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.
Yeah, it hit a series of roadblocks. First clock speed capped out, then single threaded performance started hitting serious diminishing returns, and multi-threaded performance was never a great answer since writing software for it is hard, then they started hitting a wall of heat dissipation problems, then specter reduced all the CPUs performances by like 30%, and also they're having trouble making chips any denser.
The heat problems are a huge part of it though, so I think you'll find that desktops have been getting better faster than laptops in that time. And because heat is such a concern, I don't know if a cheap notebook will run today's hot shit any time soon. Cheap desktops probably will though.
On an economics side, people are poor and corporations are rich. The hardware of 10 years ago will run real-time video and the internet just fine. So if a company wants to make money selling high-performance compute, they have to target a corporate market. So you get things like the NVidia A100, which has absurd specs and costs $10k.
edit: forgot to mention 4k monitors. They take almost 4x as much power to run anything on, and were shoved out the door way before graphics cards could actually do it, so a ton of performance is eaten up just playing catch up to that. If you switch down to 1080p you can run all sorts of shit on mid-end desktops, even with every other setting maxed out (except 4x anti-aliasing nonsense).
they have been getting better at heat management on laptops, but like good thermal control on that type of small form tends to be expensive, so you would have to buy an alienware or similar stuff and it would probably underperform a pc you built for the same price