"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."
NM has been a marketing gimmick since Intel launched their long-standing 14nm node. Actual transistor density depending on which fab you compare to is shambles.
It’s now a title / name of a process and not representative of how small the transistors are.
I’ve not paid for a CPU upgrade since 2020, and before that I was using a 22nm CPU from 2014. The market isn’t exciting (to me anymore), I don’t even want to talk about the GPUs.
Back in the late 90s or early 2000s upgrades felt substantial and exciting, now it’s all same-same with some minor power efficiency gains.
This is why I’m more than happy with my 5800X3D/7900XTX; I know they’ll perform like a dream for years to come. The games I play run beautifully on this hardware under Linux (BeamNG.Drive runs faster than on Windows 10), and I have no interest in upgrading the hardware any time soon.
Hell, the 4790k/750Ti system I built back in 2015 was still a beast in 2021, and if my ex hadn’t gotten it in the divorce (I built it specifically for her, so I didn’t lose any sleep over it), a 1080Ti upgrade would have made it a solid machine for 2025. But here we are - my PC now was a post-divorce gift for myself. Worth every penny. PC and divorce.