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But next year even new/better CPUs and GPUs will appear, right? Why not wait until next year?
by XCSme 7y ago
But next year even new/better CPUs and GPUs will appear, right? Why not wait until next year?
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoBecause in the last few years progress has been slow and mostly incremental with major leaps every 3-5 years. As long as you can wait and upgrade when that major leap happens you're good for a few years. That's why we follow tech news, leaks and rumours, to estimate when the next major leap will be and not be suckered into buying hardware that will be too quickly obsolete. That's why HW manufacturers have NDAs in place. To keep the consumers buying the current stock instead of holding out for the next gen.
- pdimitar 7y agoValid question. My answer would be: because even though AMD made things quite interesting during 2019, I don't foresee them being able to go much further than what they did now. Example: PCIe 4.0 has insane bandwidth allowances. I don't see any SSDs ever going beyond PCIe 4.0 bandwidth. Other iterative improvements like a few dozen MHz more in CPUs, or a few dozen more cores on the GPU, or a few more hundred MHz in RAM... they are usable without their potential being wasted in the new chipsets -- although I am not an expert, it does seem that way after several reads of the their parameters. And even if next-gen stuff with bigger improvements is coming, I don't feel we can go much higher before these things hit big diminishing returns in noticeable performance in all but very specialised programs. Currently I am using a workstation with 10-core 4.0GHz CPU / 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC / NVMe SSD at ~2.8 GB/s. I seriously cannot make any programming software even utilise that SSD to full capacity -- only Postgres manages to saturate it to 50% of its potential when doing `pg_restore`. Granted I haven't run any deep learning stuff and I don't intend to. I am focusing on everyday and professional-but-not-strongly-specialised software. And there, I feel, stopping at motherboards with PCIe 4.0 and their appropriate AMD CPUs and uber-fast SSDs and the fastest RAM you can find today... will be more than enough for like 5 years. All IMO of course.
- happycube 7y agoEarly hints of Zen 3 sound pretty impressive, but it sounds like you're at a good stopping point upgrade-wise for a while :) Even post-mitigations Sandy Bridge is still "good enough" for most people IMO, even though current chips are much nicer.
- ksec 7y agoThere is another data point. Zen 4 will be PCI-E 5.0 and DDR5. Unless Zen 4 is a gigantic leap forward in performance and not an iteration. The cost of Jumping in those tech will be quite expensive. So Zen 3, PCI-E 4.0, DDR4 will be like the sweet spot for desktop for a while. ( I do wish I am wrong and they drive down the cost of PCI-E 5.0 and DDR5 faster. But history has shown those tends to take 2 - 3 years to pick up the pace )
- pdimitar 7y agoI have the same feeling. A lot of people will stay on Zen 3 / PCIe 4.0 / DDR4 for years and PCIe 5.0 will be for min-maxers. Hell, even the current high-end PCIe 3.0 setups like mine seem to be quite future-proof.
- ksec 7y agoWell of coz that is from a PC perspective, and I am stuck on Mac......
- maximente 7y agoi think it's basically consumerism. i'm running a processor that's 10 years old with some RAM and SSD upgrades throughout the years. it's perfectly fine for daily golang/java/scala/haskell work. a coworker of mine has a generation 2 ryzen which runs games like factorio perfectly fine - big setups (according to him) are pretty smooth. no GPU. he says he hasn't yet found any games that can't run fairly well on it yet. it's funny because desktops are now basically the thin clients we thought we'd all be using in a futuristic tech setup, with the actual work being done on "the cloud". your desktop isn't fast enough to do any real "work" other than some unit tests, compiling, etc.