Hardware manufacturers have core-tourettes
In the beginning
When I first started this hobby I had a beast of a computer, an AMD 200mhz MMX with a 12mb Voodoo2 graphics card, which I believe was later linked to a second Voodoo2 for 24mb of graphical mayhem. It was then that graphics cards started being released upon every rotation of the earth. Soon there was the 32mb ATi Rage Pro, then the 64mb Matrox something-or-other (G400?). Before I knew it my machine was so out-dated it was barely worth the electricity it ran on.
How things have changed... Not
Things have continued in this way, each magazine I read reviews yet another card with higher clockspeeds, more pipelines and a higher price tag. My Ati X850XT no longer quite cuts it in modern games (lacking the more recent shader models for HDR) and I don't care anymore. I tried to keep up but failed - I'd be very single and very poor if I attempted to keep my machine tip-top spec.
Tourettes
It seems that hardware developers have some form of tourettes syndrome, throwing more cores at a product instantly makes it more desirable - despite software developers being (largely) unable to utilise the new architecture. We've seen QuadSLi cards, Laptops with 2 cores and 2 cards in SLi, Quad core CPU's, twin CPU motherboards to enable 4 active cores... Each vendor continues releasing product after product to try and stay atop the ever changing pile which means only one thing - dramatic depreciations.
My AMD643700+ CPU was around ?150 this time last year and has lost ?100 in value since then. My graphics card has dropped by similar levels - and both are more than capable of playing modern games - just not at uber-high details. This hardware development must reach saturation point at some point.
Products barely reach the shelves before a higher model number is released - so why bother?
I've always been of the philosophy that you can have a good machine by buying yesterday's equipment at deflated prices - offering much better value for performance than splashing ?2,000 on new equipment every 6 months.
More cores. It needs more cores
Maybe developers should slow down, perfect the architecture before moving on? Or maybe they should work with software developers to allow their hardware to be used better. After all - having 400 cores is no use if your operating system only runs on 2.
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