"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.
But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."
addie said:
Then I wrote my own reply to them, as you did.
And then I also wrote this, under your reply to them:
And now you are saying:
I mean, I do genuinely appreciate your detailed, technical explanations of these systems and hardware and their inner functions…
But also, I didn’t say you said integrated memory.
I said the person you are replying to, addie, said integrated memory.
I was asking you to perhaps be able to explain what they meant… because they don’t seem to know what they’re trying to say.
But now you have misunderstood what I said, what I asked, lol.
You replied to addie … I think, as if they had written ‘integrated graphics’. But they didn’t say that. They said ‘integrated memory’.
And… unless I am … really, really missing something… standard desktop PCs… do not have any kind of integrated memory, beyond like… very, very small areas where the mobo bios is stored, but that is almost 100% irrelevant to discussion about video game rendering capabilities.
As you say, you have to go back 20+ years to find desktop PCs with Mobos that have their own SRAM… everything else is part of the GPU or CPU die, and thus … isn’t integrated. As GPUs and CPUs are removable, swappable, on standard desktop PCs.
Eitherway, again, I do appreciate your indepth technical info!
Well, I wasn’t sure if you meant that I did say that or if you just wanted an explanation, so I both clarified what I said and I gave an explanation to cover both possibilities :)
I think the person I was replying to just got confused when they wrote “integrated memory” since as I explained when main memory is “integrated” in systems like these, that just means it’s soldered on the motherboard, something which really makes no difference in terms of architecture.
There are processing units with integrated memory (pretty much all microcontrollers), which in means they come with their own RAM (generally both Flash Ram and SRAM) in the same integrated circuit package or even the same die, but that’s at the very opposite end of processing power of a PC or PS5 and the memory amounts involved tend to be very small (a few MB or less).
As for the “integrated graphics” bit, that’s actually the part that matters when it comes to performance of systems with dedicate CPU and GPU memory vs systems with shared memory (integrated in the motherboard or otherwise, since being soldered on the motherboard or coming as modules doesn’t really change the limitations of each architecture) which is what I was talking about back in the original post.
Sorry, I … well, I was recently diagnosed with PTSD.
And a significant part of that… is I am so, so, very used to people just misinterpreting what I actually said, then in their heads, they heard /something else/, and then they respond to /something else/, they continue to believe I said /something else/, even after I explain to them that isn’,t what I said, and then they tell everyone else that I said /something else/.
(there are many other things that go into the PTSD, but they are waaaay outside of the scope of this discussion)
I, again, realize and aporeciate that you responded to both interpretations…
But I am just a bit triggered.
I am so, so, very used to being gaslit by… most of my family, and many, many other people in my life, who just seemingly willfully misinterpret me consistently, or are literally incapable of hearing/reading without just inventing and inserting their own interpretation.
… Whole lot of my family has very serious mental health disorders, and I’ve also happened to have a very bad run of many bosses and former friends and ex partners who just do the same thing, all the time.
Took me a long time to just… get away from all these toxic situations, and finally be able to pursue mental health evaluation/treatment on my own accord.
I’m not saying you ‘intentionally triggered me’ or anything like that, that would be a ridiculous judgement from me, and you have been very polite, and informative… I’m just trying to explain myself, lol.
As to the actual technical info: yes, everything you are saying lines up with my understanding, its nice to know I know what these words and terms mean in this context, and my understanding is … in line with reality.
Well, this being the Internet it’s natural to expect less than impeccable truth from strangers here, both because a lot of people just want to feel like they “won” the argument no matter what so they’ll bullshit their way into a “win”, because most people aren’t really trained in the “trying to be as completed and clear as possible” mental processes as Engineers and Scientists (so there’s a lot of “I think this might be such” being passed as “it is such”) and because it simply feels bad to be wrong so most people don’t want to accept it when somebody else proves them wrong and react badly to it.
I’m actually a trained Electronics Engineer but since I don’t actually work in that domain and studied it decades ago, some of what I wrote are informed extrapolations based on what learned and stuff I read over the years rather than me being absolutely certain that’s how things are done nowadays (which is why looking up and reading that Intel spec was very interesting, even if it turned out things are mainly is as I expected).
Also I’m sorry for triggering you, you don’t need to say sorry for your reaction and I didn’t really took it badly: as I said, this is the Internet and a lot of people are argumentative for the sake of “winning” (probably the same motivation as most gaslighters) so I expect everybody to be suspicious of my motivations, same as they would be for all other people since from their point of view I’m just another random stranger ;)
Anyways, cheers for taking the trouble of explaining it and making sure I was okay with out interaction - that’s far nicer and more considerate than most random internet strangers.