7 ms·

Reviews for components are better in written form than video form, yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using. I guess it doesn't help

Reviews for components are better in written form than video form, yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using. I guess it doesn't help that it feels like there hasn't been an increase in performance to price ratio for GPU's in the longest time.

cogman10 2y ago
Or CPUs really. Die shrinks just aren't giving the advantages they once used to. You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance even though x86 has had a decade long head start and billions more invested in development. We are quickly approaching a weird space. Barring some major innovations, you are likely to see that 10 year old equipment remains competitive with brand new products in terms of performance.
- ozaiworld 2y ago
  That might've been a result of Intel having the best leading-edge fabs until 2018 or so. It was hard to judge different ISAs before then.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Yeah I keep looking into upgrading my 12 year old PC, but for like £1500 I can get one 10x faster (multithreaded) and only about 4x faster single core. I mean, that's a decent boost but it feels very disappointing for 12 years of progress.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance Concerning RISC-V having caught up with x86 performance: dream on ... :-(
  - VMG 2y ago
    this was pretty impressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364549
- kbolino 2y ago
  ARM has gotten very good, and is definitely competitive with mid-range x86 while offering better performance-per-watt, but it is still not competitive with high-end x86.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Depends on the task and what you're measuring. My M1 (standard) CPU is definitely faster than my Ryzen 7700x on some tasks, and it blows it away on perf/watt.
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - deleted 2y ago
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    - kbolino 2y ago
      Those are both mid-range CPUs in standard consumer configurations, and I agree ARM does very well in that segment, and it does even better in the low-power/mobile/embedded segment where x86 is practically non-existent (recent gaming handhelds notwithstanding). However, high-end workstations, compute-focused servers, and supercomputers, which use extremely expensive and power-hungry x86 chips, are a different segment, one to which ARM currently has no direct answer (and some might argue it shouldn't have one because such wasteful things shouldn't exist). This segment once had a number of competitive RISC players, like POWER and SPARC, so I don't think it's unobtainable for ARM.
      - epolanski 2y ago
        What are you talking about there are arm supercomputers. There's at least 2 in the top 10, and the fugaku was the fastest in the world for a couple of years between 2020 and 2022.
        kbolino 2y ago
        You're absolutely right, I missed that entirely. The vast majority of the TOP500 is still x86 but it's already losing ground to ARM. There's still some POWER systems on the list too.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  What do die shrinks have to do with ISA performance? Also, there are no RISC-V CPUs available that match the latest X86 or ARM CPUs. Even then, the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs (at least, when comparing major ISAs like X86, ARM and RISC-V).
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Smaller nodes (generally) translate to lower power consumption, more transistor density, and faster transistor switching speeds. It allows for an architecture to deepen pipelines, add registers, add cache, and pull off tricks like SMT. > the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs That's somewhat my point, the limiting factor for ISA performance is the physics surrounding the transistors.
candiddevmike 2y ago
I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing, but give me a long form write up and I can scroll or ctrl+f my way to what I'm looking for very quickly. I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.
- immibis 2y ago
  There must be a market for video information converted to text. It would be completely illegal, of course.
  - dbspin 2y ago
    Well, there's a source if not a market - LLMs. https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousands-of-swiped-youtube-videos-to-train-ai/ https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousa...
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    The irony of serving a video, consumed by a robot, to serve a human text, rather than serving the text in the first place.
- throwway_278314 2y ago
  Oh, but they can put blinky video ads all over the page so no matter where you look there are things to distract you. yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.
- hprotagonist 2y ago
  yt-dlp audio only, and stuff that into whisper: video to text in ~30 seconds.
- imp0cat 2y ago
  Sound like some sort of ADHD symptom where any video longer that a few seconds is perceived as too long, doesn't it?
zelos 2y ago
I never understand the obsession with video. It's the first thing my kids reach for when searching for information about something and it's always painfully slow and inefficient. Does 5 minutes of side by side videos of GPUs playing a game at 120fps, encoded as a 60fps video, really help anyone?
glenndebacker 2y ago
The ridiculously high prices of GPUs have really taken the fun out of hardware for me. I used to follow hardware developments closely, but now I upgrade much less often so that also stopped.
- BuckRogers 2y ago
  I agree but it's a little deceptive. For example I have a 4070 right now and I paid $600 for it. That's good money but it is more than likely far more than most people actually need. If you watch or read reviews, you'd think only people in poverty use 4070s. I play competitive games and everything else I want to do with this card without issues and even with gas left in the tank. They crank up settings in reviews to ultra settings and then try to make it look like if you don't have a $1200 GPU that you have trash. Reality is that these GPUs are overkill and in many games medium settings look nearly identical to ultra. I swear GPU manufacturers pay to have ultra settings available, with their nearly imperceptible improvements. The option is mostly there as far as I can tell, simply to upsell GPUs.
btbuildem 2y ago
I think it's a generational thing. It seems like short-form videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to consume. I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to include all relevant information in a post, and it recently dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of people just don't read anymore.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer/genx line), but I prefer text (millennial). Not sure what the kids these days like, although I do recall some students (gen z) that really wanted videos for setting up basic stuff, like how to download VSCode.
  - syndicatedjelly 2y ago
    I can see that. Television was the newest thing for the boomers, and was a big deal for early Gen X. Later Gen X and Millenials got the Internet, which in its infancy, was too slow to display anything other than text and crappy graphics. Once video became virtually free to transmit, we started seeing a lot of video-based content saturate the waves again.
- emn13 2y ago
  I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the way. In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.
- Macha 2y ago
  If you look at e.g. GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, etc. the videos aren't really short form in that "10:02" way. Like there's plenty of detail, but 30 minutes with 15 minutes of it being looking at graphs is clearly a pretty slow way to do it compared to see they literally just presented the video script in article form and you could choose the graphs and time that matters to you.
cma 2y ago
> yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using Doesn't help that Google search results spam videos they make money from in a carousel at the top of almost every query.
cuu508 2y ago
DC Rainmaker (sports gadgets reviews) has a nice compromise of having product video reviews on Youtube, but also even more in-depth reviews with all the tables and charts on his website. I used to read his written reviews, now I mostly skim his videos.
doe88 2y ago
First it was written reviews, then it was youtube videos, soon it will be short fast paced TikTok clips.
kllrnohj 2y ago
Interestingly Gamers Nexus is using the YouTube video & merch money to fund an (ad-free!) written article site: https://gamersnexus.net/ https://gamersnexus.net/ It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it's easy to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts & script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it a bit to fit written form better and you're basically done The speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.
epolanski 2y ago
Also, I never saw half an ad on anandtech, or never noticed.. Which is what I liked about it, but possibly doomed them.

