7 ms·
I wonder why? Some possibilities: 1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of extra performance? 2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is pro
by RachelF 2y ago
I wonder why? Some possibilities:
1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of extra performance?
2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions?
3. Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities?
4. Most computers are now "fast enough" for the average user, no need to buy top end.
5. Intel's new CPUs are slower than the old ones
- dehrmann 2y ago4 has been true for over a decade.
- kome 2y agoi use a 10 years old macbook air and honestly i can do everything i need, statistics, light programming, browsing and photo editing. perfect. i wait it to break before moving on, changing for the sake to changing feels like waste.
- skyyler 2y agoI use a 10 years old macbook pro and the only thing I dislike is the battery life and the heat generated. I simply can't afford the replacement 16" MBP right now. Hopefully it lasts another couple of years.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoSurely, the new MacBook Airs offer better performance than a 10 year old MacBook Pro. The M3 is very reasonable, 16GB/512GB for $1,100 or $1,300 for 15 inch I think. Could be going lower too with M4 MacBook Air purportedly releasing in Mar or Apr.
- omnimus 2y agoI have cheapest air 8gig and its just fine for anything i do if i dont open 80tabs. But for sure wait for M4 as 16gig ram will be the base model. Coworker just got MacMini m4 and i dont see why that machine wouldnt be enough for 90% of people.
- trinix912 2y agoI just wish they upped the storage a bit. 512GB on an $1100 machine in 2025 just feels like a bad deal, especially if you already have a machine from 10 years ago that has the same amount.
- skyyler 2y agoMy ten year old computer has an SD card slot and an HDMI port. I would like to replace it with something that has an SD card slot and an HDMI port, as I use those frequently and don't want to deal with adapter solutions.
- gotoeleven 2y agoLiterally the only reason you need a computer less than 10 years old for day to day tasks is to keep up with the layers of javascript that are larded onto lots of websites. It's sad. Edit: oh and electron apps. Sweet lord, shouldnt we have learned in the 90s with java applets that you shouldnt use a garbage collected language for user interfaces?
- whatever1 2y agoWhat is wrong with garbage collection and UI?
- wtallis 2y agoLatency spikes, probably. But most UIs shouldn't be churning through enough allocations to lead to noticeable GC pauses, and not all of today's GCs have major problems with pause times. I don't think Electron's problems are that simple.
- skydhash 2y agoFrom a non expert point of view, it’s about bringing in so much dead code. Like support for every os audio subsystem for a graphic app, or the whole sandboxing thing while you’re already accessing files and running scripts. Or even the table and float layout while everything is using flex. All those things need to be initialized and hooked up. At least Cordova (mobile) runs only on the system web engine which was already slimmed down.
- mook 2y agoI work on an Electron app, and we have a ticket open to investigate why the heck it's asking the OS for Bluetooth permissions even though we'd never use it. There are, of course, higher priority things to get to first, bugs that have larger effects. I'd love to be able to get to that one…
- iforgot22 2y agoThe renderer isn't going to pause on JS execution or GC.
- bentcorner 2y agoBut has it been true for the type of person who runs CPU benchmarks?
- dbtc 2y agoProgrammers failing to manufacture sufficient inefficiency to force upgrade.
- brokenmachine 2y agoI very much doubt that is the cause.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoCan't force upgrade with money you don't have. For a non-enthusiast, even the lowest specs are more than good enough for light media consumption and the economy would affect what they invest in.
- rpcope1 2y agoAs an experiment, I've tried working with a Dell Wyse 5070 with the memory maxed out. Even for development work, outside of some egregious compile times for large projects, it actually worked ok with Debian and XFCE for everything including some video conferencing. Even if you had money for an upgrade, it's not clear it's really necessary outside of a few niche domains. I still use my maxed out Dell Precision T1700 daily and haven't really found a reason to upgrade.
- bdavbdav 2y agoI love my wyse 5070 boxes. I keep telling people to buy them instead of pis
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoAs an enthusiast, I’ve found mid-tier hardware from over a decade ago can run the majority of games on medium/high without much problem. And that the majority of people in my life only need a laptop that can consistently stream 1080p and run a modern browser, maybe with some extra bits like Microsoft Office (although most younger users use G Suite, presumably because schooling preferred it growing up).
