{"id":7128,"date":"2016-04-15T08:10:06","date_gmt":"2016-04-15T12:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7128"},"modified":"2016-04-15T17:03:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-15T21:03:15","slug":"the-midrange-computer-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7128","title":{"rendered":"The midrange computer dies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About five years ago I reacted to a lot of hype about the impending death of the personal computer with an observation and a prediction.  The observation was that some components of a computer have to be the size they are because they&#8217;re scaled to human dimensions &#8211; notably screens, keyboards, and pointing devices.  Wander outside certain size extrema and you get things like smartphone keyboards that are only good for limited use.<\/p>\n<p>However, what we normally think of as the heart of a computer &#8211; the processing and storage &#8211; isn&#8217;t like this.  It can get arbitrarily small without impacting usability at all. Consequently, I predicted a future in which people would carry around powerful computing nodes descended from smartphones and walk them to docking stations bundling a screen, a pointing device, and a real keyboard when they need to get real work done.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve now reached an interesting midway point on that road.  The (stationary) computers I use are in the process of bifurcating into two classes: one quite large, one very small.  I qualify that with &#8220;stationary&#8221; because laptops are an exception for reasons which, if not yet obvious, will be in a few paragraphs.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;large&#8221; class is exemplified in my life by the Great Beast of Malvern: my &#8220;desktop&#8221; system, except that it&#8217;s really more like a baby supercomputer optimized for fast memory access to <em>extremely large<\/em> data sets (as in, surgery on large version-control repositories). This is more power than a typical desktop user would know what to do with, by a pretty large margin -absurd overkill for just running an office suite or video editing or gaming or whatever.<\/p>\n<p>My other two stationary production machines are, as of yesterday, a fanless mini-ITX box about the size of a paperback book and a credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi 3.  They arrived on my doorstep around the same time.  The mini-ITX box was a planned replacement for the conventional tower PC I had been using as a mailserver\/DNS\/bastion host, because I hate moving parts and want to cut my power bills. The Pi was serendipitous, a surprise gift from Dave Taht who&#8217;s trying to nudge me into improving my hardware hacking.  <\/p>\n<p>(And so I shall; tomorrow I expect to solder  a header onto an Adafruit GPS hat, plug it into the Pi, and turn the combination into a tiny Stratum 1 NTP test machine.)<\/p>\n<p>And now I have three conventional tower PCs in my living room (an old mailserver and two old development workstations) that I&#8217;m trying to get rid of &#8211; free to good home, you must come to Malvern to get them.  Because they just don&#8217;t make sense as service machines any more.  Fanless small-form-factor systems are now good enough to replace almost any computer with functional requirements less than those of a Great-Beast-class monster.<\/p>\n<p>My wife still has a tower PC, but maybe not for long. Hers could easily be replaced by something like an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.intel.com\/content\/www\/us\/en\/nuc\/overview.html\">Intel NUC<\/a> &#8211; Intel&#8217;s sexy flagship small-form-factor fanless system, now cheap enough on eBay to be price-competitive with a new tower PC.  And no moving parts, and no noise, and less power draw.<\/p>\n<p>I have one tower PC left &#8211; the recently decomissioned mailserver.  But the only reason I&#8217;m keeping it is as a courtesy for basement guests &#8211; it&#8217;ll be powered down when we don&#8217;t have one.  But I am seriously thinking of replacing it with another Raspberry Pi set up as a web kiosk.<\/p>\n<p>I still have a Thinkpad for travel.  When you have to carry your peripherals with you, it&#8217;s a compromise that makes sense.  (Dunno what I&#8217;m going to do when it dies, either &#8211; the quality and design of recent Thinkpads has gone utterly to shit. The new keyboards are particularly atrocious.)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a confluence of factors at work here.  Probably the single most important is cheap solid-state drives.  Without SSDs, small-form-factor systems were mostly cute technology demonstrations &#8211; it didn&#8217;t do a lot of practical good for the rest of the computing\/storage core to be a tiny SBC when it had to drag around a big, noisy hunk of spinning rust.  With SSDs everything, including power draw and noise and heat dissipation, scales down in better harmony.<\/p>\n<p>What it adds up to for me is that midrange PCs are dead.  For most uses, SFF (small-form-factor) hardware has reached a crossover point &#8211; their price per unit of computing is now better.<\/p>\n<p>Next, these SFF systems get smaller and cooler and merge with smartphone technology.  That&#8217;ll take another few years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About five years ago I reacted to a lot of hype about the impending death of the personal computer with an observation and a prediction. The observation was that some components of a computer have to be the size they are because they&#8217;re scaled to human dimensions &#8211; notably screens, keyboards, and pointing devices. Wander&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7128\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The midrange computer dies<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7131,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128\/revisions\/7131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}