cogman10 2y ago

Or CPUs really. Die shrinks just aren't giving the advantages they once used to. You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance even though x86 has had a decade long head start and billions more invested in development. We are quickly approaching a weird space. Barring some major innovations, you are likely to see that 10 year old equipment remains competitive with brand new products in terms of performance.

ozaiworld 2y ago
That might've been a result of Intel having the best leading-edge fabs until 2018 or so. It was hard to judge different ISAs before then.
IshKebab 2y ago
Yeah I keep looking into upgrading my 12 year old PC, but for like £1500 I can get one 10x faster (multithreaded) and only about 4x faster single core. I mean, that's a decent boost but it feels very disappointing for 12 years of progress.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance Concerning RISC-V having caught up with x86 performance: dream on ... :-(
- VMG 2y ago
  this was pretty impressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364549
kbolino 2y ago
ARM has gotten very good, and is definitely competitive with mid-range x86 while offering better performance-per-watt, but it is still not competitive with high-end x86.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Depends on the task and what you're measuring. My M1 (standard) CPU is definitely faster than my Ryzen 7700x on some tasks, and it blows it away on perf/watt.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kbolino 2y ago
    Those are both mid-range CPUs in standard consumer configurations, and I agree ARM does very well in that segment, and it does even better in the low-power/mobile/embedded segment where x86 is practically non-existent (recent gaming handhelds notwithstanding). However, high-end workstations, compute-focused servers, and supercomputers, which use extremely expensive and power-hungry x86 chips, are a different segment, one to which ARM currently has no direct answer (and some might argue it shouldn't have one because such wasteful things shouldn't exist). This segment once had a number of competitive RISC players, like POWER and SPARC, so I don't think it's unobtainable for ARM.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      What are you talking about there are arm supercomputers. There's at least 2 in the top 10, and the fugaku was the fastest in the world for a couple of years between 2020 and 2022.
      - kbolino 2y ago
        You're absolutely right, I missed that entirely. The vast majority of the TOP500 is still x86 but it's already losing ground to ARM. There's still some POWER systems on the list too.
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
What do die shrinks have to do with ISA performance? Also, there are no RISC-V CPUs available that match the latest X86 or ARM CPUs. Even then, the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs (at least, when comparing major ISAs like X86, ARM and RISC-V).
- cogman10 2y ago
  Smaller nodes (generally) translate to lower power consumption, more transistor density, and faster transistor switching speeds. It allows for an architecture to deepen pipelines, add registers, add cache, and pull off tricks like SMT. > the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs That's somewhat my point, the limiting factor for ISA performance is the physics surrounding the transistors.

