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Your 7 year old laptop does not run all modern software just fine. c'mon. It runs the software you feel comfortable asking it to run, but this whole comment boa

by aksss 5y ago

Your 7 year old laptop does not run all modern software just fine. c'mon. It runs the software you feel comfortable asking it to run, but this whole comment board is suffused with people mistaking their stagnant demands for stagnant computing performance/software requirements. A 7-year old processor is somewhere around a haswell or broadwell, right? An i7 of that gen had a passmark score of like 950, whereas an i7 of current gen is about 1700. Even ignoring improvements in mobile graphics, power consumption, displays, and memory capacity, a modern laptop provides a completely different experience and level of capability than a 7-year old laptop. As I said in another comment that got voted down to hell and even flagged (for goodness sake) these comments about the adequacy of very old hardware probably tell us more about the owners' unchanging software tooling and work habits more than they convince us that technical advancement has come to a near standstill. WFH in 2020 required many people to add frequent VC on top of their normal workload. A 7 year old laptop would fully show its age if that normal workload was already pressing the laptop's boundaries. God help you if you wanted to add OBS into the mix. I can play an acceptable form of Assassin's Creed on my Tiger Lake laptop. I couldn't comfortably do that with my Skylake laptop. Examples and scenarios are legion. I'll use any resources I can get in a 13-14" mobile platform and then some.

toast0 5y ago
> stagnant demands for stagnant computing performance/software requirements I'm going to do mostly the same thing, although I'll certainly acknowledge hardware has gotten faster and more power efficient. It's not nearly the same growth rate as before, of course. But, as a grumpy old person, I don't see a whole lot of change in what people are doing with their computers. Yeah, a new one would be more powerful and often use less energy, but would it change what I can do? Newer games are a real thing, but can I spreadsheet faster? Does it make chatting better or just enable more bloat? I used to send animated gifs to friends with AIM in the late 90s on a pentium 75, and the gifs were really animated gifs. Somehow, a modern chat client needs a quad core machine. Maybe more/different VC stuff, but I usually run VC on a haswell chromebook with 2 cores, so that doesn't seem hard.
- aksss 5y ago
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-haswell-icelake&num=7 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-ha... Check out where the broadwell and haswell procs are on this plot relative to a 10th gen processor. You probably couldn't spreadsheet faster on an 11th gen, but you could have more workbooks open, drive a couple large hi-res monitors, do VC with OBS in the middle, while screen sharing, while running several other apps, and add in a few VMs/containers and an IDE on an 11th gen platform (e.g. XPS 9310), all of which you absolutely could not do on a Broadwell or even Skylake platform - I've tried. It's all about what your workload/requirement is, right?
  - Delk 5y ago
    You're not wrong about there being substantive performance improvements in recent CPU generations, or that workloads matter. However, the leaps in the 90's were great enough that you wouldn't have been able to run even the latest OS (or apps written for it) on mid-range 7-year-old hardware, at least not with any kind of comfort. I would have been almost outlandish to even try. Windows 95 should have theoretically run on a 386 from the early 90's, but I'm not sure it would have really been usable. In the late 80's you might have got a 286 -- not much luck running Windows 3.11 four or five years later on that. If you got a Pentium circa 1995, good luck running Windows XP or even Windows 2000 on it. Looking at the charts in the Phoronix article, the overall performance (geometric mean) approximately doubled from Broadwell to 10th gen. That's more than I would have expected based on how incremental the generation-to-generation changes appear, and it's certainly substantial if your workload involves any kind of heavy lifting. However, in the 90's, performance would have doubled every couple of years or so. Within a time frame similar to Broadwell to 10th gen, it would probably have more than quadrupled.
acomjean 5y ago
I think what people are saying is not that my computer is fast and getting a faster one wouldn’t improve their experience that much. I have an old work laptop (6years) and a much newer Linux home laptop that is faster. I notice and it’s nice to have the speed but Im not suffering with my old machine. We’re a long way from watching a spreadsheet recalculate (AppleWorks on the Apple 2 Im thinking of you).. Sure for gaming/ music or video work or high end development tasks it makes a difference. It probably matters more than people think but they aren’t suffering with older hardware. Some development platforms are looking to induce upgrades however (electron apps for example)
- aksss 5y ago
  > sure for [heavy work] it makes a difference That's precisely my point. Having low requirements for hardware is a poor basis upon which to judge the advancement of hardware. If you don't notice a difference between a 6th gen and 11th(!) gen proc and associated platform (for which we have comparative benchmarks, btw), your demands of the hardware have just remained too low for the improvements to register. For a basic home user or low-intensity office user, an XPS 9310 with 32GB of RAM would be a waste today. For people that can use it, it's a godsend compared to a Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake laptop.
anthk 5y ago
That's nothing. As I said, compare Doom (1993) vs Max Payne (2001). Or just a smaller gap. Doom (1993) vs Quake II (1997). Night and day. By comparison, kid, today you should be able to play a FULLY raytraced new release of AC or Watch Dogs with crazy photo-realist graphics (superior to even Forza 5) at least at 1080p. Because that was the gap between a 1993 PC and a "Multimedia PC" with a Voodoo and MMX Pentium, if not a Pentium II which would curb-stomp the 486. Oh, and we are emulating the PSX with VGS from Connectix, so add PS4 emulation on top of that with a mid-range PC from today.
- aksss 5y ago
  Different topic, but okay. It's easy to multiply your pennies when you've only got two. BTW, the first computer I personally owned was an 8086, so I was there, Gandalf. It's what I first learned to really program on. The timeframe you're talking about, the progression of tech through the nineties, I'm intimately familiar with.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anthk 5y ago
    Then you should be more than aware that current machines are not that special anymore. There is no "generation jump". Raytracing? If we were comparing it to Quake I and GL/Glide, we are on the pre-Screamer days. Barely a step over Duke Nukem 3D. I feel dissapointed.

