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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

We're well past those days, (un)fortunately. My 2015-built i4790k/1080/SSD that I use at home feels exactly the same as the more modern desktops I use at work. Even the SSD, which sees heavy use, has burned through less than 10% of its expected lifecycle. The only thing I've had to replace are the case fan and the CPU fan, just from age/use, but looking at the horizon, I see no reason I couldn't use the machine itself for another 4 years without issue.

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Computers used to become twice as fast every 18 months. Now it takes about 7 years.

I'm still using one I built in 2009. CPU, motherboard, and PSU are really the only original components anymore, so maybe it's not a great comparison, but it's still a great machine that can do heavier lifting than my maxed out Surface Book. There are some bottlenecks that's going to force me to rebuild soon though. I love how we can now get a decade from one build with minor upgrades every few years.

You've got a bit of an edge case... Haswell is the last machine I'd consider modern. Go back one generation and Ivy Bridge is missing AVX2 and loses performance in a number of applications.

Haswell is the oldest CPU that supports AVX2, DDR4, quad-core standard, probably has USB3.0 slots and PCIe 3.0.

"Modern" machines like Skylake have increased to 6-core standard (even for an i5) or more (i7 and AMD Zen are 8-cores now). Those extra cores help with compiles / 3d blender renders / some other tasks, but its not a major improvement otherwise. USB 3.1 Type C isn't a big change from USB 3.0, and PCIe 3.0 and DDR4 are still mainstream.

In as little as a year however, things seem to be changing. Intel Icelake will be adding AVX512 to the mainstream later this year. We'll see whether or not consumers get an uptick in AVX512 usage, or if Adobe / other programs continue to push GPGPU instead.

With DDR5 being released in 2019 (with doubled bandwidth compared to DDR4) and PCIe 4.0 beginning adoption, and with PCIe 5.0 and USB4 standards being released, it seems like a major upgrade cycle will occur in the 2020 to 2021 timeframe. (It seems like the Desktop market is skipping PCIe 4.0 and just going straight to PCIe 5.0, quadrupling I/O bandwidth in one jump)

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Laptops are still waiting for LPDDR4 support. Kinda sucks for them. Intel really feels like they stalled out with all of these 10nm issues they've been having. A lot of their technology (ie: Ice Lake) was delayed due to the 10nm issues.

> You've got a bit of an edge case... Haswell is the last machine I'd consider modern. Go back one generation and Ivy Bridge is missing AVX2 and loses performance in a number of applications.

(acknowledging that this website is for a particular subset of computer users) I think this comment misses the point of the original comment. I use a desktop I built in 2011 (i5 2500k) as my main driver - I upgraded to an SSD and a RX580 recently, and it performs fantasticly. It has USB 3, which is iomportant to me for bulk file transfers to removable media. It plays any game I have thrown at it yet. I may upgrade the CPU/ram/mobo at some point, but haven't felt the need yet.

I'm sure my computer would be pretty terrible compared to a new i7 at the particular CPU-intensive tasks you mentioned (encoding, rendering, compiling...), but for everyday use and gaming it can't be faulted in the slightest. Very impressive for an 8-year-old CPU. Even 3 years ago, an 8-year-old computer would've been trash (core2 duo, ew)

There are some poorly programmed games like Arma 3 that are heavily single core bound.

Haswell actually uses ddr3 unfortunately, and it's becoming a bottleneck for me personally in a few cases now. Otherwise I totally agree though.

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