hardly think that is the reason for a decline now.

Well your mistake is assuming this decline is new, and that everyone had a PC ten years ago. PC growth has been slowing for a decade as the market reaches saturation point, until finally we have a situation where everyone who wants a computer has one (as opposed to ten years ago where it was perhaps one PC shared in a household) and no-one other than a minority have any reason to upgrade.

There are a number of factors all working together, the rise of tablets, smartphones and other mobile computers, the general economic climate and the pre Windows 8 slowdown.

Those are all factors as well, yes.

[Malphas]

What about cost ? i7's cost way tooo much!

But i5's, i3's, Pentiums and Celerons all exist as well; in addition to AMD's offerings so I'm not sure what your point is. Not only that but computers are cheaper than ever, I remember a laptop I bought ten years ago for £1400 was considered a budget machine back then, and now £1400 would be considered borderline insane, with people complaining about £700 Ultrabooks still being too expensive, and then there's 10 years of inflation on top of that to consider.