I'm not much of a tech person and I have no idea if my observations are worth anything, but from where I'm sitting it seems computer technology isn't advancing anywhere near as quickly as it was from the 80s to the early 2010s.
The original Moore's law is dead and has been for a very long time, but the less specific trend of rapidly increasing computational power doesn't seem to hold much water anymore either. The laptop I have now doesn't feel like much of an improvement on the laptop I had four years ago at a similar price point. And the laptop I had six years ago is really only marginally worse.
So for those in the know on the relevant industry, how are things looking in general? What is the expected roadmap for the next 10 to 20 years? Will we ever get to the point where a cheap notebook is capable of running today's most demanding games at the highest settings, 144fps, and 4k resolution? Sort of like how today's notebooks can run the most intensive games of the 90s/early 2000s.
define cheap notebook. you can probably get a laptop for pretty cheap that has an RTX 3050 and would play almost anything at a good framerate even if it's an intense game. But games arent going to get much more realistic looking. Maybe it will be cost effective to make a game that looks like Avatar one day, but i dont think we are close to that yet. beyond that is the hardware to actually run something that looks like Avatar in real time. it does feel like computer hardware has plateaued a bit, but having solid state storage is what really opened everything up. My computers probably werent totally shit, mechanical hard drives were just bottlenecking everything. im not sure there is a bottleneck like that right now.
caches are going to get larger and memory/storage bandwidth will increase for at least another cycle or two. most of the wins coming down the pipe are for power efficiency improvements (though they keep trying to use those to pull more out of the silicon, past the point of diminishing returns). I think that's the closest we're getting to SSD level improvements. more cache on-die is a noticeable improvement if the code isn't shitty.
Maybe I just didn't look hard enough, but I think we have different definitions of cheap. My current laptop has an i5-1035G1 with integrated graphics. I got it on sale for 400 dollars, and that was a big purchase for me. It was the best (new, in box) laptop that I was able to find anywhere for that price point.