CPU Competition Heating Up In 2012? 100
jd writes "2012 promises to be a fun year for hardware geeks, with three new 'Aptiv-class' MIPS64 cores being circulated in soft form, a quad-core ARM A15, a Samsung ARM A9 variant, a seriously beefed-up 8-core Intel Itanium and AMD's mobile processors. There's a mix here of chips actually out, ready to be put on silicon, and in last stages of development. Obviously these are for different users (mobile CPUs don't generally fight for marketshare with Itanium dragsters) but it is still fascinating to see the differences in approach and the different visions of what is important in a modern CPU. Combine this with the news reported earlier on DDR4, and this promises to be a fun year with many new machines likely to appear that are radically different from the last generation. Which leaves just one question — which Linux architecture will be fully updated first?"
Re:Too many other bottlenecks (Score:5, Informative)
SSD's too expensive
Regular hard drives were just as expensive (if not more so) when they were at a comparable point in their development and life-cycle
Here is an awful-colored chart [ns1758.ca] showing price per MB over the years. It's not so much that SSDs are really that expensive, it's that traditional HDDs have gotten ridiculously cheap, and capacities have grown beyond the storage needs of most average people. I remember actually filling up hard drives and having to buy larger and larger disks to hold my shit every couple years, but the 500 GB WD in my most current build is running at 40% capacity and I've got a lot of media on there.