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Is AI taking us back to the future?

It's starting to look as if the soaring prices of key computer components has thrown a spanner in the works of the computer industry.

Apparently, motherboard sales have plunged by more than 25 percent, likely due to the fact that DRAM and NVME storage along with GPUS are not only becoming too expensive but also increasingly hard to find.

Since most of today's silicon production is headed to AI datacentres, this could spell tough times ahead for computer retailers large and small.

It will be very interesting to see how systems integrators and desktop PC companies cope with this revenue decline but I'm pretty sure that some will go to the wall before long.

Even larger manufacturers who are currently reliant on components that were ordered some time ago, will eventually run out and be forced to hike their prices significantly and/or drastically reduce production volumes.

Of course every problem is simply an opportunity in disguise so if I were a PC retailer I know what I'd be doing right now.

What is that?

Well I'd be working hard to get my hands on plenty of "recent" hardware via the second-hand market and selling that instead.

The reality is that as we move increasingly to cloud-based services (often forced to do so) and AI becomes an intrinsic part of those services, the demands on desktop PCs may actually reduce. When you've got a massive datacentre doing most of the heavy-lifting from a computational perspective, your desktop machine might become little more than a "thin client" which functions primarily as an input-output device for those cloud systems.

Even applications that previously required a high-end GPU (such as gaming) has already started moving to the cloud via services such as NVIDIA's GeForce NOW product.

How ironic that the architecture of our computing resources may soon have come full-circle.

"Back in the day", and I'm talking about timeshare systems back in the 1960s through 1980s, all you needed was often a "dumb terminal" which was connected to a big computer (a mainframe or mini) often via a relatively slow serial link.

Even during the early days of the Microcomputer revolution, dumb terminals were a thing. I lost count of the number of CP/M machines I sold that used a dumb terminal such as the Wyse 50 as nothing more than a keyboard and screen. The Morrow MD11 was a prime exsample of this sort of microcomputer and it brought hard-drive based micros within the reach of even budget-conscious users because the whole machine cost little more than the hard drive it contained.

Perhaps we've already lived through the "personal computer" era and within a decade or so it will be just a memory. Instead we'll all be paying a monthly or annual subscription to "big tech" for the privilege of using a tiny slice of their datacentre capacity and running the most simple of I/O systems that simply provide an input and output capability to that cloud.

Carpe Diem folks!

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