Ok, sorry for the click-baity title. I wouln’t write it that way though were it not what is hinted at in this video:
TLDR: “Tech Jesus” angrily decrys the squeeze that silicon valley is placing on PC consumers, eventually (he supposes) forcing us to migrate to their fee-based cloud computing platforms. The video posts as evidence Micron killing its Crucial brand of consumer memory.
A friend who works in tech is very concerned about this squeeze at his workplace as well as at home. Here’s my reply. And I am not trying to needle him. I am genuinely wondering if this really isn’t all bad. What do you think?
Me: “ But can I play devil’s advocate? Actually I am not advocating but I am trying to ve open-minded about a thing I fear. He mentions fee-based computing and I shuddered in horror before I realized that that is what I have unwittingly chosen to do. You know of my love for the xbox and MSFS. Just yesterday I flew over Tokyo in early dawn. The sim has never performed so well. It was spectacular and a shock. Tokyo was neat in the past but certainly not what I would call smooth. Now though? Nothing I have seen yet on a 2D screen has so taken me aback as did that flight at 60 FPS. On an XBOX! I thought at the time that the latest beta has worked magic squeezing such performance out of a lowly console. But that’s not it is it? Well yes some of it is hardware. But much of what is (to my monke mind) “magic” is actually an optimization of getting the data from the cloud to my console efficiently. If cloud computing can be this powerful why do we need super-computers at home? IL2 looks like ■■■■ compared to MSFS. DCS is the same. X-Plane is even worse. These platforms all ask me to buy a 5080 and 64 gigs in order to run their ugly-assed products when a decent cloud-based game can look as if it came from 20 years in the future and not require any big hardware. Is this really the world my younger sim-playing self would have applauded? No. But do I see (or recognize) a touch of “get off my lawn” from tech jesus? I do. If my XBOX looks and runs better than a modern PC while being clearly inferior, maybe Crucial chips really are providing a better service in a data-center than they would in individual homes.
Mind you…I know that I don’t know what I don’t know. My pea-sized brain may well have me pawing at the wrong shiny object.”
It appears Steve and Ed Zitron from Better Offline are going to be collaborating more around this in the future.
For me the question when it comes to the cloud is again a question of ownership. Is our own material really still our own, or does it become the property of the tech giant that’s running the cloud?
And this is before I come back again to all the other terrible issues with how Big Tech is messing with the economy and smashing any IP laws they can get away with.
Yeah, I’ve always looked at it from the moral and political perspective. And doing so fills me with nothing but fear, rage and hate. I well and truly hate the tech bros who’ve brought us here.
But in my thought experiment above I separated those real but negative concerns from the basic: playing a game on a piece of hardware. MS owns every bit of my joyful flight over Tokyo. I subscribe to Gamepass (or whatever they call it now). My console is a black brick without it. I pay Verizon for the bandwidth. Again the console is a brick without it. I paid TAOG for the helicopter. But he can take it away any time he wishes and good luck to me getting my money back. Yet the experience was peak joy. My pre-chatgpt-boom 3080 cost me nearly a thousand bucks. To continue to play 3 years later at a level comparable to my friends would require another $500-$1500 depending on trade value of the 3080. Plus the price to the now-defunct Crucial for the ever higher memory requirements. These hardware buys are themselves a form of subscription. I now wonder if “ownership” is as important as I once thought.
WE are the problem. WE keep wanting more. From homes (I’m talking the USA here) with four people (mom, dad, brother, sister) that were ~1,000 sq/ft to 2,500-4,000 sq/ft - with TWO people; to video games [simulators too :slight_smile), phones…don’t get me started, that WE demand have X/Y/Z graphical features…etc.
Having started on 4-color, 2D, 24-ish inch monitors I’m pretty darn happy at the ‘visual goodies’ line crossed just a few years ago. Now those same settings just run smoother. I may have purchased my last PC; when DCS outruns that coverage well, there’s always fishing.
Gaming is one thing, even on a PC we are halfway there if you use Steam - All my games (and saves) are in their library. Sure a copy is also on my PC and there is an ‘offline’ mode, but I am basically reliant on a connection to their servers if I want to continue to play them.
But when I think about all the other uses of my PC (banking, shopping, ‘farm management’, etc). Ownership is important. As my brother told me way back when it was really new and few outside of the industry had even heard of it - “the cloud is just somebody else’s computer”
Once your data is there you no longer control it, you don’t have guaranteed access to it. And I would bet a body part that any EULA explicitly states you no longer own it… or at the very least gives the provider carte-blanche to do whatever the heck they want with it.
