Let's look at a few key trends and see what they mean for building and upgrading PCs in the coming year.

People perceive the personal computer as aging and obsolete next to our shiny new mobile phones, voice-activated home gear, and cloud-based software. In reality, the PC looks more relevant than ever, even as the PC market matures. A new emphasis on power efficiency, higher performance GPUs, and fast, but tiny, SSDs are reshaping what we think of as the PC. Let's take a look at the trends and technologies reshaping the PC as we know it in 2016, and how those will affect what we choose to buy or build.

Incremental technology improvements, PC gaming, and a shift away from performance to power management define the personal computer in 2016. I'm also seeing a resurgence of the 2-in-1 laptop, with detachable keyboard and tablet-like display, mostly due to Microsoft's Surface 4 Pro and Surface Book. On the wane: experiments in new or exotic form factors.

Let's look at a few of these key trends and see what they mean for building and upgrading PCs in the coming year. First, we'll take a look at changes on the component level, then figure out what that means for different classes of PC users.

Incremental Technology Improvements

While you can measure the difference in performance between Intel's 32nm Sandy Bridge processors and today's Skylake processors, that difference doesn't translate to big gains overall. That seems surprising; after all, Skylake is the third generation beyond Sandy Bridge, and two process nodes smaller.

If you start looking at platform differences, you find more substantial reasons to upgrade. The last chipset dedicated to Sandy Bridge, the Z68, only offered integrated USB 2.0 and PCI Express 2.0. USB 3.0 didn't arrive until Ivy Bridge, and while you could run Sandy Bridge processors on Intel x75 or x77 core logic, they were really built for Ivy Bridge.

Skylake heralded a major platform shift to DDR4 memory. Sure, DDR4 existed in Haswell Extreme systems, but DDR4 went mainstream with Skylake. Initially pricey, I'm now seeing price parity between DDR4 and DDR3 memory. In some cases, higher-bandwidth DDR4 memory actually costs less for 2x8GB, 16GB kits. (Though to be fair, DDR4's latency is higher). The huge improvements in memory bandwidth is more significant than any CPU performance increases. In addition, Intel substantially improved Skylake's integrated graphics, though no one would mistake them for high-end gaming GPUs.

Another key area of improvement lies in power efficiency. I'm running a Skylake Core i7-6700K system. As I type this text, my PC is completely silent. The CPU, GPU, and power supply cooling fans are not spinning. The only time I notice noise from my system now is when I fire up a game.

Each technology improvement by itself is incremental, but the sum total of these improvements make for a much better PC experience.

The Action is in PC Gaming

The reinvigorated gaming PC market still demands high performance. Gaming PC sales are robust, though competition is pretty fierce. Gaming PCs aren't just about raw horsepower; users love to customize their systems. Whether it's full-on case modding to simply decking out your system with semi-custom lighting and peripherals, users love to show off their PCs.

Intel rules the roost on the processor, with AMD unable to come close to anything resembling eight-core Haswell Extreme processors or the higher end of the Skylake product line. The sweet spot for CPU price / performance looks to be Intel's Core i5-6600K, selling in the $240-$250 range. The Core i5-6500 still hits 3.2GHz, and at roughly $205, works pretty well for gaming. Most games don't benefit from Hyper-Threading, Intel's version of simultaneous multi-threading, so Core-i5's work just fine.

AMD has worked to improved power efficiency in its latest, but as I discovered recently, its 4.3GHZ FX8370 is a 125W TDP part running over 4GHz, while not quite keeping up with the midrange Core-i5 processors. The power consumption in particular looks pretty weak compared to the i5-6500's 65W.

In an unusual move, Intel's next CPU, code-named Kaby Lake, remains at 14nm, breaking with the "tick-tock" pace that drove Intel's product releases.

Intel keeps tweaking its 14nm process technology. In an unusual move, Intel's next CPU, code-named Kaby Lake, remains at 14nm, breaking with the "tick-tock" pace that drove Intel's product releases. Originally, Broadwell was the tick, moving an enhanced Haswell design from 22nm to 14nm, with Skylake being the "tock". With Kaby Lake also being built in 14nm, the cycle has been broken.

Haswell Extreme gives way to Broadwell Extreme, supposedly launching before summer. These CPUs still run on the X99 chipset that saw the light of day with Haswell-E. Rumors suggest high-end Broadwell-E processors may offer as many as ten cores, but an eight-core version looks more likely.

AMD hopes its next generation Zen CPUs, which won't launch until later in 2016, will make it competitive on the CPU side. Little is known about Zen's actual performance, however. It's AMD's first completely new CPU architecture in several years, so a lot of people are curious about it.

AMD looks a little more competitive on the graphics front. AMD tweaked its GCN architecture a bit while vastly improving memory bandwidth with its Radeon Fury GPU line. The Fury incorporates Hynix's version of HBM (high-bandwidth memory), a highly parallel memory architecture delivering memory bandwidth peaking at 512GB/second. That's nearly double the bandwidth of Nvidia's GTX 980 Ti, and makes up a little for AMD's deficit in shader performance. The Fury X competes well with Nvidia's GTX 980, but costs more like a GTX 980 Ti. The midrange AMD GPUs tend to run hotter, and require big coolers, but still perform reasonably well. Nvidia still offers a better bottom-to-top GPU lineup, however.

