I think ESR is ignorant of the computing needs for large swathes of people he has little-to-no interaction with. My guess is he's never seen a real video editing setup (my system cost over $15K and makes his Beast look positively anemic), "enthusiast" gamer system (typical buildout costs start at $3K and go up rapidly depending on your GPU budget), or even the typical engineer that has a system which probably cost $2K+ and regularly works pretty hard depending on what tools they use to do their job.

All of that said, despite his ignorance of the demands these users have, he's right that they represent a very small percentage of all computing done today, and the "middle" tier computer is getting hollowed out by people moving down to smaller devices.

I'm not sure there's anything insightful to this, though: this has been happening for over 10 years now. Worse, it's a re-play of the same trend from the 90's with high performance workstations moving from expensive enterprise-only systems to Intel, which itself is a re-play of the same trend with the intro of the PC in the 80's. Computing gets smaller, cheaper and (largely) slower -- by the standards of the stuff it's replacing, anyway.

I have friends who do professional video post production. Things like major television ads, tv shows and feature films.

Their machines are absolute monsters - and necessarily so. I don't know what kind of video editing he is talking about - but video editing is obscenely compute heavy if you are editing for 4k - which is what you have to do nowadays - and you need to do include composite graphics, effects and run color correction to be viewed, in real time (on the array of a dozen different monitors, displays and TVs of various sizes that are in your editing bay) without upfront rendering - which is what is expected. To be able to replay the same hugely complex portion of video 30 times in a row with zero lag after making a change that requires the entire thing to be re-rendered.

I can think of few single-station use-cases, in fact, that are more computationally heavy than commercial grade video editing. You've got dozens of gigabytes of source material which has to be parsed quickly, loaded into memory, modified, composited and rendered at 29.97 - and the lag between commands and playback has to be effectively zero if you don't want your editors to blow their own brains out.

Maybe he means people using iMovie.

Yup yup. I'm not even doing professional video and a big part of why I recently upgraded my workstation (an i7-6700K, 64GB of RAM, and a 980Ti) was that even consumer-level 4K video is an enormous pig. I probably over-bought for my own needs--though hey, now I might play Dwarf Fortress at a reasonable speed--but there's little enough headroom that the monstrosities bought for commercial video make so much more sense.

Just guessing from the "final parts list from the builder", and that he misformatted the memory total on the CPU cooler line, he way overpaid for something built for him that he doesn't fully understand.

He could have ended up with 16 cores and 128GB building around the E5-2670, which is dirt cheap on eBay and elsewhere these days. $500 for motherboard, both CPUs, and 128GB (granted, DDR3 and not DDR4 per his build): http://www.natex.us/product-p/intel-s2600cp2j-128gb.htm

Geez. That's just embarrassing. I took him at his word that his rig was beefier than most video editing rigs, and now I feel like an idiot. Thanks for the link.

The only thing he's missing is a graphics card, and that's because his use case is different (it would be easy to plop in). High end workstations and High end gaming are identical except for that. My rig (with very close specs to his, plus a 980TI) runs my Rift just fine.

You helped prove my point by mentioning that he could easily make his machine VR ready by buying a $600 GPU for a workstation he already considers overkill :).

He needs to replace a $550 card (7950 price when he bought it) with a $300 card (GTX 970 current price).

An AMD 7950 was the high end card when his computer was built, and is only ~20% slower than the minimum recommendation. It should run most VR games just fine.

I strongly disagree with this, from experience. The minimum specs are not joking when it comes to VR (and he's off in terms of both CPU and GPU--VR is CPU-intensive too). Even at the minimum there are games that have stuttering, and stuttering is the literal worst thing that you can have in VR. Oculus forces games to fade out/black out before any load because having the head tracking stop even for a split second can make you literally fall over; dropped frames, especially during a big or sweeping motion can make you want to puke.

Honestly, my second-biggest worry (after the specter of a much more intrusive kind of harassment, which has already started to happen, hooray!) with VR is people trying it on machines that were built to save a few bucks and being turned off by the nausea of not having the necessary perf characteristics to deliver.

But it isn't -absurd overkill like he is boasting/assuming, but pretty standard in these realms. (Gamers probably would pick higher speed and only 4 cores, no clue what video editing tools prefer. Probably even more RAM if possible?)