- jamesy0ung 2y ago> 1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of extra performance? I'm not an expert in silicon design, but I recall reading that there's a limit to how much power can be concentrated in a single package due to power density constraints, and that's why they are adding fluff instead of more cores. >2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions? This is a huge problem as well. I have a 2017 15" MacBook Pro and it's a decent computer, except it is horribly sluggish doing anything on it, even opening Finder. That is with a fresh install of macOS 13.7.1. If I install 10.13, it is snappy. If I bootcamp with Windows 11, it's actually quite snappy as well and I get 2 more hours of battery life somehow despite Windows in bootcamp not being able to control (power down) the dGPU like macOS can. Unfortunately I hate Windows, and Linux is very dodgy on this Mac.
- gaudystead 2y agoThat is WILD that Windows 11 runs faster than the machine's native OS... Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it, MORE resource efficient than modern macOS?! That feels like a ludicrous statement to type, but the results seem to suggest as much.
- iforgot22 2y agoModern macOS might be optimized for Apple Silicon CPUs. But even when it was Intel only, there were probably times when Windows was lighter, albeit bad in other ways.
- p_ing 2y agoIt’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature. And on ARM it wastes memory due to its 16KiB pages.
- ryao 2y agoNeither of them use microkernels. They are monolithic kernels with loadable module support ("hybrid" kernels). The cores of both Windows NT and XNU were originally microkernels, but then they put all of the servers into the kernel address space to make them into the monolithic kernels that they are today.
- p_ing 2y ago> 2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions? Shouldn't be an issue. Foreground applications do get a priority boost; I don't know if Passmark increases priority of itself, tho. Provided there isn't any background indexing occurring, i.e. letting the OS idle after install.
- NBJack 2y agoAs someone obsessing over small performance gains for his processor recently, there is definitely overhead to consider. Note by default you get things now like Teams, Copilot, the revised search indexing system, Skype, etc. Passmark in many tests will max out all cores at once; this tends to make it sensitive to 'background' processes (even small ones).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoCOVID. People start working from home or otherwise spending more time on computers instead of going outside, so they buy higher-end computers. Lockdowns end, people start picking the lower-end models again. On multi-threaded tasks, the difference between more and fewer cores is larger than the incremental improvements in per-thread performance over a couple years, so replacing older high core count CPUs with newer lower core count CPUs slightly lowers the average.
- Macha 2y agoI don't buy this really. COVID to now is less than 1 laptop replacement cycle for non-techie users who will usually use a laptop until it stops functioning, and I don't think the techie users would upgrade at all if their only option is worse.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoA lot of laptops stop functioning because somebody spills coffee in it or runs it over with their car. There are also many organizations that just replace computers on a 3-5 year schedule even if they still work. And worse is multi-dimensional. If you shelled out for a high-end desktop in 2020 it could have 12 or 16 cores, but a new PC would have DDR5 instead of DDR4 and possibly more of it, a faster SSD, a CPU with faster single thread performance, and then you want that but can't justify 12+ cores this time so you get 6 or 8 and everything is better except the multi-thread performance, which is worse but only slightly. The reticence to replace them also works against you. The person who spilled coffee in their machine can't justify replacing it with something that nice, so they get a downgrade. Everyone else still has a decent machine and keeps what they have. Then the person who spilled their drink is the only one changing the average.
- SecretDreams 2y agoARM?
- bobthepanda 2y agothere's 4 which has a couple different component * battery life is a lot higher than it used to be and a lot of devices have prioritized efficiency * we haven't seen a ton of changes to the high-end for CPU. I struggle to think of what the killer application requiring more is right now; every consumer advancement is more GPU focused
- bitwize 2y agoPeople are buying more HP Streams and fewer ASUS ROGs than in previous years?
- Legend2440 2y agoYou’re forgetting the most likely possibility: it’s an artifact of data collection or a bug in the benchmarking software.
