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I noticed a vastly larger jump between HDD and SSD’s, which hit for most people after 2011, than between PII vs PIII’s. People generally buy systems not indivi
by Retric 2y ago
I noticed a vastly larger jump between HDD and SSD’s, which hit for most people after 2011, than between PII vs PIII’s. People generally buy systems not individual components and in practice it’s mostly bottlenecks that matter. PII’s and PIII’s had the same RAM latency as earlier and later CPU’s because that’s bound by the speed of light, thus the explosion in cache size.
> 2011 is long after the major price drops of the 90s and early 00s
Not in terms of actual average PC prices which are down ~40% from their 2011 average. That’s a big discount in real world prices. Your price comparison on 1+k CPU’s is irrelevant when so few of them entered customers hands at those prices. Sure nVidia is selling 2000$ GPU’s today, but the average PC is ~650$ that’s the number that matters.
- ryao 2y agoBeing down 40% is nothing compared to how you used to be able to get a PC that is many times more capable of one from a few years ago for half the price. As for NAND flash SSDs, the Intel X25-M came out in 2008: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2614 https://www.anandtech.com/show/2614
- Retric 2y agoBeing available isn’t becoming mainstream. Most new computers in 2011 still had HDD due to cost. Similarly, the average price people actually paid for a PC didn’t suddenly drop by half over 3 years as you proposed. Over 15 years that kind of price declines would mean people when from 4k in 2025 dollars to 125$ which simply didn’t happen. I could cherry pick numbers suggesting opposite trends. nVidia’s top of the line card more than doubled in price when adjusted for inflation between 1999 and now. But back then most people didn’t even buy 3D graphics cards and today integrated graphics is by far the most common.