6 ms·

"For what" is the obvious question. Web development with a remote testing environment, office applications, email, web browsing - sure, a Core 2 Duo is more th

"For what" is the obvious question. Web development with a remote testing environment, office applications, email, web browsing - sure, a Core 2 Duo is more than good enough if your software environment is kept in order. Audio / video / photoshop, gaming, developing software that does math, data analysis - you can never get fast enough. The limiting factor is if your computer's feedback loop is tighter than your brain's perception loop. If you can type a letter and the letter appears, your computer is fast enough for word processing. But, if you can run a data analysis job and it's done before you release the "enter" key, it just means you should really be doing better analyses over more data. Certain use cases grow like goldfish to the limits of their environment.

RussianCow 13y ago
Very true, but the vast majority of computer users aren't pushing the limits of their systems, and I think that's what the author is getting at. If you look at the market as a whole, the need for more powerful computers isn't nearly as big as it used to be.
- roc 13y ago
  And those users are overwhelmingly the ones that tablets suit just fine. That's the problem in this type of "PCs are fine, people just don't have to upgrade" argument. (And I've made it myself, before I really worked it through and took stock of just how far tablets have already come.) The use cases satisfied by an old PC could all be satisfied just as well by today's tablets. Yes, the software support for keyboards, external displays and server-type services isn't quite there. But that's solely a software limitation. Not a limitation of the hardware platform. It will be addressed and more PC sales will disappear. And the actual remaining PC-justifying use cases are precisely those where an old core2duo isn't "good enough" and simply buying some more RAM or even an SSD isn't going to obviate the need for new hardware for 5+ years. So inasmuch as people still need PCs, they have to show up in the sales charts. And inasmuch as we don't, mobile devices are going to eat that market as the software evolves. There's really no way around it. Frankly, I think android and/or iOS are one good upgrade-cycle away from decimating laptop sales. If either or both really focus on the 'docked' use case -- better support for external displays and keyboard support to facilitate top-flight bulk text entry/editing -- laptops are dead to the general public. If a student can so much as use a keyboard case and tablet to write a term paper or code up some homework as easily as on a laptop, it's over. And there's no hardware preventing that. It's software. If Microsoft wasn't so inept, they'd have been way out ahead on this. And, frankly, between the potential of the docked use case and "BYOD" policies, mobile devices could seriously eat into the enterprise desktop market as well. You build a device cradle, that connects to an external display, power and a keyboard/trackpad, and enables the OS and apps to automatically sense that connection and shift their interfaces accordingly and you'll see how few people truly need a PC anymore.
  - RussianCow 13y ago
    I completely agree. I wasn't trying to say that PCs aren't dying, I was just trying to contend the notion that power users make up a significant portion of the market we're talking about. In fact, I think tablets directly show that the vast majority of consumers don't need powerful hardware, because tablets aren't very powerful machines at all.
    - roc 13y ago
      Oh I was absolutely agreeing with you and just expanding and making explicit how this totally contradicted the article's argument.
  - nlawalker 13y ago
    I love the idea of device docks and I would very much like to see things go that way. I think docks have some hurdles to jump in the consumer market, though. They're unsexy - I think most people associate them with boring enterprise computers and boring enterprise work, and they tend to be big and ugly. They're expensive too, considering that most people view them as nothing but plastic with a few connectors and wires inside. If someone can figure out how to jump those hurdles, though, and make docks sexy to the consumer market, beige-box sales will plummet. Make them smaller, easier, cheaper. Make them less proprietary - at the very least, a Company XYZ consumer dock should be compatible with all/most of of Company XYZ's portable offerings. Make them wireless and automatic (OK, I realize this conflicts with "cheaper")! Let me drop my Win8 tablet on my desk and immediately have it display to my dual monitors and let me use it with my mouse, keyboard, printer, big external drive and wired network connection. Let me press a button and have it display to my TV or play to my big speakers. Have your cake and eat it too. I mention Win8 specifically because the whole idea of it is that it's a tablet and a desktop OS in one. Why on earth is there no Microsoft-produced drop-in docking solution for the Surface so it can actually be both?! The consumer potential is crazy - got a crusty old desktop PC laying around? Toss it, keep the peripherals, buy a Surface+dock and you've got a new tablet/laptop and desktop. You can "dock" a Surface as-is with two cables (a micro HDMI and a USB hub with all your desktop peripherals wired in), but that leaves out wired network (maybe important), certain peripherals like speakers (maybe important), and power (critical), and even two cables is two too many. Most people who say they need a PC don't need a beige box, they need a keyboard, mouse and monitors on a desk where they can work. The form factor of the box that the CPU, disk and memory come in doesn't matter when you're at the desk, so it might as well take the form of something you can take with you and use when you're not at the desk: a laptop, tablet or phone.
