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I wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill wi

I wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon?

FredPret 5y ago
One day we’ll be up to our eyeballs in computronium, and it will never be enough. Thinking is a superpower even better than being the first species to develop sight. See also “The Last Question” by Asimov.
bufferoverflow 5y ago
There will always be apps that use all the power you throw at them. Raytracing scales pretty much linearly with the core count. Compression does too. But your everyday apps like your browser have been fast for at least a decade.
- ip26 5y ago
  Yes, but your current browser is probably not very fast on a Nehalem. That is what they are lamenting. Will a M1 Ultra one day be too slow to run Calculator? Answer: Just wait for some genius to figure out how to run Electron inside Electron, and port Calculator to it.
Epiphany21 5y ago
>Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon? The bottleneck for most slow/old PCs is not actually the CPU. Dried thermal paste, mismatched low speed RAM sticks, operating systems installed to mechanical disks and weak iGPUs are often to blame. You can fix most of these easily at home for very little money and keep using old systems. Most people are sadly too tech-illiterate to really understand what an SSD is, so I still sometimes do SSD upgrades on almost brand new laptops and pre-built desktops for friends and family. OEMs like to add insult to injury by bloating up the default Windows install with janky driver control panels and adware. A new SSD, a clean OS install with generic drivers, new thermal paste and some compressed air in the fans will make those PCs work better than they did on day one. I have a few of those kind of machines around the house...

I wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon?

FredPret 5y ago

One day we’ll be up to our eyeballs in computronium, and it will never be enough. Thinking is a superpower even better than being the first species to develop sight. See also “The Last Question” by Asimov.

bufferoverflow 5y ago

There will always be apps that use all the power you throw at them. Raytracing scales pretty much linearly with the core count. Compression does too. But your everyday apps like your browser have been fast for at least a decade.

ip26 5y ago
Yes, but your current browser is probably not very fast on a Nehalem. That is what they are lamenting. Will a M1 Ultra one day be too slow to run Calculator? Answer: Just wait for some genius to figure out how to run Electron inside Electron, and port Calculator to it.

Epiphany21 5y ago

>Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon? The bottleneck for most slow/old PCs is not actually the CPU. Dried thermal paste, mismatched low speed RAM sticks, operating systems installed to mechanical disks and weak iGPUs are often to blame. You can fix most of these easily at home for very little money and keep using old systems. Most people are sadly too tech-illiterate to really understand what an SSD is, so I still sometimes do SSD upgrades on almost brand new laptops and pre-built desktops for friends and family. OEMs like to add insult to injury by bloating up the default Windows install with janky driver control panels and adware. A new SSD, a clean OS install with generic drivers, new thermal paste and some compressed air in the fans will make those PCs work better than they did on day one. I have a few of those kind of machines around the house...