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I'm an idiot when it comes to understanding CPUs, but as an end user of them, my feeling is that the M1 Pro MBP I bought on release is so absurdly good that I c

I'm an idiot when it comes to understanding CPUs, but as an end user of them, my feeling is that the M1 Pro MBP I bought on release is so absurdly good that I can't imagine needing to buy a new laptop for decade. It's runs silent and cool and simply never struggles with anything. Since Hetzner started offering ARM VMs on their cloud service, I've set up several servers on it which have been trouble-free, run cool, and offer way over twice the value of AMD64. I've no doubt you know what you're talking about with regards to problems that need fixing, but to a CPU idiot like me, they just seem like magic and I would absolutely hate to ever go back to using chips that cause 3rd degree burns of you use a laptop on your lap.

Insanity 3y ago
Generally agree with the statement - I'm really happy with the M1 chip. But I as applications become more demanding over a time, a decade might be too optimistic given the boom in Generative AI. Also +1 on how silent it is.
- dijit 3y ago
  Generally this is deemed “Jevons Paradox” and is part of why, ironically, consoles do not hold back game development but actually improve the experience for the majority of people - by setting hard caps on how much demand can actually be requested of a computer for a baseline experience.
- freeone3000 3y ago
  Nvidia’s Grace-Hopper arch is probably the future here — a dedicated high-performance offload “GP” chip for big calculations with a small chip doing switching and routing and access control
unethical_ban 3y ago
For workloads not offloaded to dedicated hardware (NN/LLM), I say CPUs for end users have been "good enough" for four or five years. The impressive things have been in efficiency, and in implementing new kinds of logic/instructions/architectures. I'd be plenty happy with my 5+ year old laptop if it had more than 40 minutes of battery life (Yeah I need to order a new battery. Yes, batteries used to be replaceable in laptops).
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  For desktop CPU's I would say things have been "good enough" for 12 years. Sandy Lake was released in 2011, and was the last CPU from Intel that was at least 25% better than its predecessor. Ever since each generational bump has seen a ~10% bump or so. I still work & game on an i5-2500k.
  - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    IMO there's a strong case for Haswel as the first "good enough" cpu. It's not a ton faster than sandy lake, but it adds AVX-2 and FMA3 which in lots of software can easily be a 2x performance difference. (and possibly more importantly, if you define that as your baseline, you can compile all x86 applications with the same arch without giving up much performance.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
You are mistaking a small subset of computer systems (home and small server) as a silver bullet. In my case servers have 512Gb-1Tb of RAM and the cost of running nodes with a lesser amount scales extremely bad.

Insanity 3y ago

Generally agree with the statement - I'm really happy with the M1 chip. But I as applications become more demanding over a time, a decade might be too optimistic given the boom in Generative AI. Also +1 on how silent it is.

dijit 3y ago
Generally this is deemed “Jevons Paradox” and is part of why, ironically, consoles do not hold back game development but actually improve the experience for the majority of people - by setting hard caps on how much demand can actually be requested of a computer for a baseline experience.
freeone3000 3y ago
Nvidia’s Grace-Hopper arch is probably the future here — a dedicated high-performance offload “GP” chip for big calculations with a small chip doing switching and routing and access control

unethical_ban 3y ago

For workloads not offloaded to dedicated hardware (NN/LLM), I say CPUs for end users have been "good enough" for four or five years. The impressive things have been in efficiency, and in implementing new kinds of logic/instructions/architectures. I'd be plenty happy with my 5+ year old laptop if it had more than 40 minutes of battery life (Yeah I need to order a new battery. Yes, batteries used to be replaceable in laptops).

bryanlarsen 3y ago
For desktop CPU's I would say things have been "good enough" for 12 years. Sandy Lake was released in 2011, and was the last CPU from Intel that was at least 25% better than its predecessor. Ever since each generational bump has seen a ~10% bump or so. I still work & game on an i5-2500k.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  IMO there's a strong case for Haswel as the first "good enough" cpu. It's not a ton faster than sandy lake, but it adds AVX-2 and FMA3 which in lots of software can easily be a 2x performance difference. (and possibly more importantly, if you define that as your baseline, you can compile all x86 applications with the same arch without giving up much performance.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

You are mistaking a small subset of computer systems (home and small server) as a silver bullet. In my case servers have 512Gb-1Tb of RAM and the cost of running nodes with a lesser amount scales extremely bad.