carterschonwald 13y ago
Emphatic agreement. I wind up helping folks a lot with writing high performance software, and it's very easy to get to the point where the time to run a model is totally determined by how fast the CPU and IO are. I'm talking problems where naively written C would take an hour, but if I'm careful and use some blend of very clever c or Haskell, the computation is done in 2-5 minutes
- awef 13y ago
  What kind of problems are those? I would love to find problems, ultimately examples, where smart Haskell and c blends are superior to pure c.
  - dikei 13y ago
    It's not neccesarily which language is faster, but the which algorithm is faster. He said naively written C, which mean the algorithm may be entirely different and run in O(n2) and much slower than a Haskell version which use a different algorithm and run in O(nlogn).
    - awef 13y ago
      Right, I read 'naively' as 'natively'. Carry on!
      - carterschonwald 13y ago
        to answer your question just plain ole mathematical modeling / machine learning, and associated duct taping the tubes. I am also going to be releasing the start of a "Numerical Haskell" tool chain sometime (hopefully this fall, but life happens and all that jazz)
    - carterschonwald 13y ago
      actually in the specific example I'm thinking about, i'm talking about memory locality being the performance difference (and in this case, array layout for matrix multiplication). The naive obvious "dot product" matrix mult of two Row Major matrices is 100-1000x slower than somewhat fancier layouts, or even simply transposing the right hand matrix can make a significant difference, let alone more fancy things. Often the biggest throughput bottleneck for CPU bound algorithms in a numerical setting is the quality of the memory locality (because the CPU can chew through data faster than you can feed it). Its actually really really hard to get C / C++ to help you write code with suitably fancy layouts that are easy to use. Amusingly, I also think most auto vectorization approaches to SIMD actually miss the best way to use SIMD registers! I've actually some cute small matrix kernels where by using the AVX SIMD registers as a "L0" cache, I get a 1.5x perf boost!
JVIDEL 13y ago
In what planet? I'm not even going to use myself as an example because I do other heavy stuff with my PC, I'm going to use my non-tech friends: one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system. Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience. That's not a problem in mobile where the need is the mother of invention so mem management is automatic and chrome reopens the tabs you had by itself, but in a desktop environment (specially windows) one wrong click and the session restore in chrome wipes your previous session. But it was cheap, cheaper than an unlocked iphone and it gets the job done so its ok for her.
- asveikau 13y ago
  > one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system. I suspect a few people on HN will be reluctant to see their role in this arrangement. ducks
  - B-Con 13y ago
    Don't duck, it's the truth. We built really powerful computers and decided the best way to use them was to run web apps consisting of a poor performance scripting language with a poor performance visual-rendering language and half the people who build with it seem to think that anything done in a web browser is free. "Modern" CSS for even a simple site is pretty silly. So many horribly inefficient rules, sometimes dozens of levels of overwriting properties, etc. And gobs upon gobs of Javascript that does very little but is constantly running, checking input boxes, animating every tiny little detail, doing things that can be done without Javascript, etc. I have better system performance when running a Windows 7 VM, a semi-bulky image editor, or compiling the kernel than I do with a few bulky webapps in Firefox. And this is on a desktop built just 4 years ago. I have a light-weight Linux setup that uses 80MB of RAM after logging in. It has 1GB of RAM. I can't run GMail and Facebook Firefox and browse the Internet at the same time with minimal open tabs. It's sad.
    - 13y ago
nsxwolf 13y ago
Nothing is ever good enough for a development box when you use an IDE and work with larger and larger projects. Faster CPUs, more memory, and faster storage are always welcome. I look forward to the day when Eclipse and other IDEs really start taking advantage of GPU stream processors for indexing and validation.
rallison 13y ago
Indeed. I work with RAW photographs fairly often, and simply exporting an album with a few hundred RAW files to JPEG takes a surprising amount of time with fast, modern hardware.
djrogers 13y ago
None of those use cases are going to grow the PC market. The things you're describing have always been a niche (remember Workstation Class PCs?) that may add a few $$ to the bottom line, but they are not going to drive growth. The PC market has relied on end users - consumers and business users - for it's growth engine for decades, and that appears to be drying up. One of the reasons for that is outlined in the article, for most use cases we don't need faster.
georgemcbay 13y ago
Even with gaming there isn't as much of a push as there used to be to constantly be on the cutting edge. This is mostly do to the fact that the industry as a whole focuses primarily on consoles first now and thus consoles tend to be the gating "LCD" target. If your PC is at least as good or a little bit better than a console released in 2005 or 2007 you're set. Of course, there will soon be a bump forward here with the next gen Xbox and Sony systems coming out in a month. I fit into a lot of the special cases here: Developer, gamer, amateur photographer with many gigabytes of RAW files and even I don't feel the need to upgrade systems like I used to. Now it is about an every 3-4 year thing whereas previously it was yearly or more.

