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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>Smaller builds are gaining popularity.

Gaining popularity in the ever shrinking market of PCs is nothing to brag about. I'd wager it's still not that popular as you make it be. Everyone just buys laptops nowadays and whoever they do buy PCs they get the full sized towers with discrete GPUs for gaming, not small form factors with APUs. That's more of a niche of a niche.

That's why AMD hasn't focused too much on APUs for desktop PCs. It's not a big market. Their biggest sellers are APUs for notebooks and consoles, CPUs for datacenters and desktops, discrete GPUs for ... everything.

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It's been an "ever shrinking market" since the 2000s, if you believe the news.

A thing to consider is, for the consumer market, machines have gotten good enough that most don't need a new machine for 5+ years, in terms of performance. Especially for casual household tasks.

No, you are right. I think this APU is basically a spin-off mobile processor. The technology comparison would be translatable, though, as with laptops battery life and weight matters.

However, here we talk about the desktop market, don't we? And not every desktop PC has to be a gaming capable machine. Power-savings will probably be even more relevant for organizations running hundreds of office machines and terminals.

>And not every desktop PC has to be a gaming capable machine.

Yes, but desktop PCs not for gaming aren't really selling volumes nowadays, they're a tiny niche being eaten by notebooks and NUCs (also a niche) which Intel has been dominating as they had CPUs with iGPUs (basically APUs without the marketing) since ... forever.

>Power-savings will probably be even more relevant for organizations running hundreds of office machines and terminals.

When was the last time you saw organizations buy PCs for their workforce? In volume I mean, not just one PC for Bob who needed a CAD workstation, because then Bob most likely isn't getting an APU for CAD but some workstation with discrete CPU and some Quadro GPU.

Organizations mostly transitioned their office machines to notebooks a long time ago, even moreso after WFH became more popular so there was less need of PCs tied to a fixed location. PCs not for gaming or heavy compute workstations aren't big sellers anymore.

In my experience, bureaucracy doesn't run on laptops.

On what does it run on?

Yeah, I'm sure governments do buy some amount of desktop PCs because they don't intend for their workforce to work from anywhere else other than a specific office, but you also can't tell me with a straight face that selling PCs to the DMV, FBI and other bureaucrats represents a big lucrative market that was waiting for the APU revolution.

PCs are a low selling niche now. APUs won't move the needle on that, that's why AMD ignored it for so long. End of story.

I think you are moving the goal post a bit.

How so? Please enlighten us with your arguments on the matter.

Well for starters the argument wasn't about economics, but who would value a power efficient processor like this.

Scroll up, enlighten yourself.

Economics matter. People can value a lot of things, but if there's too few of them, then the market won't bother catering to them. See small smartphones.

Sure, but maybe this objection to the original argument shouldn't come as a moving goal post, don't you think?

Cause moving goal posts are lame and exhausting. End of story.

they 100% do. what company or government agency have you ever seen running on desktops that isnt the DMV?

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