World+Dog to favour dual-core laptops through 2014 Buy a laptop in 2015, and there will be a 50 per cent chance it will contain a quad-core processor. So says market watcher iHS iSuppli, after sampling current shipment rates. This year fewer than one in ten notebooks - nine per cent, to be precise - will come with a four-core chip. Hexa-core CPUs will reach that level of …
Just got a new MBP and it's a quad; and my old HP HDX from 2 years ago is a quad.
It's not just encoding video that needs more cores. The rumored new version of MS Word that automatically guesses the next 1000000 key presses you might make and spell checks them in the background will also benefit.
It used to be very nice when only a few apps could use multi-core, because it meant that the other cores were left for UI responsiveness or running 2 apps at full tilt. Once Flash becomes multi-core the world will stop as it manages to eat everything it can.
There's also another branch of thinking that laptops or notebooks won't be around for that long, thanks to tablet devices and more advanced smart phones, also accordingly, the average PC will be accessing the cloud and will need less compute power,the big need for processors being on server farms.
On the other hand, who knows?
Wait for more reference material from ElReg, or possibly start thinking for myself again.
That thinking ignores several points.
Not everyone wants a tablet, without a keyboard they're not easy to do real 'work' with. I can't see many travelling sales people writing out quotes, drawing up graphs and such-like on a tablet.
Accessing 'the cloud' is all good fun, but will be determined by internet access speed and won't be of use to those people who insist on doing CPU/GPU heavy stuff on a laptop.
I'm sure the tablet market will take some laptop users, but the laptops more versatile so it's not going anywhere. Whether it's battery can hack four or six core processors and all the relevant cooling is another story, the laptop may end-up as immobile as the desktop if power consumption isn't kept in check.
Is not a certainty - it's one of the most succesful form factors ever and looks set to continue for some time yet.
The Cloud doesn't even know what it is yet and has a long way to go before some thin client/cloud setup is even a practical solution for day to day laptop replacement never mind a marketable alternative.
The real need for quad core has to be marginal or non-existent for most laptop users given the lack of current software than can actually take advantage. The practicality of using the power of a quad in most laptops likewise doesn't pan out and you could probably shorten the life span of the unit with the extra heat which is a significant factor in the laptop form.
However, if the price differential falls (which it always does) then the shift to quad is as inevitable as the shift to dual.
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