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>Does anyone have any mental heuristics for judging how "useless" a feature is? My favorite example is the story I got to live through of the first generations
by Rinzler89 3y ago
>Does anyone have any mental heuristics for judging how "useless" a feature is?
My favorite example is the story I got to live through of the first generations of consumer 64 bit CPUs.
When the first AMD Athlon 64 came out, everyone I knew was buying them because they though they were getting something totally future proof by jumping early on the 64 bit bandwagon, in 2003, when nobody yet had 4GB+ of RAM and neither Windows nor any software would see 64bit releases till several years later when Vista came out which everyone avoided and staid on Windows XP 32bit waiting for Windows 7.
And by the time RAM sizes over 4GB and 64 bit software became even remotely mainstream, we already had dual- and quad-core CPUs miles ahead of those original 64 bit CPUs which were now obsolete (tech progress back then was wild).
So just like how 64bit silicone was a useless feature on consumer CPUs, and like the first GPUs with raytracing, I feel like now we're in the same boat with AI silicone in PCs, no much SW support for them and when it does come, these early chips will be obsolete. It's the price of being an early adopter.
- nercury 3y agoIf AMD did not come up with 64-bit extension, we would be saying goodbye to x86 architecture.