5 tech trends making PC hardware obsolete faster than ever

The world of tech often follows trends, even if those trends aren't terribly useful. Currently, most of those trends in the PC hardware sector are focused on the use of AI, whether that's AI PCs or learning models that run on the best GPUs, although there are some other trends for those who are terminally bored with AI everything. The thing with tech trends is that they're often far-future-focused, and that means they need more powerful hardware to run.

Sometimes, they're rolled out way before their time, and it's up to the market and the companies that got on board to make it into a reality. When that happens, PC hardware gets obsolete really fast, as the new technologies require dedicated hardware to work. It's happening right now with some major trends in the industry, some that are relatively new and some that have been trending for a decade or more.

One thing you can always count on when it comes to PCs is new trends to follow every year

When Nvidia first released RTX and real-time ray tracing to the world, only two graphics cards supported it, and there weren't any games on the market that could use it. That changed a few months later with Battlefield V using ray tracing, and the race to fully ray trace games was on. Nowadays, not every game comes out with ray tracing, but enough do that you'll want the latest graphics cards to enjoy them fully. However, even that is changing.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the first game to require hardware-accelerated ray tracing for some effects, and it shows what the future of gaming has in store for us. That's ray tracing in everything, at least for AAA titles. With gamers holding on to their GPUs for some years before thinking about upgrading, that means a huge part of the market will have a choice: upgrade my GPU or not play the latest blockbuster games.

Ray tracing comes with heavy financial and performance overheads. Here are the only titles that make it all worth it.

AI is probably the biggest tech trend right now, with some companies out to show you that it could be awesome if they could fix a few things. Some companies have good use cases to offer, and others are stuffing it into every crevice in their code just in case. But all of them have one thing in common: the need for powerful hardware to train and run their models.

In the early days of AI, you could reliably put a training dataset into 8GB of VRAM on your GPU and get slow but steady progress. Those datasets have ballooned, and now you really need 24GB or more to start, and many times that to push the envelope on training. The other end of AI inference also needs powerful hardware, but that's being handled on many devices by dedicated Neural Processing Unit hardware that's specifically tuned for AI workloads. The PC hardware market is being squeezed at both ends to make this work, and less powerful hardware is being discarded by the truckload.

The big thing in computing right now is AI, and we're starting to see more AI PCs come to market. What will that mean for Windows system requirements?

While many trends can send swathes of PC hardware to the proverbial scrap heap, none have the potential of an operating system upgrade. New security requirements, features, and modernization of code mean that old hardware is often left to rot. When Windows 11 was announced, Microsoft had a fairly long list of things that your PC needed to match to be ready for the upgrade, but none excluded more PC hardware than the need for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). This instantly made it so thousands, potentially millions, of PCs, couldn't upgrade to Windows 11, and, well, Windows 10 is going end-of-life later this year.

The change to 64-bit programming left many 32-bit programs unusable, and more recently, Nvidia dropped 32-bit OpenCL and CUDA support for a lengthy list of popular games that no longer have driver support on their graphics cards. Maybe this is expected, as we don't expect 8 or 16-bit operating systems to work well unless used in an emulator, but it's still hardware and software being killed off because of a single upgrade to the operating system or the drivers that run the hardware inside the PC.

Planning to set up a Windows 11 VM? Here's how you can add a virtualized TPM 2.0 device on popular hypervisor platforms.

The rise in encrypted traffic on the internet, thanks to HTTPS and easy SSL certificate authorities like Let's Encrypt, is a double-edged sword. Having your cloud provider use end-to-end encryption while storing your encrypted files means that nobody can see your data except you, and that's a very good thing, indeed. Having your sensitive data transmitted over HTTPS encryption, say from your online bank account, is also a fantastic move forward for security. But the very nature of encryption means that bad actors can use it to hide their malware from sight, and that's exactly what's happening.

In 2023, Zscaler found that 86% of cyberattacks are coming from encrypted channels. That threat is increasing rapidly, and that's a problem for traditional security models. Old-school rule-based firewalls are still useful tools for layering defenses, but they can't be the only thing anymore. Traffic needs to be inspected by IDS/IPS pairs, decrypted wherever possible for security tools to scan, and other defenses like sandboxing incoming files enabled to keep malware off internal drives.

The threat environment is changing and hardware firewalls need to do more than they used to.

If Daft Punk were tech CEOs, one of their most recognizable tracks would have probably gone something like: "Thinner, faster, lighter, stronger," because that's the direction that mobile devices of all descriptions are trending. That's not good for repairability or upgradeability, but it does make for some gorgeous tech. Processors on laptops haven't been upgradeable for a long time, but currently, many CPUs, like Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake from Intel, also come with system memory soldered onto the package, so there's no way to upgrade afterward. The company did this to reduce latency and power consumption, but it does mean that you only have options for 16GB or 32GB of RAM, with no option of 64GB or more for power users.

Apple's Mac range is similarly soldered down, not to the CPU but to the logic board that the CPU is fixed to. This makes it easier to design a thinner device while having more space to stuff battery cells into it, which is one of the only things that most consumers care about when buying a mobile device. The bad news is that this trend is likely to continue. Faster RAM is harder to get stable when it's further from the CPU, so expect more memory-on-package options. Integrated graphics are getting good, so there's no need for discrete GPUs for many users. And the tech world loves sleek and slim devices, whatever it needs to achieve them.

Apple's latest processor is no joke

For every tech trend like this that bakes obsolescence into its core, there are many that looked like the end but have stayed the course. OLED and QD-OLED monitors came with all kinds of warnings about short lifespans, burn-in, and other issues that have largely not materialized. Nobody expected Apple to triumph with its Arm-based Apple Silicon chips for laptops, desktop Macs, or Microsoft to properly support Windows-on-Arm, but both have gone from strength to strength. The explosion of the mechanical keyboard hobby during the early years of the pandemic brought better quality keyboards to the affordable end of the market, and the list could go on and on.

The tech world is never static, and while these trends are err... trending right now, that might change, and other things will take their place. We're also going through a phase change between the limits of current PC hardware power and what comes next, and that always means some technologies get lost in the shuffle. Betamax vs. VHS, DVD vs. Laserdisc, the iPod vs. Zune—it's not always the best technology that triumphs, but the one that more people are willing to use. We'll see what these current trends usher in with the next generation.

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