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by aksss 1771 days ago
To some degree I imagine there’s also a question of how much demand we put on these modern old computers that reflects changing/diminishing interests as we age. There are certainly workloads available today that would cripple an 8 yo computer (Mac or PC), workloads that a younger version of you may have been more interested in (multiple VMs, gaming, real-time video processing at same time). You probably stressed your 386 to the breaking point within three years of buying it, and you could easily load up an 8yo computer today to its breaking point. My 2016-era laptop is no longer useful to me as, well, anything except an emergency backup.

If one can’t discern issues with a four-five yo computer, I would very humbly suggest it also says something about the demands of the owner stultifying to a degree.
3 comments
anthk 1771 days ago
Eh, bullshit. Go try running Max Payne from 2002 PC on a 486.

Then, show me the equivalent of a 2015 game on par on the gap to a game from 2021 as a 486 game like Doom compared to a Pentium III game like Max Payne.

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aksss 1770 days ago
My life doesn't revolve around games enough to do that, but I can tell you that running an IDE, a stack of VMs, driving external monitors, screensharing while on VC, along with misc productivity apps was not doable on my skylake laptop, whereas the same workload is easily doable on my tiger lake platform. How's that?

> eh, bullshit

Precisely what's bullshit? You're telling me that your workloads on modern computers are stressing them out and you simultaneously don't see a difference between a 6th gen platform and an 11th? No, you don't see a substantial difference in modern platforms because you don't have a need for the performance gains.

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anthk 1770 days ago
That's just better perforanmance on parallel tasks, not by raw capacity.

My point stands.

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CamperBob2 1771 days ago
The single-thread performance of my 10-year-old Sandy Bridge is only now reaching the magic half-as-fast point relative to the fastest CPUs available. That's the point, historically, that's prompted me to upgrade.

For those whose workloads aren't multicore-intensive (or GPU-intensive, which is pretty much the same thing), it's been a dry, boring 10 years in the PC business.

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otabdeveloper4 1771 days ago
> and you could easily load up an 8yo computer today to its breaking point

I've seen people load up a 200 machine cluster on AWS doing quite mundane tasks.

Information complexity is the only physical quantity that doesn't obey conservation laws, so this kind of thing really isn't impressive or interesting.

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mianos 1771 days ago
In real life, a few years ago, people at work fired up a 20 host cluster on AWS to do something that I later replaced with a script and GNU parallel (at the time a perl script), running on my 2013 Macbook pro i7, beating it by 10X.

Sure, I'll admit it may not be fair to compare, considering the AWS host type, copying the data out and in, and all the other overhead.

That said, the project sure looked like it was resume driven 'big data'.

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