3 ms·
Desktop didn't really peak out at 2006. The clock speeds are not really raising anymore, true, but both architectural and fab improvements make a difference. I
by glogla 14y ago
Desktop didn't really peak out at 2006. The clock speeds are not really raising anymore, true, but both architectural and fab improvements make a difference. If you take a look at benchmarks on anandtech for example, you'll find that current CPUs are about five or six times faster in well parallelizable tasks like video encoding or about three times faster in tasks that don't parallelize well.
While this might not seems like much, waiting for something one minute instead of five makes a difference, and 2006 computer won't play FullHD video, and you'll feel the difference on js heavy web pages.
- lmm 14y agoWon't play FullHD video? Maybe if you're talking about crazy everything-x264-can-do encodings, but a decent 2006 computer will have a geforce 7xxx or similar and play "normal" FullHD video like you buy from itunes just fine.
- glogla 14y agoBut without the GPU (and I'm not sure how geforce 7xxx driver support looks now) even 720p videos might get problematic, some becoming pretty much a slideshow, some being just slightly uncomfortable when going around 20 fps. I know they do on my 2007 macbook.
- zanny 14y agoThe problem is that the general use case doesn't have a media center pc from 2007, "A significant portion" of consumer hardware is EXCUSIVELY for web browsing and word processing. Sources: every single relative I have except for my father who uses trading software to watch stocks, only use a combination of word (if I haven't touched their boxes), libre office (if I have), ie (if I haven't) or firefox (if I have). Those two cases cover 90% of pc use, maybe some photo browsing, but none of them watch video on a general purpose pc. (yet). Netflix probably changes that.