Sums it up in a nutshell.
No thanks. If that is the future of computing then once I no longer have access to what I consider a personal computer, where I hold my data and decide what data to share online then it is back to pen and paper, bricks & mortar stores for shopping, etc.
This is just completing big techs wet dream that started with Social Media = You are the product.
YES! Takes me back to when that nonsense started. Akin to the marketing hype around ‘Digital’ this/that, AI this/that. All useful buuuutttt…
When someone brought up the ‘Cloud’ I’d roll my eyes, exclaiming, "it’s just a harddrive (storage) on a computer, somewhere else’. They pitched it like it was magic. I can’t rant too hard on marketing people as my wife minored in that
I never use these marketing, and invasive IMO, methods, ie; Google Drive, Onedrive, et. al. I do use G-Drive for exchange to other people for some things, but not ‘my stuff’.
Bought my wife a USB 1TB disk for her laptop; setup a NAS, etc.
Genius. I was on Facebook for about 1 month, when it started. I saw all this coming in it’s various forms and mutations. Gosh, that was, what?, about 2011?
Same with my smartphone, even though Android forced me to have a Google account all contacts, photos, etc are stored on the SD card. Nothing (voluntarily) gets sent to the cloud. With the exception of contacts, all files are regularly copied to external storage/backup and deleted from the phone. Message and call logs are deleted as soon as they are completed.
I bought one of the new(ish) Nokia 4G phones because they came with practically zero bloatware and even then I have uninstalled apps that I can and disabled the rest - Other than the camera, the only apps that I use are two for the Rural Fire Service and 3rd party AV (Bitdefender).
I also have zero social media accounts. Other than the privacy sucking shitbags that they are, it is just another attack vector.
wait till you see it in 120FPS , that will be rush
and you exaggerated it little there . sure IL2 and DCS dont look that great as MSFS but at the same time I dont think they need 5080 and 64 RAM to run in 60FPS .
as I see it , I am mildly optimistic about few devs who can still do magic in optimization . multi-threading , frame generation , upscaling … thats the way forward . I am not buying into this ’ more power equals more fps ’ anymore .
if I am wrong and the optimizations are only ’ scattered shouts in the dark ’ and everything will end up on in the cloud(s) then I am happy to fly XP11 with ortho4xp forever
Hard to believe, 3 days back I got the same CPU for 281,01 EUR, today’s price is 381,56 EUR. I returned the packed R7 9800X3D after I saw the many 1440p/4K gaming and productivity benchmarks.
The main problem of X3D is high TDP (120W vs 65W) and, minus 300+ Mhz frequency. 1% lows that are slightly better in some games are not everything. X3D CPUs are overpriced in my opinion.
That can’t be right, are you sure you’re comparing the same tier of x3d vs non x3d? The different cache shouldn’t increase TDP, you’re right about lowered boost frequency though.
Why would it be a problem per sé? Having higher TDP wouldn’t necessarily mean it has lower efficiency. In my understanding it can just handle more power and in effect also heat. And while the frequency is lower you’re also losing out on 2/3ths of L3. Anyway, I hope that CPU will work out very well for you.
I’m still very happy with my pick, the 9800X3D. It’s idling mostly while it waits for the GPU. This is also because things got better with multithreading in recent years.
Right, 3D cache and higher base frequency make a difference between 120W TDP vs 65W TDP, both CPUs are 8c/16t means also higher power consumption in idle. I tested R5 9600X recently in Cinebench 2024, and R5 9600X and R7 9700X have world-class performance per core (/single core), especially if we count 65W TDP. Therefore, they are beating the older AMD as well as the Intel CPU easily.
Most scenarios will always bottleneck on the GPU side. Anyway, my warm congratulations on your purchase the X3D.
Maybe somewhere in the future I will consider buying the X3D if frequency, power efficiency, and price will be similar to R5 9600X or R7 9700X nowadays.
Give it five or ten years and these data centres will start throwing old stuff out.
I’m currently enjoying my 8th Generation Intel business PC (that I’m running a Linux distro on, using for productivity work and currently typing this post on) - the only new part in that is the SSD, and even that was only bought new by me, it’s been the heart of two other PCs already in its life!
It is nasty now, and it’s going to be hard for a while. And in that time things like the games consoles are probably going to a streaming model rather than a local execution model. But the home PC (and home server/homelab!) aren’t dead.
all contacts, photos, etc are stored on the SD card. Nothing (voluntarily) gets sent to the cloud. With the exception of contacts, all files are regularly copied to external storage/backup and deleted from the phone. Message and call logs are deleted as soon as they are completed.