RussianCow 13y ago

Very true, but the vast majority of computer users aren't pushing the limits of their systems, and I think that's what the author is getting at. If you look at the market as a whole, the need for more powerful computers isn't nearly as big as it used to be.

roc 13y ago
And those users are overwhelmingly the ones that tablets suit just fine. That's the problem in this type of "PCs are fine, people just don't have to upgrade" argument. (And I've made it myself, before I really worked it through and took stock of just how far tablets have already come.) The use cases satisfied by an old PC could all be satisfied just as well by today's tablets. Yes, the software support for keyboards, external displays and server-type services isn't quite there. But that's solely a software limitation. Not a limitation of the hardware platform. It will be addressed and more PC sales will disappear. And the actual remaining PC-justifying use cases are precisely those where an old core2duo isn't "good enough" and simply buying some more RAM or even an SSD isn't going to obviate the need for new hardware for 5+ years. So inasmuch as people still need PCs, they have to show up in the sales charts. And inasmuch as we don't, mobile devices are going to eat that market as the software evolves. There's really no way around it. Frankly, I think android and/or iOS are one good upgrade-cycle away from decimating laptop sales. If either or both really focus on the 'docked' use case -- better support for external displays and keyboard support to facilitate top-flight bulk text entry/editing -- laptops are dead to the general public. If a student can so much as use a keyboard case and tablet to write a term paper or code up some homework as easily as on a laptop, it's over. And there's no hardware preventing that. It's software. If Microsoft wasn't so inept, they'd have been way out ahead on this. And, frankly, between the potential of the docked use case and "BYOD" policies, mobile devices could seriously eat into the enterprise desktop market as well. You build a device cradle, that connects to an external display, power and a keyboard/trackpad, and enables the OS and apps to automatically sense that connection and shift their interfaces accordingly and you'll see how few people truly need a PC anymore.
- RussianCow 13y ago
  I completely agree. I wasn't trying to say that PCs aren't dying, I was just trying to contend the notion that power users make up a significant portion of the market we're talking about. In fact, I think tablets directly show that the vast majority of consumers don't need powerful hardware, because tablets aren't very powerful machines at all.
  - roc 13y ago
    Oh I was absolutely agreeing with you and just expanding and making explicit how this totally contradicted the article's argument.
- nlawalker 13y ago
  I love the idea of device docks and I would very much like to see things go that way. I think docks have some hurdles to jump in the consumer market, though. They're unsexy - I think most people associate them with boring enterprise computers and boring enterprise work, and they tend to be big and ugly. They're expensive too, considering that most people view them as nothing but plastic with a few connectors and wires inside. If someone can figure out how to jump those hurdles, though, and make docks sexy to the consumer market, beige-box sales will plummet. Make them smaller, easier, cheaper. Make them less proprietary - at the very least, a Company XYZ consumer dock should be compatible with all/most of of Company XYZ's portable offerings. Make them wireless and automatic (OK, I realize this conflicts with "cheaper")! Let me drop my Win8 tablet on my desk and immediately have it display to my dual monitors and let me use it with my mouse, keyboard, printer, big external drive and wired network connection. Let me press a button and have it display to my TV or play to my big speakers. Have your cake and eat it too. I mention Win8 specifically because the whole idea of it is that it's a tablet and a desktop OS in one. Why on earth is there no Microsoft-produced drop-in docking solution for the Surface so it can actually be both?! The consumer potential is crazy - got a crusty old desktop PC laying around? Toss it, keep the peripherals, buy a Surface+dock and you've got a new tablet/laptop and desktop. You can "dock" a Surface as-is with two cables (a micro HDMI and a USB hub with all your desktop peripherals wired in), but that leaves out wired network (maybe important), certain peripherals like speakers (maybe important), and power (critical), and even two cables is two too many. Most people who say they need a PC don't need a beige box, they need a keyboard, mouse and monitors on a desk where they can work. The form factor of the box that the CPU, disk and memory come in doesn't matter when you're at the desk, so it might as well take the form of something you can take with you and use when you're not at the desk: a laptop, tablet or phone.

