To new computer or to not new computer?

It is that time of year. Everything is fresh and new as 2025 gets kicked into high gear. Many organizations have new budgets providing money to spend on new computer hardware. But is now the best time to spend those dollars? That is the question. New coming out of CES might help answer that question.

What is CES?

For those that are not a computer nerd like me (yes I build my own computer when I need or want a new one.), you may not be aware of a big computer convention going on right now in Los Vegas, CES. CES, which stands for Consumer Electronics Show, is one of the largest consumer level electronics shows held in North America. It is organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA).?? The CTA is a trade association made up of technology vendors that help promote and advocate for that industry. ?To put it in GIS related terms, it is like MAPPS as best I understand it.

Many major and minor technology companies use CES as a platform to announce new products and innovations. Like what Esri does at their User Conference each year.? This includes NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Adobe, and Microsoft just to name a few.

Big Computer Related Hardware Announcements

As expected, the big computer hardware manufacturers, Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD along with their partners have announced a lot of new products releasing soon to replace their current generation.

Intel

Intel announced the release of new series 2 Ultra Core processors. The Ultra Core processors are built with a focus on AI processing. These continue to build on the concept of having both p-cores (Performance) and e-cores (Efficiency) to provide increased capability when needed and to ramp down to save power when it is not needed. These new chips boast anywhere from 14 to 24 cores, and some include Wi-Fi and embedded graphics capabilities on the CPU itself. These new processors are expected to hit the market sometime next month.

These new processors come on top of Intel’s announcement of a new GPU, the B-series cards, code named Battlemage. These two new graphics cards, B580 and B570, were announced in early December to rave reviews for low to mid-tier under $300 graphics cards. A market that NVIDIA and AMD appear to have abandoned.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA announced its next generation of Graphics Cards, RTX 5000 series built on their new Blackwell technology. NVIDIA is claiming huge performance increases over its current RTX 4000 series cards. Of course, these claims have not been verified by any outside parties just yet. ??These new cards include improved versions of the NVIDIA DLSS, a big increase in tensor cores, and new GDDR7 memory. ?NVIDIA has made big investments in supporting AI with all its latest tech. You will see this in GIS with applications such as ArcGIS which is optimized to leverage NVIDIA tensor cores for much of its AI and Machine Learning capabilities. Prices for these new cards from NVIDIA are reported to run from around $550 to over $2,000. Expect these new cards to be available near the end of the month both from NVIDIA directly as well as its partners.

AMD

AMD, known for both CPUs and GPUs, announced both new processors and graphics products at CES. On the CPU side, this included new gaming and AI focused processors built on their new Zen 5 architecture. For gamers, AMD unveiled their new Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D. For mobile devices, AMD announced the new AI Max and AI MAX Pro.

The Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D hyperthreaded cores that can boost up to 5.7 GHz and include up to 144 MB of on-board cache as well as featuring embedded RDNA 2 Graphics. The 3D V-Cache has proven to provide better performance than traditional CPU cache. ?

The new AI Max and AI Max Pro are commercial CPUs for use in laptops and tablets. These new CPUs reportedly provide workstation level performance capable of working with large data models and complex AI workloads. These also include integrated graphics and leverage the Zen5 architecture.

To compete with NVIDIA, AMD also announced new Graphics Processors alongside its partners. This includes name changes to follow NVIDIA’s naming scheme. The new RX9000 series is built on AMDs RDNA 4 platform and is expected to be released sometime Q1 of 2025 but no exact date has been provided. Exact specs and benchmarks have not been released either so it is hard to say how they will compare to either Intel or NVIDIA’s new GPUs.

So, should I buy a new computer now?

At present I would recommend holding off on buying a new PC now if you can wait. There is too much change happening at this moment.

Many manufacturers of computer components have halted production of the current generation hardware to spin up production of the incoming generation. So, some components such as GPUs are starting to get hard to find. This is driving up costs. ?Give it another couple of months and the new products will start hitting the shelf, hopefully driving down the cost of last generation hardware as stores try to dump their old inventory to make room for new products.

If you do want to get the latest and greatest, waiting will also allow time for bugs to be discovered and worked out. We all know that manufacturers like to use us as their beta testers. Which means there will be unexpected issues with the new hardware and drivers. So let others that like to live on the bleeding edge work through those issues.

Of course, if you can’t wait, try at least to get a PC that is upgradable and does not use a lot of proprietary components if at all possible. I know many are stuck with whatever IT purchases which will limit your options. This is why I like to build my own if given the chance.