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also how far you can get with a single machine has changed massively in the past 15 years. 15 years ago a (really beefy) single machine meant 8 cores with 256GB
by adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
also how far you can get with a single machine has changed massively in the past 15 years. 15 years ago a (really beefy) single machine meant 8 cores with 256GB ram and a couple TB of storage. Now a single machine can be 256 cores on 8TB of ram and a PB of storage.
- layoric 1y agoExactly, and the performance of consumer tech is wildly faster. Eg, a Ryzen 5825U mini pc with 16GB memory is ~$250USD with 512GB nvme. That thing will outperform of 14 core Xeon from ~2016 on multicore workloads and absolutely thrash it in single thread. Yes lack of ECC is not good for any serious workload, but great for lower environments/testing/prototyping, and it sips power at ~50W full tilt.
- eru 1y agoCuriously, RAM sizes haven't gone up much for consumer tech. As an example: my Macbook Pro from 2015 had 16 GiB RAM, and that's what my MacBook Air from 2025 also has.
- ericd 1y agoEhhh Macbook Pros can be configured with up to 128 now, iirc 16 was the max back then. But I guess the baseline hasn't moved as much.
- eru 1y agoYes, there has been some movement. But even an 8 fold increase (128/16) over a decade is nothing compared to what we used to see in the past. Oh, and the new machine has unified RAM. The old machine had a bit of extra RAM in the GPU that I'm not counting here. As far as I can tell, the new RAM is a lot faster. That counts for something. And presumably also uses less power.
- wild_egg 1y agoI saw a twitter thread recently where someone tried to make this point to someone shilling AWS spaghetti architectures. They were subsequently dog-piled into oblivion but the mental gymnastics people can do around this subject is a sight to behold. Simplicity is uncomfortable to a lot of people when they're used to doing things the hard way.