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.
Slowly, fastly, depends. I brought my old high power desktop back to life (13-15 year old hardware), and its old outlandish quad core can be beaten handily by a single core of its new eight core. And, its old power hungry graphics card got pummeled by that same processor’s integrated graphics. That’s not quite the 90’s, but that’s still a pretty serious advance considering you’re also talking about 350w of specific power consumption vs something like 75w.
Alongside that, you can get good enough hardware for almost nothing these days, and you can also spend out the ass for something that would spank my upgrades. (But a lot of that hardware’s also barely available on the consumer market.)
What’s probably more surprising is the old hardware was still pretty capable. It couldn’t multitask very well as someone who needs full suites of heavy apps open for work, and it was outright missing features needed to support some modern software. But, once I threw an SSD in it, it could still act as a reasonably competent daily driver and workstation.