We’ve been up against the 5Ghz thermal wall for over a decade. We can keep adding cores but we need significantly improved design (less nanometers) for these gains - and these are now running up against another wall, namely quantum tunneling which begins being a problem at around the nanometer scale.
I assume only a radically different architecture (light instead of electricity?) will be able to smash these barriers.
Very long story short- Trump crashing oil prices in 2016/2017 more or less ‘killed’ GlobalFoundries and which left TSMC as the only leading edge pureplay foundry. (Intel isn’t pureplay, Samsung is no longer chasing leading edge)
The PS5’s price is higher than it was 4.5 years ago at launch, a device with identical function. While we should be seeing a lite version at 30% the price, we see a pro version at 50% more. Crazy.
“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”
A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.
We continue to be able to make faster chips, both via smaller nodes, but also via advanced packaging and architecture improvements.
But the costs of every new generational increase is rising faster than the % performance improvement.
I am personally hoping this will eventually lead to a culture of total optimization (similar to what we saw in the 90s on both PC and console), but there are likely significant barriers to implementing such a new development culture at scale.
I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.
The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.
Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.
I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.
The console market ever since the PS3 and xbox 360 has been a leech on the PC platform market. They turn up every X years apart to buy a cheap GPU and CPU on a chip and demand rock bottom prices for volume and pay for none of the research and development in the intervening years.
I respectfully disagree. AMD basically said that they survived the Bulldozer debacle because of Sony and Microsoft ordering their APUs. The custom designs also have trickled down with AMD making iGPU that are desktop levels now (8060S).
But that’s what they’ve always done. The NES used a 6502 processor that no one used anymore, and the Sega a Z80 after CP/M went the way of dinosaurs. The Xbox and PS2 used out of date Pentium processors.
OG Xbox - nVidia GPU - never gets a price cut and is discontinued almost immediately after 360 releases (with an AMD GPU from which MS never looked back at nVidia)
PS3 - nVidia GPU - Only got small price cuts very late, discontinued almost immediately after PS4 release (with an AMD GPU from which Sony never looked back at nVidia)
Switch - nVidia SoC - never got a real price cut either (though Switch2 is also an nVidia SoC)
The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don’t know how you call that small.
So the Switch is essentially for rent. You can play it, as long as Nintendo decides you’re in its good graces.
You don’t own something to which somebody else has the master off-switch. And with their continued abuse of their own fans and other game developers through the courts, it’s a testament to FOMO and fandom that they are still in business.
Vote with your wallets, y’all. This kind of behavior only makes you the loser.
My first Nintendo console was an NES that I got for Christmas the year it was released in the US. You can say thay I have been a Nintendo fan for a bit. Nowadays I repeat the same thing over and over again.
I love my emulating devices that are full of nintendo games I may or may not have paid for. I definitely paidbthe emulation company, nintendo? Nodidtho
What I took away from the story is that they’re still going to sell cartridges, but the games won’t actually be on them … they’re essentially bulky, overengineered QR codes to be able to download the game you just bought a physical copy off. So, services gone? Congrats on your useless $80 piece of plastic.
In my opinion, that oversimplifies it. PlayStation and Xbox have disks without the “Next Gen” Version on it for years, but nobody cared. At this point there are also no games that have this license-on-a-cartridge.
After all, you can still sell the cartridge, something you cannot do with a completely digital game.
The game key cards are only an option developers can use. Afaik no Nintendo published games are using them. Most games still have the game on the cartridge
Hasn’t… basically every internet capable console been capable of hardware ID level banning itself, upon detecting being tampered with, at least to some extent?
Like I have no interest in a Switch as a gamer, but this basically reads as a gauntlet off the hand, thrown to the ground challenge to hardware hackers.
Banning is fine, we’re talking about remote bricking. If I hack my Xbox, I’m fine with not being allowed to use it to join msft’s network, but I am not fine with them identifying my hacked device over the internet and actively sending some sort of backdoor self-destruct instruction to it. To me that’s a violation of the CFAA.
You do realise that long ago MSFT switched from being a desktop software company to cloud and telemetry, right? Win10 and Win11 were free, and Azure isn’t exactly driving them into the ground.
Oh my god if I see one more “YOuR SwItCh 2 WiLl Be BrIckEd, NiNtEnDo iS aNtI cOnSuMeR!1!1!” post
Every fucking modern console with an internet connection does this. Switch 1 does this. If you hack your console, keep it off the internet. Brain dead easy. Furthermore, are we talking account brick/ban, or full hardware brick, because obviously they’re going to brick your account for online play, because hackers. If it’s a hardware brick (without being on the internet), then that would suck (but is not surprising, obviously duh Nintendo doesn’t want to lose money).
People will figure out how to hack Switch 2, give it a few years. Emulators of varying quality will be made, and will be of good quality eventually.
If you don’t want Switch 2 for the price, don’t buy it. Simple as that.
If that first line is your takeaway, you clearly didn’t actually read my post, in which I said my last console was an SNES.