When looking for a new graphics card, the key parameter today seems to be onboard memory. My VR testing suggests that cards with 2GB simply won't cut the mustard – VR requires 4GB at a minimum. For the most robust performance, however, higher-end graphics cards become a necessity. At a minimum, AMD's Fury Nano or Nvidia's GTX 970 do fairly well, but the GTX 980 or above have a bit more headroom. Better GPUs means VR titles stay above the magical 90fps threshold needed to avoid serious vertigo. Projectile vomiting does not make for a robust VR experience.

Next Gen GPUs

Nvidia's been talking up its next generation Pascal architecture for over a year now, and will include its own spin on high-bandwidth memory. Pascal will likely ship in late summer or Fall. Meanwhile, AMD soft-announced that company's next generation Polaris architecture at the 2016 CES show, hinting that we might see product as soon as late summer. It's shaping up to be an interesting year for graphics, making up a bit for the ho-hum evolution of CPU technology.

All of this incredible performance exists to support PC gaming, including VR. Few users will be buying Broadwell-E systems with Pascal or Polaris GPUs to run Microsoft Office. And while Broadwell-E's multicore performance should appeal to video editors and code builders, gamers will likely make up the bulk of the market.

The Death of Physical Media

The combination of ubiquitous broadband service and SSDs are killing more traditional storage media. Fewer PCs now ship with an optical drive SSDs offer superb storage performance, and are rapidly evolving to very compact form factors, such as M.2-based, motherboard-down SATA drives. This one-two punch – eliminating optical drive and ultra-tiny SSDs – now enable highly compact PCs. Even gaming PCs benefit, by requiring smaller cases and PSUs. The gating factor on gaming PC size remains higher-end graphics cards, but Pascal and Polaris designs look to minimize graphics card bulk.

Cloud storage and cloud services also have an impact. Services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive further reduce local storage requirements, though what's really needed is a universal cloud storage standard integrated into the OS. Cloud services, which can offload some compute chores, have already had an effect on gaming, with at least one upcoming Xbox One game, Crackdown 3, offloading some of its rendering chores to GPU servers hosted by Microsoft's Azure cloud services. It's likely this type of compute sharing will see more use, even as game streaming services fade into the sunset.

Forget Performance, It's All About Power

The CPU and GPU companies now worry less about pure performance, and more about performance per watt.

The CPU and GPU companies now worry less about pure performance, and more about performance per watt. While Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have talked up performance per watt for several years now, that mantra has become the primary force shaping product design. At least one Intel spokesman suggested that processor performance may actually level off or decrease a bit in favor of greater power efficiency.

Power efficiency extends beyond the PCs, as LCD monitors are also more power efficient than past displays. My own somewhat extreme case demonstrates the impact of the emphasis on performance per watt. I have eight PCs set up for LAN parties in my basement lab. When fully populated, we no longer need to fire up the air conditioner to keep the room cool. Despite all the PCs I run, my annual power bill continues to decline.

Mobile PCs: Less Experimenting

We've seen a great deal of form factor experiments over the past five years, ranging from weird laptop PC designs, through Intel's NUC initiative, and a variety of different all-in-one PCs. Companies are starting to back off from some of the more extreme experiments. NUCs are fine for light office work, but having run several different NUCs under high load, the noise generated by those tiny fans can set teeth on edge.

On the laptop side, the standards now seem to be the good old clamshell, plus 2-in-1 ultralight notebooks, and those 270 degree rotating hinge affairs popularized by Lenovo's Yoga series. Microsoft's Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 now define what 2-in-1 laptops should be, with companies like HP and Lenovo following suit with similar designs.

High-end gaming systems still ship in big tower cases, but more users now seem to gravitate towards smaller form factors, such as Falcon Northwest's Tiki. In fact, users can now build their own Tiki-like systems, though it's not a job for the first-time builder.

Where Next?

PC gaming has reinvigorated the PC market; even laptop manufacturers have adopted the gaming faith. Recently, Nvidia, AMD and Razer announced full support for an external graphics card housing, allowing buyers to have an Ultrabook-class notebook PC for travel, while plugging in for high performance gaming on the desktop. The whole affair is driven by Intel's Thunderbolt 3, which uses the newly minted USB-C standard connector to deliver 40Gbps bandwidth to the GPU.

Mainstream PC users will continue to gravitate to more mobile platforms, or desktop systems using mobile technology, such as NUCs and all-in-one PCs. These fixed PCs offer limited upgrade potential, but standards such as Thunderbolt 3 enable high performance external upgrades. Modular PCs designs are once again being considered for future designs; Microsoft recently talked up its vision for a modular PC standard.

Despite a seemingly mature market, the PC business continues to innovate. Sure, the PC business may be in decline, but the decline seems to be flattening. Recent projections through 2019 still see over 280 million PCs being sold each year. So let's not conflate "declining" with "small". The real worry is that only two major PC platform companies remain, Intel and AMD – and AMD looks pretty weak financially.

Overall, 2016 looks like the most interesting year for PCs in a long time. Faster, but more compact and power efficient graphics, tiny storage devices, better memory bandwidth, and tech such as Thunderbolt 3 should generate some really cool personal computers in the coming year.