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You guys thinking ATX is a standard has me laughing my head off. On those motherboards we had 6 bus 'standards', 6 video card 'standards' (AGP, AGP 2X, AGP 4X,

You guys thinking ATX is a standard has me laughing my head off. On those motherboards we had 6 bus 'standards', 6 video card 'standards' (AGP, AGP 2X, AGP 4X, ...), 6+ disk 'standards' (IDE, EIDE, PATA, SATA-1,2,3, M.2, PCI, and the list goes on). the biggest joke is that CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Motherboard Cabal.

tbolt 8y ago
Can you provide some evidence that “CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years?”
shasheene 8y ago
Video card interface electrical standards may have changed, but GPU form factors have not. Electrical interface changes just need to be paired with compatible motherboards. Same with hard drives: the interface changed but the form factor has not. They are even compatible with their larger versions: a laptop 2.5" platter drive or SSD can fit in a 3.5" drive bay with a cheap bracket. The SATA versions were backwards compatible speed bumps. Performance was always the maximum supported on the motherboard. M.2 is just PCIe in a different form factor, so on desktops a $5 passive adapter allows NVMe SSDs to be used on any PCIe slot on even on relatively ancient PCs (though use as a boot drive dependent on BIOS support). Same with display interfaces. VGA is still supported on many systems, with DVI-I being backwards compatible with cheap passive adapters. DVI and HDMI are electrically identically (minus audio) so cheap passive adapters work. The broader point is that large incompatible electrical changes are possible because they only mean the new motherboard just needs to be paired with a compatible component. There's still market pressure for backwards compatibility unless the leap is large enough.
detaro 8y ago
> the biggest joke is that CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years 2009 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i7-975 2019 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K Single-thread performance has doubled. And the i9 has double the number of threads. And uses less energy. > and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Motherboard Cabal. The point is that you do not need to buy an entirely new systems every two or three years (and I personally know few people that do), but can comfortably upgrade parts. CPU upgrade compatibility has sometimes been annoyingly short, but most of time you can easily extend the lifetime of a system by buying a former high-end CPU for cheap, and for other pieces compatibility is way longer. SATA drives from 10 years ago still work with modern PCs if they survived (or your PC from 10 years ago you still use because "CPUs haven't become faster" can be upgraded with a SATA or PCIe SSD, which it can't fully utilize, but it'll work and make a difference. PCIe cards always have been compatible between versions, you had the choice between AGP and PCIe for quite a while (when that switch happened, like 15 years ago?), and technically can still buy boards with PCI ports today (although that's a market niche).

tbolt 8y ago

Can you provide some evidence that “CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years?”

shasheene 8y ago

Video card interface electrical standards may have changed, but GPU form factors have not. Electrical interface changes just need to be paired with compatible motherboards. Same with hard drives: the interface changed but the form factor has not. They are even compatible with their larger versions: a laptop 2.5" platter drive or SSD can fit in a 3.5" drive bay with a cheap bracket. The SATA versions were backwards compatible speed bumps. Performance was always the maximum supported on the motherboard. M.2 is just PCIe in a different form factor, so on desktops a $5 passive adapter allows NVMe SSDs to be used on any PCIe slot on even on relatively ancient PCs (though use as a boot drive dependent on BIOS support). Same with display interfaces. VGA is still supported on many systems, with DVI-I being backwards compatible with cheap passive adapters. DVI and HDMI are electrically identically (minus audio) so cheap passive adapters work. The broader point is that large incompatible electrical changes are possible because they only mean the new motherboard just needs to be paired with a compatible component. There's still market pressure for backwards compatibility unless the leap is large enough.

detaro 8y ago

> the biggest joke is that CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years 2009 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i7-975 2019 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K Single-thread performance has doubled. And the i9 has double the number of threads. And uses less energy. > and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Motherboard Cabal. The point is that you do not need to buy an entirely new systems every two or three years (and I personally know few people that do), but can comfortably upgrade parts. CPU upgrade compatibility has sometimes been annoyingly short, but most of time you can easily extend the lifetime of a system by buying a former high-end CPU for cheap, and for other pieces compatibility is way longer. SATA drives from 10 years ago still work with modern PCs if they survived (or your PC from 10 years ago you still use because "CPUs haven't become faster" can be upgraded with a SATA or PCIe SSD, which it can't fully utilize, but it'll work and make a difference. PCIe cards always have been compatible between versions, you had the choice between AGP and PCIe for quite a while (when that switch happened, like 15 years ago?), and technically can still buy boards with PCI ports today (although that's a market niche).