candiddevmike 2y ago

I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing, but give me a long form write up and I can scroll or ctrl+f my way to what I'm looking for very quickly. I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.

immibis 2y ago
There must be a market for video information converted to text. It would be completely illegal, of course.
- dbspin 2y ago
  Well, there's a source if not a market - LLMs. https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousands-of-swiped-youtube-videos-to-train-ai/ https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousa...
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  The irony of serving a video, consumed by a robot, to serve a human text, rather than serving the text in the first place.
throwway_278314 2y ago
Oh, but they can put blinky video ads all over the page so no matter where you look there are things to distract you. yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.
hprotagonist 2y ago
yt-dlp audio only, and stuff that into whisper: video to text in ~30 seconds.
imp0cat 2y ago
Sound like some sort of ADHD symptom where any video longer that a few seconds is perceived as too long, doesn't it?

zelos 2y ago

I never understand the obsession with video. It's the first thing my kids reach for when searching for information about something and it's always painfully slow and inefficient. Does 5 minutes of side by side videos of GPUs playing a game at 120fps, encoded as a 60fps video, really help anyone?

glenndebacker 2y ago

The ridiculously high prices of GPUs have really taken the fun out of hardware for me. I used to follow hardware developments closely, but now I upgrade much less often so that also stopped.

BuckRogers 2y ago
I agree but it's a little deceptive. For example I have a 4070 right now and I paid $600 for it. That's good money but it is more than likely far more than most people actually need. If you watch or read reviews, you'd think only people in poverty use 4070s. I play competitive games and everything else I want to do with this card without issues and even with gas left in the tank. They crank up settings in reviews to ultra settings and then try to make it look like if you don't have a $1200 GPU that you have trash. Reality is that these GPUs are overkill and in many games medium settings look nearly identical to ultra. I swear GPU manufacturers pay to have ultra settings available, with their nearly imperceptible improvements. The option is mostly there as far as I can tell, simply to upsell GPUs.

btbuildem 2y ago

I think it's a generational thing. It seems like short-form videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to consume. I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to include all relevant information in a post, and it recently dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of people just don't read anymore.

bee_rider 2y ago
Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer/genx line), but I prefer text (millennial). Not sure what the kids these days like, although I do recall some students (gen z) that really wanted videos for setting up basic stuff, like how to download VSCode.
- syndicatedjelly 2y ago
  I can see that. Television was the newest thing for the boomers, and was a big deal for early Gen X. Later Gen X and Millenials got the Internet, which in its infancy, was too slow to display anything other than text and crappy graphics. Once video became virtually free to transmit, we started seeing a lot of video-based content saturate the waves again.
emn13 2y ago
I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the way. In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.
Macha 2y ago
If you look at e.g. GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, etc. the videos aren't really short form in that "10:02" way. Like there's plenty of detail, but 30 minutes with 15 minutes of it being looking at graphs is clearly a pretty slow way to do it compared to see they literally just presented the video script in article form and you could choose the graphs and time that matters to you.

cma 2y ago

> yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using Doesn't help that Google search results spam videos they make money from in a carousel at the top of almost every query.

cuu508 2y ago

DC Rainmaker (sports gadgets reviews) has a nice compromise of having product video reviews on Youtube, but also even more in-depth reviews with all the tables and charts on his website. I used to read his written reviews, now I mostly skim his videos.

doe88 2y ago

First it was written reviews, then it was youtube videos, soon it will be short fast paced TikTok clips.

kllrnohj 2y ago

Interestingly Gamers Nexus is using the YouTube video & merch money to fund an (ad-free!) written article site: https://gamersnexus.net/ https://gamersnexus.net/ It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it's easy to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts & script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it a bit to fit written form better and you're basically done The speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.

epolanski 2y ago

Also, I never saw half an ad on anandtech, or never noticed.. Which is what I liked about it, but possibly doomed them.