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enrageorange on 06 May 2014
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fatslob-:O said:
Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

I must admit I was seeing it from mainly the future of consoles perspective. Once price to power becomes low enough which could happen as early as mid this gen, Consoles will be completely obsolete, and the big 3, with the exception of Nintendo, will probably migrate wholly to digital platforms. This is inevitable if Moore's Law continues to hold. From this viewpoint, I saw SteamOS as a early entrant into this "virtual" console space. However, you are right, the diversity of a PC os like Windows 7 or OSX is not going to even be dented by SteamOS.

I would argue that the potential it had would mainly be in increasing Valve's appeal to console gamers or the mainstream in general, but I agree that the whole entire idea is pretty flawed.

Moore's law is dying as we speak right now ... The whole semiconductor industry can't continue to depend on just miniturization for performance gains and all innovations to performance gains such as SIMD model processing have being exhausted for the most part. The last miniturization technology will likely be at a 5nm process node according to ex-Intel microprocessor designer, Bob Colwell. Moore's law is not about surpassing physical limits anymore because at that point an entity would also have to surpass economical limits too as transitioning to a new process node gets prohibitively more and more expensive each time thus becoming harder to justify. Once Intel releases broadwell processors they only have 3 more shrinks left ... 

You shouldn't assume obsolete so soon this time because the whole semiconductor industry is struggling to innovate. 

Moore's Law is expected to "die" around 2020. In other words in 4 years the ps4/xbox1 will indeed be completely obsolute. Heck, they are already obsolete compared to higher end gaming rigs. It's just that in a few years you will be able to buy a $300 steambox that is 2-3 times more powerful than the ps4. The big problem steamboxes will have is getting developers to jump ship to Linux. If they do jump ship, and take advantage of the extra power, steamboxes could actually be a very good alternative to consoles for those who don't want to deal with standard PC gaming.