[rdw]

It's fun to be back in the age where every few years you want to upgrade your computer because the new ones are so much faster, not because the old one is worn out.

20% faster isn't enough to make me regret my M1 purchase, but after one or two more 20% speed gains I'll feel like upgrading to the latest is going to be worth it.

[systemvoltage]

I'd want the Wirth's law[1] to be not true regardless of where we are in the hardware scale.

I recently tried using a 486 + CRT monitor setup. The speed at which your keystrokes appear on the screen is simply astounding. I'd like us to pay more attention to how software is written and debloating the layers of abstraction with hindsight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[PragmaticPulp]

> I recently tried using a 486 + CRT monitor setup. The speed at which your keystrokes appear on the screen is simply astounding.

Use a fast editor like Sublime Text or even something like JetBrains IDEA with the zero-latency mode enabled and the editor delay will be single-digit milliseconds.

Get a modern 120Hz or more monitor (search for gaming monitor) with low latency and your display lag will be less than 10ms.

More info here: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

[systemvoltage]

I’ve been using Sublime Text since the Aztecs and it is really fast, but not as fast as what I described earlier. Yep, using it on macOS with 120Hz Liquid Retina (M1 MBP 14 inch).

I’ll check Jet Brains zero latency mode. I didn’t know that exists, cool.

[worthless-trash]

The example here will still neglect the reality that the stack processing the input will significantly increase the latency.

The (likely) ps2 keyboard on the 486 will have lower input latency as it doesn't have the multiple complex (both hardware and software) stacks that each key-input will need to travel through. People say you can't feel it, but people are regularly incorrect.

I feel like Rick (C-137) when I say, you gotta experience low latency on something like the original pong machine (from 1972) to know what you're missing out on. Once you've used this, the wireless mice and USB keyboards will feel slow and laggy even in low latency software.

[worthless-trash]

Downvoted to zero points again, apparently not contributing to the discussion.

[narrator]

I can't understand why people like those tiny wireless keyboards and mice they have to recharge and pair. When you're at a workstation just plug in one dongle and hook up all of it. It's so easy.

[User23]

The most responsive computer I’ve ever used was a Mac 512ke upgraded with 2.5 MB of RAM. I booted and loaded applications all off a RAMdisk and every input was instantaneous, including launching applications.

[KptMarchewa]

It's the OS and event driven model, and polling USB vs interrupt based PS/2.

The nearly unnoticeable latency is small price for progress.

[m463]

I remember reading that 1/10 of a second response time is "interactive"

I wonder how many systems don't qualify as interactive?

I don't think typing into the amazon search bar qualifies.

[flatiron]

Boot on Linux and bash on a modern computer. Do you think the keystrokes are slower?

[giobox]

The problem isn't even the computer most times, its more often the display. Many modern flat panel displays have far more latency than even a crappy analog CRT, and yes the difference is definitely often noticeable if you have any experience with computers. Some of the most modern ones can be the worst offenders too, given the amount of signal processing a modern display does.

To add to earlier example, I do some retro gaming on an old windows 98 box with a CRT, the lack of latency moving the mouse in first person shooters of this era compared to today can be incredible.

[ricardobeat]

Same reason most people playing FPS games today use a 144hz+ monitor, ideally with black frame insertion. The difference is night and day.

[teilo]

That's analog for you. You essentially have a speed of light connection from the frame buffer to the electron gun, with no processing involved. As fast as the bits can be read from the data buffer they appear on the screen.

[pradn]

Dan's famous article on this subject has benchmarks: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

[systemvoltage]

I've tried FreeBSD (without desktop) on Thinkpad X1. I must admit, it is pretty good.

[microtonal]

Right, and this is quite impressive, since they haven't yet been able to go from 5nm to 3nm. So, by the time the M3 is out, it will be a great update for the M1. (And the M1 will still be awesome for people who don't need the bump.)

[cogman10]

IDK that I'd count on node shrinks to provide anywhere near the performance/power saving bumps that it used to. We are pretty close to the point were smaller nodes will mean more power consumption with the same design merely due to the fact that smaller nodes mean more leakage due to electron tunneling.

[parkingrift]

This has been the story for years and we just keep solving the problems. Perhaps one day you’ll be right, but it won’t be N5 to N3.

