Not quite there yet ... from left on surface, 5G internet, WireGuard router, pihole on a Zero W and 4x4 N95 HTPC, plus 1080p projector. When a computer that size (actually smaller, since I don't need a SATA bay) can outperform my tower, though ...
This photo of Meteor Lake shows 16GB of LPDDR5X on the package. AMD's looking to kill the low-midrange GPU in the next couple of generations of APUs, with Intel attempting to reach parity. And all of this in a fraction of the power envelope of a midrange gaming rig.
Maybe it's next-quarter-itis dominating the tech press, but these developments feel like they deserve a bit more attention given that all signs point to gaming 4x4 PCs with a wall wart in the next two years. This actually makes Intel's exit from the NUC space somewhat surprising, but they've been shedding products pretty consistently and this may just be a part of that.
I'm in the situation of having a 5-year-old gaming rig that's still going strong (caveat: I'm a factory/city-builder gamer so an RX 6600 works fine for me at 4K60), and moving into a stepvan in the next couple of weeks and therefore suddenly very aware of power draw, so all of this may be more exciting to me than the average bear, as I could see finally upgrading on account of a dead component in the next couple of years.
Yet there's still that part of me from college that wants to keep abreast of the latest developments, and as I've watched now six desktop Intel generations hit benchmarks since I was the lucky winner of an 8086K, there's been nothing that really draws a line in the sand and says "this will be the clear new minimum target."
Intel starting over at 1st gen for Meteor Lake shows they see this finally changing. It honestly could have happened anywhere from introduction of E-cores to the seeming destination of Rentable Units, which have finally popped up outside of MLID. I've seen nothing about what AMD's disaggregated endpoint looks like, even though I'm definitely looking to Strix Halo as where I may be able to ditch the ITX sandwich tower completely. Couple this with swapping out my TV for a native 1080p mini projector (a "maybe" suggestion that turned into having to try one at $40, and wow!), and I could be gaming in a van in fucking style with essentially zero dedicated hardware space in just a couple years!
Anyway, in situations like this, I've found that I may have inadequate sources, so I thought I'd see if anyone had suggestions.
This doesn't make sense. It's more likely we'll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.
Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It's impressive how far things have come.
However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you'll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.
The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I'm not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.
Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today's games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you'll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.
The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don't need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don't (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That's been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.
The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We're not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.
I thought Apple was on to something with their cylindrical form factor. It's inconvenient from a mobo perspective, but a central core motherboard, with CPU, GPU, even memory and M2 sticking out like fins. Get the mobo down to segments like 25mm x 250, and stack the whole thing over a massive -like 250-350 mm- low rpm fan would be great for heat management and noise. Heck, put it in a venturi tunnel driven by a 500mm fan.