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Eh, I think we got some time for consumer performance improvements. Graphics cards and HDD/SSDs seem to have been steadily increasing (noticeably) but CPU's an
by mrep 8y ago
Eh, I think we got some time for consumer performance improvements. Graphics cards and HDD/SSDs seem to have been steadily increasing (noticeably) but CPU's and RAM have not for consumers which are major bottlenecks.
My top of the line late 2013 rMBP has got 4 cores, 16GB of ram, and 512GB NVMe SSD. rMBPs just recently upgraded to 6 cores and 32GB of ram (more storage too but that isn't a big deal nowadays since speed was the biggest optimization for storage and it is still NVMe IMO). However, server CPU and RAM has increased. You can now rent an AWS x1e.32xlarge with 64 cores and 4TB of RAM and thanks to AMD, that competition seems to finally be flowing back to consumer computers (At least for CPUs).
Just look at people being amazed at threadrippers 32 freaking cores on a desktop (matches AWS x1 when you consider the x1 has dual sockets) and we still haven't passed down the gains in RAM (2TB of RAM if it matches the x1).
When those performance gains pass down to consumer computers, users will have up to 6.33 times the amount of CPU and 64 freaking times the amount of RAM!
- majewsky 8y ago> When those performance gains pass down to consumer computers, users will have up to 6.33 times the amount of CPU and 64 freaking times the amount of RAM! This will only happen once there is a usecase for that much RAM in a consumer machine that justifies the massive increase in power consumption. I don't see such a usecase yet. (The only thing that I can think of that pushes hardware requirements on consumer machines is VR/AR, but that's mostly a GPU problem.) Many notebook models (also the previous Macbooks, I think) were stuck at 16 GB RAM because that's the maximum for low-power DDR3.