carterschonwald 13y ago

Emphatic agreement. I wind up helping folks a lot with writing high performance software, and it's very easy to get to the point where the time to run a model is totally determined by how fast the CPU and IO are. I'm talking problems where naively written C would take an hour, but if I'm careful and use some blend of very clever c or Haskell, the computation is done in 2-5 minutes

awef 13y ago
What kind of problems are those? I would love to find problems, ultimately examples, where smart Haskell and c blends are superior to pure c.
- dikei 13y ago
  It's not neccesarily which language is faster, but the which algorithm is faster. He said naively written C, which mean the algorithm may be entirely different and run in O(n2) and much slower than a Haskell version which use a different algorithm and run in O(nlogn).
  - awef 13y ago
    Right, I read 'naively' as 'natively'. Carry on!
    - carterschonwald 13y ago
      to answer your question just plain ole mathematical modeling / machine learning, and associated duct taping the tubes. I am also going to be releasing the start of a "Numerical Haskell" tool chain sometime (hopefully this fall, but life happens and all that jazz)
  - carterschonwald 13y ago
    actually in the specific example I'm thinking about, i'm talking about memory locality being the performance difference (and in this case, array layout for matrix multiplication). The naive obvious "dot product" matrix mult of two Row Major matrices is 100-1000x slower than somewhat fancier layouts, or even simply transposing the right hand matrix can make a significant difference, let alone more fancy things. Often the biggest throughput bottleneck for CPU bound algorithms in a numerical setting is the quality of the memory locality (because the CPU can chew through data faster than you can feed it). Its actually really really hard to get C / C++ to help you write code with suitably fancy layouts that are easy to use. Amusingly, I also think most auto vectorization approaches to SIMD actually miss the best way to use SIMD registers! I've actually some cute small matrix kernels where by using the AVX SIMD registers as a "L0" cache, I get a 1.5x perf boost!

JVIDEL 13y ago

In what planet? I'm not even going to use myself as an example because I do other heavy stuff with my PC, I'm going to use my non-tech friends: one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system. Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience. That's not a problem in mobile where the need is the mother of invention so mem management is automatic and chrome reopens the tabs you had by itself, but in a desktop environment (specially windows) one wrong click and the session restore in chrome wipes your previous session. But it was cheap, cheaper than an unlocked iphone and it gets the job done so its ok for her.

asveikau 13y ago
> one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system. I suspect a few people on HN will be reluctant to see their role in this arrangement. ducks
- B-Con 13y ago
  Don't duck, it's the truth. We built really powerful computers and decided the best way to use them was to run web apps consisting of a poor performance scripting language with a poor performance visual-rendering language and half the people who build with it seem to think that anything done in a web browser is free. "Modern" CSS for even a simple site is pretty silly. So many horribly inefficient rules, sometimes dozens of levels of overwriting properties, etc. And gobs upon gobs of Javascript that does very little but is constantly running, checking input boxes, animating every tiny little detail, doing things that can be done without Javascript, etc. I have better system performance when running a Windows 7 VM, a semi-bulky image editor, or compiling the kernel than I do with a few bulky webapps in Firefox. And this is on a desktop built just 4 years ago. I have a light-weight Linux setup that uses 80MB of RAM after logging in. It has 1GB of RAM. I can't run GMail and Facebook Firefox and browse the Internet at the same time with minimal open tabs. It's sad.
  - 13y ago

nsxwolf 13y ago

Nothing is ever good enough for a development box when you use an IDE and work with larger and larger projects. Faster CPUs, more memory, and faster storage are always welcome. I look forward to the day when Eclipse and other IDEs really start taking advantage of GPU stream processors for indexing and validation.

rallison 13y ago

Indeed. I work with RAW photographs fairly often, and simply exporting an album with a few hundred RAW files to JPEG takes a surprising amount of time with fast, modern hardware.

djrogers 13y ago

None of those use cases are going to grow the PC market. The things you're describing have always been a niche (remember Workstation Class PCs?) that may add a few $$ to the bottom line, but they are not going to drive growth. The PC market has relied on end users - consumers and business users - for it's growth engine for decades, and that appears to be drying up. One of the reasons for that is outlined in the article, for most use cases we don't need faster.

georgemcbay 13y ago

Even with gaming there isn't as much of a push as there used to be to constantly be on the cutting edge. This is mostly do to the fact that the industry as a whole focuses primarily on consoles first now and thus consoles tend to be the gating "LCD" target. If your PC is at least as good or a little bit better than a console released in 2005 or 2007 you're set. Of course, there will soon be a bump forward here with the next gen Xbox and Sony systems coming out in a month. I fit into a lot of the special cases here: Developer, gamer, amateur photographer with many gigabytes of RAW files and even I don't feel the need to upgrade systems like I used to. Now it is about an every 3-4 year thing whereas previously it was yearly or more.