Ask Paul: July 26 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and if you were impacted by the CrowdStrike outage this past week, I hope that's finally calmed down for you. Let's kick off the first weekend of the post-CrowdStrike era a bit early with another great set of reader questions. Like you, I bet, I could use some downtime.
The future of desktop PCs
MartinusV2 asks:

Hello Paul, with the problems Intel and AMD are having with their desktop CPUs lately, do you think, they will eventually stop selling them since it's less profitable than mobile (laptop) counterpart? Does Apple Silicon and Qualcomm are showing the way of the future with an CPU+NPU+GPU combos for gaming?

It is odd to me that there's no true discrete GPU option in the Arm world, and with rumors of other companies looking to come on board in the PC space, I'm wondering if one, in particular—Nvidia—might try to innovate in that space. But tied to what I wrote yesterday in A Few Thoughts on Portable PC Gaming (Premium), there's a parallel push to make integrated graphics—whatever the name/brand, and separate from Arm specifically—more powerful as well. So it's not entirely clear: Do integrated graphics improve to the point where dedicated graphics are no longer required? This is impossible to say at the moment, but if it's going to happen, it's still a way off.

With regard to the issues Intel is having specifically—issues that, rumors now suggest, may not actually be solved by the microcode update it announced—it's difficult to know which processes or mistakes led to this situation, and whether they point to a bigger problem. But to make this very general—I'm not a hardware guy—it's fair to say that microprocessors are more complex than ever and as this world races to be physically smaller, more efficient, and ever more powerful, that these companies have understandably run into unique challenges. I rip on Intel for strategic reasons—the way it downplayed and even ignored the need for more efficient mobile chips and for so long is criminal—but it's also an engineering colossus. If any company can overcome these challenges, it's Intel.

And let's not lose sight of a few basic truths. PCs as a platform have been getting more and more mobile since the beginning of this era, with more and more people computing on the go than at a desk in a specific room of a specific building. Those trends will only continue, but that doesn't change the fact that desktop computing has advantages, and that those advantages will continue to be important for years to come. Obviously, there are hybrid setups in which you dock a laptop and can then take it with you. But a true desktop PC or workstation is literally modular, so you can more easily upgrade or replace components, including physically large components like dedicated graphics cards that don't make sense in portable PCs. (External GPUs are a thing, of course.) And those systems will always be more powerful, and thus of interest to, and even required by, video gamers...