Digitimes reports that we’ll begin to see products built around the Silverthorne processor in about six months.
We’ve thought for a long, long time that once computers got “fast enough” for most people, they’d start asking for less. Less weight. Less size. Less complexity. Less cost.
There’s no doubt in our minds that this is where the action is going to mostly be the next five years: in small devices.
We have considerable doubts as to what shape and form the winners will be, or even if one size will rule them all. Will they be mini-notebooks? Micro-notebooks? PhonePCs? We’ll certainly see all of them; which will have staying power, or will all of them still be around five years from now?
Perhaps more selfishly, will overclocking and overclockers shift with the times, or will it continue to pretty much stick to the dinosaur desktop?
No, the desktop won’t go extinct, and “regular” notebooks probably haven’t quite had their heyday quite yet. Yes, a few have already overclocked handheld devices.
But overclocking started as a kind of underdog sport, getting underdog equipment to overachieve. I think that spirit has been at least undercut with high-end quad cores and high-end quad video with high-end quad credit card bills. I think you lose something of the challenge when you can just throw money at a system, with overclocking being just the cherry on top.
For some reason, the example of Daniel Boone comes to mind. He was a serial pioneer, when the place he was living got too settled and civilized, he moved on. I wonder if that’s going to happen with this hobby. Are we approaching a paradigm shift, with people trying to do more with less? Or will O/Cing will remain almost entirely a bastion of the big boxes.
I don’t know, I expect we’ll find out in the next few years.
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