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> I'd argue that PC sales are slow because Intel hasn't compellingly upgraded their processors in a long time. It used to be that every 18 months, we'd see a pr

> I'd argue that PC sales are slow because Intel hasn't compellingly upgraded their processors in a long time. It used to be that every 18 months, we'd see a processor that was a huge upgrade. Now it's 5 years to get that upgrade. I think it’s Moore’s law approaching its limits and the direction of chip improvements isn’t core speed but the number of them, power usage, etc which make a difference but for most folk it doesn’t appear like an improvement like say doubling the frequency every 18 months. I have an old laptop and it keeps up quite nicely after 8 years...

hmottestad 6y ago
This is me today. I'm typing this on an 8 year old macbook pro. First gen retina. 4-cores and 16GB of ram. I want to upgrade, I really really do. I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work, but I can't bring myself to purchase one for myself since I've been telling myself I would wait for 10nm. The first 14nm processors started shipping in the 15" in 2015 - 5 years ago. My current 8 year old macbook has a 22nm processor. I would never have thought 8 years ago that Intel would only have managed a single node shrink since then.
- jseliger 6y ago
  The big subjective improvements appear to have been in screen resolutions/sharpness and in SSDs. An 8-year-old LCD will likely have dimmed substantially. On the other hand if you like it, you like it, and cheap is beautiful.
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    Why would it dim? Never hears about it.
    - mpol 6y ago
      It won't :) It has a LED backlight. Older LCD screens often had fluorescent backlight, which will and did degrade after hours of use. According to Wikipedia, LEDs are the most popular backlight in LCD screens since 2012.
      - rgbrenner 6y ago
        The idea that LEDs last forever is a myth. LEDs degrade over time. They actually list it on the spec sheet. For example an L70 rated led with a 25k hour life will produce 70% of the light it produced when new after 25k hours. Recently I replaced 4 Asus monitors with led backlights that were produced in 2014 and 2015. Asus says 300 nits. Tested them when I was calibrating their replacements and they were 110-120 at full brightness. Monitors color shift and dim as they age... that’s why hardware calibrators exist.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work I'm jealous and genuinely curious where do you guys work that your employers can afford to get everyone such expensive machines. I've been a dev in the EU for 8 years now and at most places I've worked or interviewed(not FAANG) the machines you get are some cheapo HP/Lenovo/Dell with only the executives having Apple hardware. I never understood why companies in the west cheap out on hardware so much since compared to the cost of office rent and employee salaries that's a drop in the ocean, they could buy everyone MacBooks or Ryzen towers and it wouldn't even dent their bottom line.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    Every tech company I've worked at in Silicon Valley let the engineer pick their own computer and just submit a receipt for reimbursement. Up to $3000. Frankly with the cost of hiring you, spending $3k to make you even a few percent more productive if money well spent.
    - NightlyDev 6y ago
      USD 3000 might be quite limiting if you need a fast workstation. 3000 USD is like one 1 TB high performance SSD.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        What? Even optane is less than half that much. A high performance SSD, capable of over 3GB/s, is less than $200 for 1TB.
        NightlyDev 6y ago
        P4800X is around 5K. And you probably want them in raid, so at least 10K.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        And a 905P costs a quarter of that. But seriously, a 970 Evo Plus is a high performance SSD suitable for a workstation and that's $400 for two.
mekpro 6y ago
Blaming Moore's Law is not fair since Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, HiSilicon,... can deliver reasonable improvement in these 3 years while only Intel is stagnant.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  To be fair, most of that is them catching up to where Intel already was. Noone seems to actually be fabbing meaningfully smaller feature sizes (or higher layer counts) than what Intel is stagnating at.
  - bradknowles 6y ago
    The difference is that ARM has been able to deliver desktop-grade performance at power levels that are suitable for use in an iPad. Intel and AMD might be able to deliver somewhat higher performance by throwing a whole bunch of cores at the problem, but they do so at a much higher cost in power requirements. And it would be easy enough to design ARM machines with an equal number of cores (or even way more), and still have much lower power requirements. Intel stagnated, and has high power requirements. ARM has caught up, and has much lower power requirements. The reasoning seems pretty simple to me.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture; that they've made better use of the transistors available, not that they've achieved better feature density than what would be expected from where they are on the Moores law curve. Also Intel and AMD have not delivered higher performance via more cores; they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon (edit: or at least in the same package). (There are some slight improvements in inter-processor interrupt and cache-forwarding latency, but if that's a performance bottleneck, the problem is bad parallelization at the code level.)
      - DuskStar 6y ago
MarekKnapek 6y ago
Yes, Moore's law is hitting its limits: For example 5nm distance equals like about 25 silicon atoms. That's like: Quantum electron tunnelling will ruin your life. So if we want increase our chip's performance any further, we need a fundamental change in our technology. And since silicon atom is 210 pm big and carbon atom (graphene is made from carbon) is 170 pm big, we need to change our architecture as shrinking transistors will not be possible anymore. I mean CISC/RISC, drop x86 support and so on.
- toron123 6y ago
  5nm is marketing name, it doesn't have anything in common with real sizes of transistors. They are much bigger than that.
bcrosby95 6y ago
> I think it’s Moore’s law approaching its limits and the direction of chip improvements isn’t core speed but the number of them Note that this is still Moore's law. You're thinking of Dennard scaling. That basically ran out 12 years ago.

