It could be a the beginning of the end of an era: the centrality of the PC to the hardware world.
At least, you might think that if recent DRAM sales are any indication: for the first time since the 1980s, reports ComputerWorld, memory destined for PCs has slipped to less than 50 per cent of the total. The article quotes IHS iSuppli, a market research firm, as saying that the decline marks "the arrival of the post-PC era."
While the PC will remain important for some time, manufacturers are now shifting their focus to the technology that powers tablets and smartphones, the company says.
But at the same time common PC operating systems (Windows,
Mac and
Linux) are in a sort of limbo between 32-bit and 64-bit architectures (the latter of which will support a great deal more memory). When the transition to 64-bit applications is fully underway it will be interesting to see if the numbers change.
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