[Normille]

For as long as I can remember, every new Apple computer was "up to" 5... 10... 15... times faster than the one before. The use of "up to" is a clever marketing ploy. Because if all those were actual figures then, with all that compound multiplication, the current laptops must be about a million times faster than the one I had 20 or so years ago.

[irrational]

Well, even my phone feels about a million times faster than the desktop machine with an old pentium chip (that was in the mid megahertz range) that I was still using 20 years ago.

[potamic]

Even 20 years ago, Notepad used to open in a flash on my desktop. The Notes app on my phone however...

[gabereiser]

definitely feels a million times faster than a iMac circa 2000 with it's 333mhz CPU. I mean, we are talking 100000x performance at least.

[pjmlp]

Meanwhile my main computers are all about 2010, even for hobby 3D graphics coding I will never be able to saturate the GPUs with my designer skills.

[app4soft]

> for hobby 3D graphics coding I will never be able to saturate the GPUs with my designer skills

Yeah, but latest versions of usual apps (especially web-browser) requires newer GPU/CPU.

Sadly, our days coding style by popular software devs is not focused on performance & optimization.

[pjmlp]

Web browser 3D apis are a bad example, because WebGL 2.0 is unware of what happened after 2011 in GPU hardware, while WebGPU is targeting 2015 hardware.

[jeffbee]

That doesn't seem new. Just taking the default single-thread benchmark from Anandtech, CPUs that are sequentially 20% slower than the current record, the Intel Core i9-12900K (Q4 2021), are the Ryzen 9 5900X (Q4 2020), the Core i9-10900K (Q2 2020), Core i3-7350K (Q1 2017), and Core i5-6500 (Q3 2015). That's a doubling in performance in about 6.25 years. So you needn't have waited for your fruity savior to bring you biennial 20% performance increases.

[mekster]

I think you got that wrong. Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore and you won't get much better experience. This is same as phones.

Soon, they'll have to be more creative for people to consider buying every few years.

I wish MBA started having ProMotion.

[microtonal]

> I think you got that wrong. Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore and you won't get much better experience. This is same as phones.

Well... I'm pretty sure that this is Hacker News. And for many developers, any performance improvement is great.

I first got an M1 Air, which was fantastic. Faster than my 3700X workstation for building Rust projects, while it was passively cooled and portable. Despite the awesome performance of the M1 Air, I upgraded to an M1 Pro when it came out. Moving from 4 performance + 4 efficiency cores to 8 performance + 2 efficiency cores was yet another awesome upgrade, giving again much quicker builds.

I work on machine learning stuff, so the AMX matrix co-processing unit in the M1 was really great for training small networks (sometimes convolution networks are still great for NLP + being able to train locally is nice for development). Then the M1 Pro/Max had double the AMX units, so it's again a great step forward.

Getting 20% YoY improvements will definitely make me very happy (and I bet many other developers).

[adrr]

Depends what you do. Compiling/Building or Video/Photo editing, the speed makes a big difference. M1s cut compile time on xcode build by half compared to I9s. Also docker builds are faster. Shaving off a few minutes here and there makes a big difference in ROI when you factor in the a year lifespan. Let's say it saves you 15 minutes a day. That is 62 hours a years.

[puranjay]

Small things add up. Freezing a track in Ableton, for instance, is substantially faster. This makes a huge difference to the workflow. When you're in a creative state of flow, stopping several seconds just for a track to freeze can take you completely out of your zone.

[maccard]

Completely agree here. Not only that, but I have faster compiles on my m1 mac than on my i7 mac, _and_ I can compile on batter on my M1 and still have it last all day.

[eitland]

I am a Linux user.

For me lagging on Windows is not only noticeable but also maddening.

Typically my old laptop with a 3 year old processor and half the memory is snappier running a mainstream distro with KDE Plasma than a brand new one running Windows.

[zimpenfish]

> Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore

stares in Mojang's poorly optimised Java

(Also, as other people have pointed out, it absolutely can be when compiling, using Photoshop, doing billions of Prolog inferences, etc.)

[bismuthcrystal]

>Soon, they'll have to be more creative for people to consider buying every few years.

No, they will just stop the "security" updates and force you to buy a new one.

[rdsubhas]

Higher speed at the same power usage translates to better battery life.

[sib]

I spend a lot of my (non-work) time doing photo editing using Adobe products while traveling.

I'll happily take a laptop that is 10x as fast as my current one...