As time goes by we see how certain components and peripherals of our computers become more and more integrated, this is on the one hand a benefit, since the proximity of the components increases performance and avoids us having to buy them separately . But the integration in the hardware has its negative part and we are going to discover it.
If you take an old computer magazine and turn the pages of it until you reach the advertisements in computer stores, you will see peripherals to add to the PC that today have completely disappeared. The reason for this is that as new manufacturing nodes have appeared, the number of transistors per area has increased, which allows adding more elements to it.
What do we understand as hardware integration?
One way to take advantage of Moore’s Law is to create more complex processors, but another is to integrate more and more of the elements, which has led many peripherals over time to end up inside other chips or even inside the main processor. This is what has caused peripherals that were previously sold separately to be included as standard in the PC.
Have you ever wondered where those network cards, sound cards and many other peripherals have gone? Over time they have been integrated more and more within our computers until they almost disappear from our sight, but they are still among the circuits of our computer, only in a no longer visible way, since they have been integrated into other components and / or or peripherals.
The downside of hardware integration: what you don’t see you don’t talk about
One of the problems of integration in the hardware is the disappearance of this in the eyes of the user, what in principle is an advantage can end up becoming a disadvantage on other fronts. The most obvious? The fact that the companies that are dedicated to the design and production of this type of PC components have to be reoriented or they end up disappearing from the market.
The success of integrated components makes sense for PC assemblers, the reason for this is that they greatly cut the production costs of a computer and when an integrated peripheral ends up being good enough for general use then the use of variants or versions that do that job in a better way to build a new computer, since it is much cheaper.
Good enough is technically what the ordinary user can absorb through his knowledge, if we integrate, for example, a sound card and it meets in its specifications what that user requires or what his level of knowledge tells him that it has good performance , then the user will not worry about the specification, since the problem will be given as solved, since it is not a priority.
The reality is that we have become used to suddenly disappearing specifications that apparently are not important in the daily performance of our PCs. For the simple fact that manufacturers believe they are good enough and the reality is that a good part of these components have completely stagnated and do not offer better specifications or performance over the years.