2019 TECH PREVIEW
Take your mind back a moment. It’s November 1996, Bill Clinton has just beaten Bob Dole to the presidency, “Macarena” is topping the charts, and Star Trek: First Contact is about to make waves at the box office. In the world of tech, however, something more wonderful is about to happen. Andrew Grove, Intel’s CEO of the day, is about to drop one of his truth bombs, and that truth? Well, it’s that by 2011, thanks to a combination of Moore’s Law and genius architectural advancements, Intel CPUs will be operating at the 10GHz mark and beyond.
Although that prediction may have fallen a bit flat over the years, it’s not to say we haven’t advanced since then, technologically at least. The world of the transistor stops for no nerd, and as another orbit of the sun comes to a close, it’s time for us here at the PCPP Lab to condense all of our prophetic ability into one clean, crisp, potentially slightly wooly, article. So, folks, likely more accurate than your election-time pollsters, and definitely more truthful than those Hurricane Florence weather forecasts, hold on to your hats, because it’s time for PC PowerPlay’s Tech Preview 2019.
The battle for processing superiority
What does the future of high-end tell us about the destiny of mainstream processing?
Nothing’s better for the tech industry than a little competition, and that’s something Ryzen has very much brought to the table over the last two years. Consider this: Since the beginning of 2017, we’ve doubled the number of cores available to mainstream processing parts. From the very bottom rung, with Pentium and Athlon CPUs, all the way up to the Core i9s and Ryzen 7s, Intel and AMD have produced an epic lineup of chips, with twice as many threads as before. Look at high-end desktop processors, and
