4 ms·

The article goes on and on about CPUs. They're right of course, anything after a core 2 duo is likely "fast enough." Tons of people have been buying the i5s ins

The article goes on and on about CPUs. They're right of course, anything after a core 2 duo is likely "fast enough." Tons of people have been buying the i5s instead of the i7s (myself included) for that very reason. But they're wrong in general. Memory capacity has continued to climb (from 2 GB with Vista, to 4 GB with Win7, to 8 GB today). I wouldn't build a PC today without 16 GB of RAM. Then we get to talk about the MASSIVE amount of improvement in IO in the last few years. The 7200 RPM HDD is dead. SSDs are now affordable. You can get a 256 GB SSD for £100. When consumers start to experience an SSD system compared to their old "slow" HDD system, they will be at the stores in droves wanting to upgrade. SSD's speed improvement is very noticeable indeed, like night and day.

Spooky23 14y ago
You're missing te point -- computers for the mass market are no longer an enthusiasts market. They are like TVs. Where I work, we're stuffing users into 2GB/1core VDI instances. They work fine. The only new client purchases are replacements of dead stuff, devices that improve mobility, and some dev/kiosk machines.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  So, your users aren't working on traditional "Desktop PC" instances anymore, but inexpensive terminal clients that connect to a backend Hypervisor running on a server? I've been waiting to see when companies would start doing that "en masse" - back in 1999/2000, I thought it was going to take off when Sun was promoting the Thin Client Concept. Then VMWare took it up - but, for some reason, I never saw it get any traction, and the vast majority (Well, in my experience, all) companies seemed to go the other direction (countering where my instincts thought we were going to go) - and started issuing everyone laptops. The exact opposite of thin clients connected to servers. I had to eat a lot of claim chowder. If I'm understanding your situation correctly, how do your thin clients work out in practice, and, how do people deal with scenarios in which they would normally use laptops? (Business Trips, Airplane Flights, etc...)
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    I think the issue until a couple of years ago is that compute densities weren't there, and broadband wasn't pervasive. Now you can deliver a decent desktop through a VMWare VM-centric solution or a Citrix/Microsoft Server computer solution. The use cases work out like this: Stationary workers get PCs reimaged with a locked down OS...PCs get replaced by thin clients over time; Mobile workers either get laptops with remote access clients or tablets. The mobile folks love it, because they aren't tied down to some horrific work-issued laptop. The big remaining problem is Microsoft licensing. Unless you have an EA, the licensing is both obtuse and expensive. Lots of big enterprises are rolling out thousands of VDI desktops -- 2011/2012 was the point where the financial case started to make sense.
kayoone 14y ago
I disagree. You talk about power users who will always buy the latest and greatest kit, but even those are slowing down. Gamers dont need to update their PC every 2 years because of todays very long gaming console life cycles. I have built my development rig 4 years ago in 2009, a Quad-Core 2.8Ghz, 8GB, SSD and reasonably fast GPU. It wasnt top of the line back then (except for the SSD) and its still fine for all my needs, only replaced the SSD because it broke. My girlfriend has some cheap laptop which is also a couple of years old but its more than enough for her web surfing and office needs.
hatu 14y ago
But Facebook and Youtube and Gmail run perfectly on 5 years old hardware - probably even much older. Why would anyone need 16GB RAM or a blazing fast SSD for web browsing or other simple tasks that even phones with much worse specs can do these days?
- bluedino 14y ago
  I was streaming a sporting event the other day, and my old, but still very useful laptop (2GB, SSD, T7500 C2D 2.2GHz) was being crushed. It streamed fine but I couldn't do much else on that laptop, memory usage was through the roof. I don't have that issue with YouTube but not every site has such an optimized player/media combination. Good thing I have a second laptop that I could continue to use for normal tasks at the same time.
api 14y ago
Good point. SSDs deliver a much larger speed improvement than a faster processor. A super-fast chip with bad I/O is simply wasted waiting on I/O all the time.
- bluedino 14y ago
  We replaced our Core 2 Duo/Pentium Dual Core machines with new Dell i5's, and every single person complained that the new computer wasn't any faster than the old ones. It was worth the SSD upgrade for Outlook alone. Import a 6GB PST file in 20 minutes instead of 6 hours.

Spooky23 14y ago

You're missing te point -- computers for the mass market are no longer an enthusiasts market. They are like TVs. Where I work, we're stuffing users into 2GB/1core VDI instances. They work fine. The only new client purchases are replacements of dead stuff, devices that improve mobility, and some dev/kiosk machines.

ghshephard 14y ago
So, your users aren't working on traditional "Desktop PC" instances anymore, but inexpensive terminal clients that connect to a backend Hypervisor running on a server? I've been waiting to see when companies would start doing that "en masse" - back in 1999/2000, I thought it was going to take off when Sun was promoting the Thin Client Concept. Then VMWare took it up - but, for some reason, I never saw it get any traction, and the vast majority (Well, in my experience, all) companies seemed to go the other direction (countering where my instincts thought we were going to go) - and started issuing everyone laptops. The exact opposite of thin clients connected to servers. I had to eat a lot of claim chowder. If I'm understanding your situation correctly, how do your thin clients work out in practice, and, how do people deal with scenarios in which they would normally use laptops? (Business Trips, Airplane Flights, etc...)
- Spooky23 14y ago
  I think the issue until a couple of years ago is that compute densities weren't there, and broadband wasn't pervasive. Now you can deliver a decent desktop through a VMWare VM-centric solution or a Citrix/Microsoft Server computer solution. The use cases work out like this: Stationary workers get PCs reimaged with a locked down OS...PCs get replaced by thin clients over time; Mobile workers either get laptops with remote access clients or tablets. The mobile folks love it, because they aren't tied down to some horrific work-issued laptop. The big remaining problem is Microsoft licensing. Unless you have an EA, the licensing is both obtuse and expensive. Lots of big enterprises are rolling out thousands of VDI desktops -- 2011/2012 was the point where the financial case started to make sense.

kayoone 14y ago

I disagree. You talk about power users who will always buy the latest and greatest kit, but even those are slowing down. Gamers dont need to update their PC every 2 years because of todays very long gaming console life cycles. I have built my development rig 4 years ago in 2009, a Quad-Core 2.8Ghz, 8GB, SSD and reasonably fast GPU. It wasnt top of the line back then (except for the SSD) and its still fine for all my needs, only replaced the SSD because it broke. My girlfriend has some cheap laptop which is also a couple of years old but its more than enough for her web surfing and office needs.

hatu 14y ago

But Facebook and Youtube and Gmail run perfectly on 5 years old hardware - probably even much older. Why would anyone need 16GB RAM or a blazing fast SSD for web browsing or other simple tasks that even phones with much worse specs can do these days?

bluedino 14y ago
I was streaming a sporting event the other day, and my old, but still very useful laptop (2GB, SSD, T7500 C2D 2.2GHz) was being crushed. It streamed fine but I couldn't do much else on that laptop, memory usage was through the roof. I don't have that issue with YouTube but not every site has such an optimized player/media combination. Good thing I have a second laptop that I could continue to use for normal tasks at the same time.

api 14y ago

Good point. SSDs deliver a much larger speed improvement than a faster processor. A super-fast chip with bad I/O is simply wasted waiting on I/O all the time.

bluedino 14y ago
We replaced our Core 2 Duo/Pentium Dual Core machines with new Dell i5's, and every single person complained that the new computer wasn't any faster than the old ones. It was worth the SSD upgrade for Outlook alone. Import a 6GB PST file in 20 minutes instead of 6 hours.