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Final Thoughts
Without doubt, 2014 was a cool year for technology. The days of ‘massive innovation every 6 months' are probably behind us for good, we still see enough cool new kit being delivered each year to keep everyone happy.
Just as the world starts moving toward Maxwell, fracking and alternative sources of electricity – so the price of energy (specifically oil) dives off a cliff – making retro sources seem more appealing, but that has to be short-term. In the longer term, as circuits get smaller and smaller, the drive toward efficiency – at a macro and microscopic level – will keep picking up more mind share.
If you live in the developed world, then you want lower energy bills. If you live in a developing country, then you probably can't generate 1,000w per desktop, so – either way – there is a drive to reduce consumption. And then we have the move toward more mobile solutions, including Shield/GRID.
The relentless pressure to make electronics smaller and smaller, means we will soon live in an age where solid state drives pwn the mass storage market. When that happens, spinning magnetic disks at 7,200rpm in order to store vital information will seem as logical as using papyrus.
One thing we can be certain of, is that this development will all happen faster than we can imagine.
Sure, we all complain when a roadmap slips and technology takes a few months longer than anticipated to arrive in the stores, but the overall pace of change is amazing and relentless.
Fifteen years ago, PC companies could take £1,000 off you for a single core AMD-based system with 128MB of memory and a 32MB GeForce2 MX graphics card. If you were lucky enough to get a monitor, then it would be a huge CRT that offered 1280×1024 resolution and internet access was via a 56k Fax Modem. Today's £1,000 system will give you GTX970 graphics and access to the web using broadband in the 10-100Mbps range.
When KitGuru celebrates its 20th anniversary in 15 years time, we can only imagine what kind of spec would be needed to tease £1,000 from your wallets. A contract with your ISP may well include unlimited gigabit wi-fi for £20 a month and system ram could be in the terabyte range.
Whatever the technologies, whatever the performance levels, KitGuru Labs will be there to provide the most intelligent testing environment possible – to bring you the buying advice you need in order to get value for money.
We thank you for reading the first 14,000 articles we've written since KitGuru was launched – and for enjoying our ‘Best of the Best' for 2014. Over 250,000 of you follow us on Facebook and – right or wrong – we'd love to know what you think about this year's choices, so please let us know by clicking HERE.
Lastly, we wish you and yours a very happy, prosperous 2015!
How is a $390 CPU mainstream exactly?
Well you can always thank intel for that =)
It’s not exactly mainstream, but it definitely brings some hi-end goodness down to a very reasonable price. It performs on the same level as CPUs that used to cost $500-600. Its predecessor only had 4 cores. Need I say more?