#Power PC
040s and 486s aren't even close to that point. I have an HP Vectra
486/25T at work – respectable though not cutting edge by any means –
and an ATI Graphics Ultra+ card, and the video is anything but faster
than my think time. The display at high resolutions and color depths
is sluggish – even 1024x768x8 is pretty slow. Of course it's a
wickedly fast DOS box, but who wants DOS, especially as a long term
platform? Not me, anyway.
The increase in video information has substantially outpaced CPU
developement – a 486/25 is something like 40x faster than an 8086.
But whereas a CGA display took up about 64k (I'm guessing at the
exact numbers on that) a 1280x1024x24 display takes up something like
62x that amount of memory, outstripping the increase in CPU power,
which also has to be divided up among more other areas. (My numbers
probably aren't exact, but my point is correct – I lifted it out of a
BYTE article I read a few months ago.) And why should 1280×1024 be
the be-all and end-all of display resolutions? I hunger for a
larger, sharper, more detailed display. Crisper text, more room to
multitask, more of a page on-screen at once. Multimedia workspaces.
And sooner or later FED displays will become a commercial reality,
opening the door to humungous flat cheap displays. Think of the
bandwidth required then. There are always new uses for power. So
far those uses are growing faster than the power supply.
And I don't think video and animation and sound will be limited to a
small group of elite users – applications will incorporate them,
operating environments will incorporate them, and there will always
be people poo-pooing the importance of animated buttons and
high-quality computer synthesized speech, but these are things that,
used properly, can make one's working environment more attractive,
pleasant, user-friendly, information-dense, and productive.
And just think of the reams of data streaming in from all over the
world and beyond. As more and more of it comes online, more and more
people are going to want and use it. And it will become more
difficult to manage and sort through. I don't think anything is
going to seriously impede the ongoing computer revolution short of
major economic shifts – sure, the pace of upgrades will slow as
people become satisfied with their setups, but only, I think, to a
point.