[kostya-kow]

One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.

[niggler]

One can also argue that not everyone has google fiber, and running locally enables it to run when internet access is slow or unreliable

[nwh]

What reasonable company would justify spending tens of thousands an hour on server costs, when they could optimise their code a little more and run it for free?

[samstave]

You do know what c-suite we are discussing, correct? ;)

[lhnz]

The richest games company makes decisions which benefit them...

[seanp2k2]

So let's assume that the average person wanting to play SimCity is running a Core2Duo (released 7 years ago). It's hard to find benchmarks directly comparing a Core2 E6600 to something like an Ivy Bridge Xeon that you'd expect to find in a modern dual-socket 1U server, but even looking at a TomsHardware chart of x86 core performance can tell you that an i7-2600k is only about twice as powerful as a Pentium 4 HT660 (core-for-core) http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/x86-core-performance-comp...

Bottom line, the total cost of ownership doesn't at all make business sense to do right now. In 10 years, it very well might.

See also: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 ("Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know"). TL;DR

Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache vs Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns 150 ms

[bluedino]

It's a little closer to 3x as fast

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-b...

[CamperBob2]

The core-for-core thing makes a huge difference in the real world that doesn't show up on single-core benchmarks. The HT660 was a good chip in its day, but it's at a four-to-one disadvantage for code that's multithreaded and/or running on a busy PC.

I think Sandy Bridge is my favorite CPU of all time. It does a truly massive amount of work without consuming significantly more power than the part it replaced.