by aksss 5y ago

toast0 5y ago

> stagnant demands for stagnant computing performance/software requirements I'm going to do mostly the same thing, although I'll certainly acknowledge hardware has gotten faster and more power efficient. It's not nearly the same growth rate as before, of course. But, as a grumpy old person, I don't see a whole lot of change in what people are doing with their computers. Yeah, a new one would be more powerful and often use less energy, but would it change what I can do? Newer games are a real thing, but can I spreadsheet faster? Does it make chatting better or just enable more bloat? I used to send animated gifs to friends with AIM in the late 90s on a pentium 75, and the gifs were really animated gifs. Somehow, a modern chat client needs a quad core machine. Maybe more/different VC stuff, but I usually run VC on a haswell chromebook with 2 cores, so that doesn't seem hard.

aksss 5y ago
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-haswell-icelake&num=7 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-ha... Check out where the broadwell and haswell procs are on this plot relative to a 10th gen processor. You probably couldn't spreadsheet faster on an 11th gen, but you could have more workbooks open, drive a couple large hi-res monitors, do VC with OBS in the middle, while screen sharing, while running several other apps, and add in a few VMs/containers and an IDE on an 11th gen platform (e.g. XPS 9310), all of which you absolutely could not do on a Broadwell or even Skylake platform - I've tried. It's all about what your workload/requirement is, right?
- Delk 5y ago
  You're not wrong about there being substantive performance improvements in recent CPU generations, or that workloads matter. However, the leaps in the 90's were great enough that you wouldn't have been able to run even the latest OS (or apps written for it) on mid-range 7-year-old hardware, at least not with any kind of comfort. I would have been almost outlandish to even try. Windows 95 should have theoretically run on a 386 from the early 90's, but I'm not sure it would have really been usable. In the late 80's you might have got a 286 -- not much luck running Windows 3.11 four or five years later on that. If you got a Pentium circa 1995, good luck running Windows XP or even Windows 2000 on it. Looking at the charts in the Phoronix article, the overall performance (geometric mean) approximately doubled from Broadwell to 10th gen. That's more than I would have expected based on how incremental the generation-to-generation changes appear, and it's certainly substantial if your workload involves any kind of heavy lifting. However, in the 90's, performance would have doubled every couple of years or so. Within a time frame similar to Broadwell to 10th gen, it would probably have more than quadrupled.

acomjean 5y ago

I think what people are saying is not that my computer is fast and getting a faster one wouldn’t improve their experience that much. I have an old work laptop (6years) and a much newer Linux home laptop that is faster. I notice and it’s nice to have the speed but Im not suffering with my old machine. We’re a long way from watching a spreadsheet recalculate (AppleWorks on the Apple 2 Im thinking of you).. Sure for gaming/ music or video work or high end development tasks it makes a difference. It probably matters more than people think but they aren’t suffering with older hardware. Some development platforms are looking to induce upgrades however (electron apps for example)

aksss 5y ago
> sure for [heavy work] it makes a difference That's precisely my point. Having low requirements for hardware is a poor basis upon which to judge the advancement of hardware. If you don't notice a difference between a 6th gen and 11th(!) gen proc and associated platform (for which we have comparative benchmarks, btw), your demands of the hardware have just remained too low for the improvements to register. For a basic home user or low-intensity office user, an XPS 9310 with 32GB of RAM would be a waste today. For people that can use it, it's a godsend compared to a Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake laptop.

anthk 5y ago

That's nothing. As I said, compare Doom (1993) vs Max Payne (2001). Or just a smaller gap. Doom (1993) vs Quake II (1997). Night and day. By comparison, kid, today you should be able to play a FULLY raytraced new release of AC or Watch Dogs with crazy photo-realist graphics (superior to even Forza 5) at least at 1080p. Because that was the gap between a 1993 PC and a "Multimedia PC" with a Voodoo and MMX Pentium, if not a Pentium II which would curb-stomp the 486. Oh, and we are emulating the PSX with VGS from Connectix, so add PS4 emulation on top of that with a mid-range PC from today.

aksss 5y ago
Different topic, but okay. It's easy to multiply your pennies when you've only got two. BTW, the first computer I personally owned was an 8086, so I was there, Gandalf. It's what I first learned to really program on. The timeframe you're talking about, the progression of tech through the nineties, I'm intimately familiar with.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anthk 5y ago
  Then you should be more than aware that current machines are not that special anymore. There is no "generation jump". Raytracing? If we were comparing it to Quake I and GL/Glide, we are on the pre-Screamer days. Barely a step over Duke Nukem 3D. I feel dissapointed.