hmottestad 6y ago

This is me today. I'm typing this on an 8 year old macbook pro. First gen retina. 4-cores and 16GB of ram. I want to upgrade, I really really do. I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work, but I can't bring myself to purchase one for myself since I've been telling myself I would wait for 10nm. The first 14nm processors started shipping in the 15" in 2015 - 5 years ago. My current 8 year old macbook has a 22nm processor. I would never have thought 8 years ago that Intel would only have managed a single node shrink since then.

jseliger 6y ago
The big subjective improvements appear to have been in screen resolutions/sharpness and in SSDs. An 8-year-old LCD will likely have dimmed substantially. On the other hand if you like it, you like it, and cheap is beautiful.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Why would it dim? Never hears about it.
  - mpol 6y ago
    It won't :) It has a LED backlight. Older LCD screens often had fluorescent backlight, which will and did degrade after hours of use. According to Wikipedia, LEDs are the most popular backlight in LCD screens since 2012.
    - rgbrenner 6y ago
      The idea that LEDs last forever is a myth. LEDs degrade over time. They actually list it on the spec sheet. For example an L70 rated led with a 25k hour life will produce 70% of the light it produced when new after 25k hours. Recently I replaced 4 Asus monitors with led backlights that were produced in 2014 and 2015. Asus says 300 nits. Tested them when I was calibrating their replacements and they were 110-120 at full brightness. Monitors color shift and dim as they age... that’s why hardware calibrators exist.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work I'm jealous and genuinely curious where do you guys work that your employers can afford to get everyone such expensive machines. I've been a dev in the EU for 8 years now and at most places I've worked or interviewed(not FAANG) the machines you get are some cheapo HP/Lenovo/Dell with only the executives having Apple hardware. I never understood why companies in the west cheap out on hardware so much since compared to the cost of office rent and employee salaries that's a drop in the ocean, they could buy everyone MacBooks or Ryzen towers and it wouldn't even dent their bottom line.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Every tech company I've worked at in Silicon Valley let the engineer pick their own computer and just submit a receipt for reimbursement. Up to $3000. Frankly with the cost of hiring you, spending $3k to make you even a few percent more productive if money well spent.
  - NightlyDev 6y ago
    USD 3000 might be quite limiting if you need a fast workstation. 3000 USD is like one 1 TB high performance SSD.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      What? Even optane is less than half that much. A high performance SSD, capable of over 3GB/s, is less than $200 for 1TB.
      - NightlyDev 6y ago
        P4800X is around 5K. And you probably want them in raid, so at least 10K.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        And a 905P costs a quarter of that. But seriously, a 970 Evo Plus is a high performance SSD suitable for a workstation and that's $400 for two.

mekpro 6y ago

Blaming Moore's Law is not fair since Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, HiSilicon,... can deliver reasonable improvement in these 3 years while only Intel is stagnant.

a1369209993 6y ago
To be fair, most of that is them catching up to where Intel already was. Noone seems to actually be fabbing meaningfully smaller feature sizes (or higher layer counts) than what Intel is stagnating at.
- bradknowles 6y ago
  The difference is that ARM has been able to deliver desktop-grade performance at power levels that are suitable for use in an iPad. Intel and AMD might be able to deliver somewhat higher performance by throwing a whole bunch of cores at the problem, but they do so at a much higher cost in power requirements. And it would be easy enough to design ARM machines with an equal number of cores (or even way more), and still have much lower power requirements. Intel stagnated, and has high power requirements. ARM has caught up, and has much lower power requirements. The reasoning seems pretty simple to me.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture; that they've made better use of the transistors available, not that they've achieved better feature density than what would be expected from where they are on the Moores law curve. Also Intel and AMD have not delivered higher performance via more cores; they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon (edit: or at least in the same package). (There are some slight improvements in inter-processor interrupt and cache-forwarding latency, but if that's a performance bottleneck, the problem is bad parallelization at the code level.)
    - DuskStar 6y ago

MarekKnapek 6y ago

Yes, Moore's law is hitting its limits: For example 5nm distance equals like about 25 silicon atoms. That's like: Quantum electron tunnelling will ruin your life. So if we want increase our chip's performance any further, we need a fundamental change in our technology. And since silicon atom is 210 pm big and carbon atom (graphene is made from carbon) is 170 pm big, we need to change our architecture as shrinking transistors will not be possible anymore. I mean CISC/RISC, drop x86 support and so on.

toron123 6y ago
5nm is marketing name, it doesn't have anything in common with real sizes of transistors. They are much bigger than that.

bcrosby95 6y ago

> I think it’s Moore’s law approaching its limits and the direction of chip improvements isn’t core speed but the number of them Note that this is still Moore's law. You're thinking of Dennard scaling. That basically ran out 12 years ago.