So to presume my knowledge of modern consoles and belittle me because you’re wrong … breathtaking. I’ve no interest in a Switch. I posted this not because it has any chance of affecting me but because it seemed like news people who might want a switch could use. That’s the purpose of a news-aggregation site.
My comment is not personally directed at you, it’s just more about how everyone and their mom is talking about Nintendo’s recent decisions on piracy. Literally every tech/gaming community on Lemmy (and social media in general) is talking about it, and I’m tired of seeing it every day. I don’t mean to belittle you about your last console being the SNES, it’s just frustrating rhetoric that others have repeated because they truly seem to think Switch 2 is the only console doing this.
I understand what you mean about how someone who pirates probably would’ve never bought the game anyway, just like people (including me) who watch playthroughs of games that they never would’ve bought, hence tbe company was never gonna make money anyway. But even if companies know that fact, they’re not gonna just ignore people who break their ToS to pirate because they don’t want to lose money.
As you stated, you buy music of the stuff you originally pirated, and some game pirates might do that. But music has replay value compared to a lot of games. Once I finish a long RPG, there’s a very unlikely chance I’m picking it back up again, unless it’s many years later or it’s a hand-me-down to someone. If I pirated and played that type of game, I’m unlikely to buy it because why bother, other than to show support to the devs?
Companies don’t want to lose those who pirated and potentially would’ve bought the game. The whole point of piracy is that it has to be more convenient than buying the game, and since they know homebrewing can get to a very comfortable point, they don’t want to lose people to that.
My taste in games is somewhat different. I don’t look for storylines; I look for games with tremendous replay value like Factorio (which has the added benefit of endlessly being able add mods and start a totally new experience). I got it early enough – coincidentally because of an Ars review – that it was still just $20.
Some 800 hours later, that makes it 2.5 cents per hour for entertainment. And I’ll likely get the update pack when I have sufficient hardware, but I get that many popular games are more like books. I don’t tend to reread one as soon as I’m done, but in a few years, I might get a wild hair.
Oh yeah, it totally depends on the game. I do play and love the highly replayable stuff, but those games I almost never pirate, it’s usually something I already bought or would buy.I think one of the few non-online replayable games I’ve pirated was Rhythm Heaven on 3DS.
For quite some time, I’d watch YouTube playthroughs of about an hour and realized that in most cases, that was all I really needed. If shit starts looking grindy in an hour, you likely made a bad game.
I’m grateful for these streamers. They save me from wasting money.
We should make noise about it and enforce regulations that ban practises that do not allow people to own the things they own. We don’t want to end up like america.
If you hack your console and put it on the internet, don’t be surprised that you’re bricked. Do I think it’s a little extreme to brick a Switch that hasn’t even joined an online game? Yes, that does suck, but realistically any game company is not going to knowingly let you use a device that is hacked. Once again, if it’s just an account brick, then who cares, make a new one (why would you hack with your main account?). Hardware bricks are pretty shitty, but there’s no way you could fight that in court (I deserve the right to hack my console and get free games?).
Once they stop making updates, you’ll own the switch anyway, as then they don’t give a fuck/can’t do shit about hackers. I’ve hacked my WiiU and several 3DS because there are no more new updates to ever brick them, they’re obsolete/abandoned consoles.
I fucking love the thought of paying Big Corporate in ‘exposure’ 😂
Also my basic experience — nobody lost anything (Linux ISOs, obviously), because the alternative was not me buying something.
Edit: As an adult, I’ve spent more money on vinyl records in the last decade than I have buying music for the first three quarters of my life. And much of the music in the first three quarters was also on vinyl.
And then Spotify subscription fees since launch. What is that, 20 years? 😳 And now I’m trying to move to self-hosted because all of Spotify’s buying stock in weapon manufacturers and giving head to Dumbph & Friends is making me retch 🤢
I never quite got the idea of music streaming. Maybe I’m just too old (yells at cloud), but I listened to radio shows (online) to discover new music, then downloaded it. In the era of mobile data, this seems to have been a solid choice.
I struggle to hit my 5GB data limit by a large margin … adding a streaming service and then having to upgrade my plan because of it sounds like throwing money away when I spend less a month on new tracks than Spotify costs.
There’s been some weird conditioning going on over the years with younger generations that it totally makes sense to just throw a lot of money every month at things that have cheaper, easily accessible one-time solutions. Just because you can’t buy a house doesn’t mean you should rent everything else.
Hell … I was born in the '70s, and the last time I had cable was when I lived with my parents. “Let me get this straight … you want me to pay usurious prices because there’s no way to avoid ESPN being bundled in and then trump it with ads?”
As a rule, if it has ads, I won’t pay for it (I was fine with it back in print days, as they were paying my salary on the other side of the hairline). That’s what the advertisers should be doing. You’re charging the customers too much and the advertisers too little if this is the equilibrium that makes line go up while taking money that customers could have had to spend on the advertised products.
Let’s say cable prices dropped to $20 per month. I’d imagine you’d get those ads in front of far more eyeballs, so increased ad rates would actually be beneficial. But let’s not bring logic into capitalism.
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