In the year 2011: technology.

[strawberryfrog]

Summary: Shiny new distractions, important new tools, softly totalitarian spyware, all on the same device.A few years ago I would travel without any device that could be called a computer. As a rule of thumb, if a device can render a web page it's a computer since it can run stored programs (the browser), scripts on the fly in the page and connect

Comments

[andrewducker]

Desktop processors do continue to get more powerful - the Core i7 processors are pretty damned amazing. And more cores are available all the time, with 4 core now being standard for desktops, and 6-core at the high end, and 10-core processors available for servers.

Plus, of course, graphics cards are ever-more-powerful, which boosts desktops a lot.

(Other than that, that's a really good roundup!)

[mac1235]

Graphics are great for games, but extra CPU cores are rarely useful past three. 1 for OS, 1 for antivirus and 1 for your program...

[andrewducker]

That depends if your program is written to be multithreaded. If it is then it's using more than one core. There are plenty of games that use two threads nowadays, although not so many that use more than that, so far as I'm aware. Hopefully it's something we'll see more of in the future.

[strawberryfrog]

The software libraries and programming techniques to deal with multi-core, and varying numbers of cores, are slowly becoming more available. the LINQ AsParallel stuff in .Net 4 that farms a map out to available cores.

I hadn't noticed desktop core count advancing all that fast, but I haven't been graphing the numbers.