I don't want to see hardware manufacturers pushing for higher performance. I want to see hardware manufacturers pushing for more power efficiency, maintaining current performance with less electricity and less heat output. I want to see hardware manufacturers pushing for hardware designs that see less of a burden to produce on the environment and on the people who extract the raw materials. I want to see the people extracting the raw materials treated better, paid better. I want to see software developers looking into more efficient implementations of their programs, making better use of the performance we do have available.
EDIT: I also want to see hardware manufacturers reclaiming the hardware they made that is outdated and no longer in use to return it to raw materials and reuse it to make the next generations of parts. Enough dumping this shit in landfills. Enough overmining of resources when we already have plenty.
i keep thinking like. i am typing this on a laptop from 2012 and it does everything I need, its the computer i use for almost everything. What if I had this with exactly the same specs but made with 2024-level manufacturing capabilities. it'd probably use like half the power at least, maybe even less
I feel like a lot of misteps in the marketing and launches have really made it wildly unclear why it is happening ... but this is exactly what Apple is doing with their Apple Silicon, and what MS keeps trying and failing to do with Silicon.
The simple fact of the matter is that X86 is a shit platform. It's insanely power hungry, inefficient, and runs at ridiculous temperatures, and yet we live in the laptop age.
This has been a problem for years. It's why your laptop from 2012 is still pretty much as useful as anything you can buy for an equivalent price right now: because the chips are just too fuckin' hot and hungry to be any faster than they are.
And then came tablets. For as much as the software has struggled to deliver, the fact of the matter is the iPad proved that most people's computers are pointless. That for years they were burning thousands of dollars on loud, hot, battery hungry laptops just so they could watch Youtube in bed. And the only reason they had to do that, was because X86 had a monopoly on "the computer" as a concept, so there wasn't any other choice.
Then came the iPad, and now you can watch Youtube on the toilet even! In a device that runs completely silently, nearly ice cold, and will do it for like 12 hours to a charge.
Apple has spent the last decade trying to compete with itself in this. Throttling the shit out of Intel's chips to try, desperately, to get them to compete with their own ARM machines ... before someone finally had the sense to ask "hang on, why the fuck are we doing this again?"
Say what ever you will about Apple, I know I will continue to, but the fact of the matter is I've had multiple Apple Silicon laptops now, and it is impossible to deny that they are the future. That they always were, and desperately need to be the future. They should've been the future 10 years ago, even.
For the vast majority of tasks, with really only one critical exception that's not as common as nerds would like to believe it is, there simple is no meaningful difference between my M2 Macbook Pro, and the Intel and AMD laptops I used before it, in terms of performance. It's not faster, but it's not slower either. What it is, however, is completely silent, ice goddamn cold at load, and has literally survived an entire weekend of conference note taking, and still booted up just fine the following Monday morning for work.
The only reason I have a desktop computer at this point is because of video games. That's it. If I weren't hopelessly addicted to the gay catgirl game, I would never need an X86 machine ever again. And to be honest, I don't actually expect this status quo to last either.
ARM is going to murder X86, eventually, not because it's faster or more powerful, but because X86 isn't enough faster than ARM to offset the insane cost to run it, for the vast majority of users, even professional ones.
In case you're wondering. Yes. You can run FFXIV on ARM. How, I don't know at this time, but I think it will be high time to consider porting games over to ARM. Sure, we might be able to keep X86 on life support by making it more efficient, but it won't match ARM in the long game.
Okay, granted, it's shifting the onus on Climate Change onto the consumer, and initial cost of entry is really expensive, but if megacorps aren't willing to change, and very few people are willing to start a revolution, then we need to buy more time somehow.