- chvid 2y agoPeople spending less on new computers.
- torginus 2y agoI think it's that the measure of modern CPU performance- multithreaded performance is worthless and has been worthless forever. Most software engineers don't care to write multithreaded programs, as evidenced by the 2 most popular languages - Js and Python having very little support for it. And it's no wonder, even when engineers do know how to write such code, most IRL problems outside of benchmarks don't really yield themselves to multithreading, and due to the parallizable part being limited, IRL gains are limited. The only performance that actually matters is single thread performance. I think users realized this and with manufacturing technology getting more expensive, companies are no longer keen on selling 16 core machines (of which the end user will likely never use more than 2-3 cores) just so they can win benchmark bragging rights.
- silverlinedjik 2y ago>multithreaded performance is worthless and has been worthless forever. I have a very opposite opinion; single threaded performance only matters to a point where any given task it's doing isn't unusable. Multithreaded performance is crucial from keeping the system from grinding to a halt because users always have multiple applications open at the same time. Five browser windows with 4-12 tabs on each, on three different browsers, 2-4 Word instances, some electron(equivalent) comms app, is much less unusual than I'd like it to be. I have used laptops with only two cores and it gave a new meaning to slow when you tried doing absolutely anything other than waiting for your one application to do something. Only having one application open at a time was somewhat useable.
- whilenot-dev 2y ago> The only performance that actually matters is single thread performance. I think users realized this and with manufacturing technology getting more expensive, companies are no longer keen on selling 16 core machines (of which the end user will likely never use more than 2-3 cores) just so they can win benchmark bragging rights. How can you state something like this in all seriousness? One of the most used software application has to be the browser, and right now firefox runs 107 threads on my machine with 3 tabs open. gnome-shell runs 22 threads, and all I'm doing is reading HN. It's 2025 and multicore matters.
- nubinetwork 2y ago> (increased overhead with newer versions of Windows) > Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities? I don't know if they'll keep doing it, but hardware unboxed had been doing various tests with Windows 10 vs 11, and mitigations on vs off, as well as things like SMT on vs off for things like AMD vcache issues, or P cores vs E cores on newer intels... it's interesting to see how hardware performs 6-12 months after release, because it can really go all over the place for seemingly no reason.
- anal_reactor 2y agoI think it's reason #4. I bought a PC 12 years ago, the only upgrade I did was buying an SSD, and now it's being used by my father, who's perfectly happy with it, because it's fast enough to check mail and run MS Office. My current gaming PC was bought 4 years ago, and it's still going strong, I can play most games on high settings in 4k (thank you DLSS). I've noticed the same pattern with smartphones - my first smartphone turned into obsolete garbage within a year, my current smartphone is el cheapo bought 4 years ago, and it shows no signs of needing to be replaced. ok I lied, my phone is only two years old, but what happened is that two years ago my phone experienced a sudden drop test on concrete followed by pressure test of a car tyre, and it was easier to buy a new one with nearly identical specs than to repair the old one.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoMaybe it's all the new Intel CPUs that failed?
- giljabeab 2y agoIt’s everyone jumping ship and switching from 14th gen to AMD
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoI mean the CPUs were tested early on, but later they failed, and no longer raise the average. It should be visible in more detailed statistics if it is so.
- iforgot22 2y agoThe number of people who swap CPUs or even pay attention to the "Intel inside" sticker on a PC must be very small.
- windward 2y ago4 and 1.b: extra silion being used by GPUs. CPU performance isn't that important anymore. I know, I know: all the software you use is slow and awful. But it's generally bad thanks to a failure to work around slow network and disk accesses. If you use spinning rust, you're a power user. It's also a minority of video games that rely more on CPU performance than GPU and memory (usually for shared reasons in niche genres)
- xen2xen1 2y agoIt's either the Chromebook effect: people are just buying slower computers, possibly in poorer-ish countries. Or: The average speed of new computers just isn't going up. People are just buying lower end computers because they're good enough. I think it's mostly that: the average is just trending a bit lower because lower is fine. The thirst for the high end is disappearing for most segments, because people don't need it.