Ask HN: Am I using bad hardware or has software become inefficient? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Am I using bad hardware or has software become inefficient?

6 pointsMemosyne5 comments

Does your laptop not get hot when running Chrome? Do your fans not start roaring when running Windows 10? Does WebGL not make your laptop really hot? Why does it seem like everyone is okay with CPU/GPU usage being maximized? Why do certain language servers keep running when everything else is idle?

I work with 3D graphics in C/C++ and it makes my computer a little warm. I open a SPA in Chrome and all of a sudden it feels like I'm training a neural network for Google. Now, I'm no computer expert but something definitely seems amiss here. Is my hardware at fault or is the software just that inefficient? Could it be the spectre security mitigation? Things definitely weren't this bad a couple of years ago...

Edit: I'm not just ranting; I'm actually wondering if its time to upgrade my computer. If anyone has a laptop recommendation that doesn't suffer from the aforementioned problems please let me know.

I completely agree with you. I'm constantly trying to figure out why CPU usage is high and fans are spinning on my brand-new 16" MacBook Pro. Whether it be Chrome, Zoom, or even Apple's own processes and daemons, my machine is getting cooked all the time.

Even the simple act of connecting to an external display (2560×1440, mind you) gets my machine an extra 20° warmer. These could be platform-specific issues (i.e. Apple hasn't done a good job with thermal management, GPU drivers, or both), but something has gone awry.

After fast internal SSDs became mainstream around 2015, that was the last major boost I've seen to the overall computing experience. For example, open/save dialog boxes loaded much faster, and other common actions were a lot zippier. Apart from that, there's been no perceptible improvement whatsoever in terms of "daily computing". My CPU and RAM resources have increased dramatically as I've upgraded laptops over the years, but I can hear my fans more often than before doing the same exact workflows.

I'm just as shocked as you and want answers.

For the last couple decades, all I've seen is people push the notion "computers are so fast now, why bother being efficient. There is plenty of power, don't worry about it", I didn't realize anybody cared about efficiency anymore except hardware engineers

And FWIW you probably are training a neural network for google :P

Software has indeed become inefficient, both from a compute resources point of view but also bandwidth and information density.

Have you tried a different browser?

Yeah, I use Firefox and it's fantastic for simple documents. However, Chrome is still the most popular browser so I have to wonder how it got that way. If it turns out that Chrome actually is the better browser and my hardware is the problem then ideally I'd like to know (even if I never change due to philosophical reasons).

p.s. I use Linux with a simple WM. I have gone through great lengths to ensure that my system uses very few resources. I just want to know why/how everyone else is tolerating these inefficiencies.

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