3 ms·

I went the other way, I was a PC gamer and 'only true programming PC consumes 700W and acts as a space heater' type for nearly two decades and then somewhere al

I went the other way, I was a PC gamer and 'only true programming PC consumes 700W and acts as a space heater' type for nearly two decades and then somewhere along the line laptops got fast. My T470P with an i7-7700HQ/32GB RAM/nvme m.2 handles all the programming I realistically need to do (I realised this when I had W10 running in a VM (8Gb/2 CPU), 3 vagrant instances and intellij open and still had 12GB of RAM free. When I bought the laptop the plan was to build a Ryzen desktop pretty much immediately afterwards but here I am a year later deferring that till next year and the Zen2 architecture and my incentive to build a desktop has gone out the window, the Thinkpad runs a 27" 4K display just fine and for programming thats all I need it to do when I don't feel like working on the sofa. So yes I can see ML and Gaming been a driver but since I don't do the former and rarely have the time for the latter I'm in the strange position of having a laptop be my primary computer for the first time since I started using PC's in 1987. Hell the only game I play anymore on PC is Chess everything else the Xbox One is just fine.

perl4ever 8y ago
I had/have an i3 2.5GHz (M380) laptop, IIRC from around 2011, which I had tried to upgrade recently with a top of the line SSD, Windows 10 and 8 GB RAM to extend its life. While Windows 10 was definitely better than I'd anticipated, overall it's still painfully slow browsing the web (except for HN of course). So I broke down and got a new laptop with an i7 8650U, and it is disturbing how much faster it is, considering the base frequency seems to be significantly lower (1.9). I am wondering whether there is some now-ubiquitous function, perhaps relating to encryption that is accelerated on newer processors. Single threaded benchmarks only indicate it should be 2x as fast, but there is far more of a difference than that. Without identifying what the improvement is, I have the nagging doubt I should've identified a software problem on my old computer. I did try Linux on it, and that was not stunningly fast either. So I would be happy with my new PC, except that I'm wary I'm being flim-flammed with software that makes old hardware run like crap, and the performance is an illusion. But hey, maybe the hardware has improved in 7 years. I remember when that was an eternity.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Not surprised, the 8650U is an incredible part, it matches the 7700HQ at half the TDP - Still not sure how they managed that magic.

perl4ever 8y ago

I had/have an i3 2.5GHz (M380) laptop, IIRC from around 2011, which I had tried to upgrade recently with a top of the line SSD, Windows 10 and 8 GB RAM to extend its life. While Windows 10 was definitely better than I'd anticipated, overall it's still painfully slow browsing the web (except for HN of course). So I broke down and got a new laptop with an i7 8650U, and it is disturbing how much faster it is, considering the base frequency seems to be significantly lower (1.9). I am wondering whether there is some now-ubiquitous function, perhaps relating to encryption that is accelerated on newer processors. Single threaded benchmarks only indicate it should be 2x as fast, but there is far more of a difference than that. Without identifying what the improvement is, I have the nagging doubt I should've identified a software problem on my old computer. I did try Linux on it, and that was not stunningly fast either. So I would be happy with my new PC, except that I'm wary I'm being flim-flammed with software that makes old hardware run like crap, and the performance is an illusion. But hey, maybe the hardware has improved in 7 years. I remember when that was an eternity.

noir_lord 8y ago
Not surprised, the 8650U is an incredible part, it matches the 7700HQ at half the TDP - Still not sure how they managed that magic.