[otabdeveloper4]

Yeah, the guy is living in some alternate reality. E.g., here on planet Earth low- and mid-range consumer laptops have been getting slower, not faster over the years. (Yeah, they're lighter and more power-efficient, but that's orthogonal.)

Same deal with servers: AWS and Azure are dog-slow compared to the on-premises server hardware we'd have before "the cloud".

[tester34]

>Yeah, the guy is living in some alternate reality.

How so?

(I'm talking from desktop perspective)

I'm following tech news and it feels like there's always news about AMD releasing new stuff or Intel trying to catch up

I bought my 8 cores CPU for +-125$ of _my_currency_ year ago which was unbelievable like 3? years ago. Meanwhile I'm still far behind of what's on the edge.

Also nowadays I can spend like 60$ of _my_currency to get insanely fast NVMe M2 disks, so things are cheap nowadays I guess.

[icedchai]

Maybe if you stick with Intel. My AMD "budget" laptop (Ryzen 4500U, 6 cores) blows away a much more expensive Intel laptop I bought only 2 years ago. It was less than half the price.

[yitchelle]

I think that this is wrong perspective. The computers that you and I are using right now on our desks does not get slower. A CPU running 3.6GHz will still be running at 3.6GHz in a few years time. The moving target is software.

[MacsHeadroom]

3.6GHz from 10 years ago and 3.6GHz from today aren't the same though. Modern processors have way more specialized hardware for common tasks that weren't common a decade ago.

Yes, the compute cores are going at the same speed. But you aren't getting the significant advantage of other hardware optimizations.

Just look at the M1 benchmarks for goodness sake. (A bit unfair because it's RISC-V based, but even x86 hardware has improved enormously in the last decade.)

[scottlocklin]

>even x86 hardware has improved enormously in the last decade.

No, it really hasn't! My ancient x220 is still as fast as, or faster than almost all pre 2020 laptops. By contrast, hardware in the period of time ~9 years before 2011 when I bought it is absurdly slower to the point of unusability. Same story with my threadripper versus my 2009 era desktop. For single threaded stuff, not IO bound, they're subjectively about the same. If I need a lot of threads, big memory or big IO, the recent machine is comically faster (like 100-1000x), but lots of things are single thread bound. Again if I take the leap back in time separating the threadripper from my 2009 era machine; there were huge improvements in performance; imagine trying to compile something on a 1998 era tower like OP did.

[eivarv]

M1 isn't RISC-V, but a custom ARM.

[MacsHeadroom]

The R in ARM is for RISC.

[eivarv]

So what?

RISC-V is a specific (RISC-based) ISA. ARM is a family of RISC-architectures, which does not include RISC-V.

Apple's M1 is an ARM SoC. It does not use RISC-V.