4 ms·

"Nobody buys desktops anymore." Nobody buys desktops anymore because they haven't gotten faster in any real way in the last 5 years. Probably about 80% of inte

"Nobody buys desktops anymore." Nobody buys desktops anymore because they haven't gotten faster in any real way in the last 5 years. Probably about 80% of intel's product line can be beaten by a 5 year old intel machine. Sure at the absolute top, there has been a few percent gain, but most people don't seem willing to buy a couple thousand dollar machine to gain a few percent. Sure it may be more power efficient, but I don't think most people buying desktops really care if the CPU draws 30 watts or 80 watts, as its plugged into the wall and the cost savings over years isn't enough to pay for the upgrade. Intel could be pushing features into the desktop space (say ECC for example) but that would further cannibalize their high profit chips.

agumonkey 12y ago
Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU, except maybe for HD Video. CPU is not a bottleneck since ages, memory / storage bandwidth is. With heat being a problem, manufacturers improve where it can be seen. A SSD has more impact on your life than the latest CPU. I've seen it numerous times. My neighbors latest SONY i5 laptop doesn't hold a candle to my uber aging ThinkPad simply because of this (and an OS that doesn't accumulate crap over time) And people bought desktops because that's how it was. Under the slightly fallacious upgrade-ability of towers. But a fanless mini-itx would please anybody in less space. I don't know how important this is for people, do they prefer to have a dedicated area for a large box vs tiny imac / vesa mounted box somewhere.
- StillBored 12y ago
  "Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by the lack of performance improvement. If someone managed to double single threaded performance every 18 months for the next 5 years, I can assure you that it would force an upgrade cycle. If for no other reason than than FF/chrome/websites would bloat up enough that people would have to upgrade. Its not like people sat around for hours waiting for their 286's to boot, or to print word processing documents. Faster technology enables "features" which suddenly people cannot live without which drives the upgrade cycle. There are plenty of technologies which are not yet "mature" and could benefit from more single threaded computing power. Speech recognition, compression, and on and on, are algorithms which are tuned for available computing power rather than the best compression ratio, or the most accurate recognition.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...
mark-r 12y ago
I really really wish ECC were available on desktops and laptops. Why are my programs and data less important than a servers? This is an area where AMD could catch Intel sleeping if they implemented it across the line, but unfortunately I don't see a way to make the public care enough to count.
- tracker1 12y ago
  IIRC some ASUS boards for AMD desktop CPUs suport ECC (Unregistered). Discovered this after I had already setup my ZFS homebrew NAS box, but after all the trouble I had with it, going back to Synology. And an FX-8350 is plenty fast for most uses... especially if you are using all the cors (running server VMs, docker, etc). All of that said, a Core i3-5010U has almost the same single-core performance and 40% the multicore while using less than 1/8 the power... I can now just run two systems, one for the server, another for my desktop and still see less power. After getting said CPU in a Brix box for my HTPC, I'm considering such a move for my next home desktop (still a year off though).

agumonkey 12y ago

Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU, except maybe for HD Video. CPU is not a bottleneck since ages, memory / storage bandwidth is. With heat being a problem, manufacturers improve where it can be seen. A SSD has more impact on your life than the latest CPU. I've seen it numerous times. My neighbors latest SONY i5 laptop doesn't hold a candle to my uber aging ThinkPad simply because of this (and an OS that doesn't accumulate crap over time) And people bought desktops because that's how it was. Under the slightly fallacious upgrade-ability of towers. But a fanless mini-itx would please anybody in less space. I don't know how important this is for people, do they prefer to have a dedicated area for a large box vs tiny imac / vesa mounted box somewhere.

StillBored 12y ago
"Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by the lack of performance improvement. If someone managed to double single threaded performance every 18 months for the next 5 years, I can assure you that it would force an upgrade cycle. If for no other reason than than FF/chrome/websites would bloat up enough that people would have to upgrade. Its not like people sat around for hours waiting for their 286's to boot, or to print word processing documents. Faster technology enables "features" which suddenly people cannot live without which drives the upgrade cycle. There are plenty of technologies which are not yet "mature" and could benefit from more single threaded computing power. Speech recognition, compression, and on and on, are algorithms which are tuned for available computing power rather than the best compression ratio, or the most accurate recognition.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...

mark-r 12y ago

I really really wish ECC were available on desktops and laptops. Why are my programs and data less important than a servers? This is an area where AMD could catch Intel sleeping if they implemented it across the line, but unfortunately I don't see a way to make the public care enough to count.

tracker1 12y ago
IIRC some ASUS boards for AMD desktop CPUs suport ECC (Unregistered). Discovered this after I had already setup my ZFS homebrew NAS box, but after all the trouble I had with it, going back to Synology. And an FX-8350 is plenty fast for most uses... especially if you are using all the cors (running server VMs, docker, etc). All of that said, a Core i3-5010U has almost the same single-core performance and 40% the multicore while using less than 1/8 the power... I can now just run two systems, one for the server, another for my desktop and still see less power. After getting said CPU in a Brix box for my HTPC, I'm considering such a move for my next home desktop (still a year off though).