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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

> I'd argue that PC sales are slow because Intel hasn't compellingly upgraded their processors in a long time. It used to be that every 18 months, we'd see a processor that was a huge upgrade. Now it's 5 years to get that upgrade.

I think it’s Moore’s law approaching its limits and the direction of chip improvements isn’t core speed but the number of them, power usage, etc which make a difference but for most folk it doesn’t appear like an improvement like say doubling the frequency every 18 months. I have an old laptop and it keeps up quite nicely after 8 years...

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This is me today. I'm typing this on an 8 year old macbook pro. First gen retina. 4-cores and 16GB of ram. I want to upgrade, I really really do. I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work, but I can't bring myself to purchase one for myself since I've been telling myself I would wait for 10nm.

The first 14nm processors started shipping in the 15" in 2015 - 5 years ago.

My current 8 year old macbook has a 22nm processor. I would never have thought 8 years ago that Intel would only have managed a single node shrink since then.

The big subjective improvements appear to have been in screen resolutions/sharpness and in SSDs. An 8-year-old LCD will likely have dimmed substantially.

On the other hand if you like it, you like it, and cheap is beautiful.

Why would it dim? Never hears about it.

It won't :) It has a LED backlight. Older LCD screens often had fluorescent backlight, which will and did degrade after hours of use. According to Wikipedia, LEDs are the most popular backlight in LCD screens since 2012.

The idea that LEDs last forever is a myth. LEDs degrade over time. They actually list it on the spec sheet. For example an L70 rated led with a 25k hour life will produce 70% of the light it produced when new after 25k hours.

Recently I replaced 4 Asus monitors with led backlights that were produced in 2014 and 2015. Asus says 300 nits. Tested them when I was calibrating their replacements and they were 110-120 at full brightness.

Monitors color shift and dim as they age... that’s why hardware calibrators exist.

>I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work

I'm jealous and genuinely curious where do you guys work that your employers can afford to get everyone such expensive machines.

I've been a dev in the EU for 8 years now and at most places I've worked or interviewed(not FAANG) the machines you get are some cheapo HP/Lenovo/Dell with only the executives having Apple hardware.

I never understood why companies in the west cheap out on hardware so much since compared to the cost of office rent and employee salaries that's a drop in the ocean, they could buy everyone MacBooks or Ryzen towers and it wouldn't even dent their bottom line.

Every tech company I've worked at in Silicon Valley let the engineer pick their own computer and just submit a receipt for reimbursement. Up to $3000.

Frankly with the cost of hiring you, spending $3k to make you even a few percent more productive if money well spent.

USD 3000 might be quite limiting if you need a fast workstation. 3000 USD is like one 1 TB high performance SSD.

What? Even optane is less than half that much.

A high performance SSD, capable of over 3GB/s, is less than $200 for 1TB.

P4800X is around 5K. And you probably want them in raid, so at least 10K.

And a 905P costs a quarter of that.

But seriously, a 970 Evo Plus is a high performance SSD suitable for a workstation and that's $400 for two.

If you are being paid 30k a 2K upgrade would be worthwhile if it resulted in a 6% increase in productivity. At 60k it would be justified by a 3% increase in productivity. Maybe your company just has no meaningful way to measure or understand what effects productivity.

There are a few places that kind of go 'to the nines' for employees and give adequate and even overpowered workstations. I think the crowd that gets that treatment is slightly over-represented on HN.

But most businesses here are the same, you get lucky to get any nice feature over the 'same laptop that sales gets' which is barely more than a Chromebook. And getting an external monitor that's not the cheapest bulk-buy model was also pretty hard to do (I had a friend in marketing who helped me get a larger display with better colors at that place).

Or you go self employed and get your own fancy workstation since you know it’s easily worth your money in the long run. Don’t work for people that don’t understand this.

The rule of thumb is that a typical dev here is 250k fully loaded (benefits, office, etc). When you are trying hire and your are competing with Google and Facebook that extra 2K on the laptop kit is a rounding error. It’s hard to hire as FANGs are a sure thing money wise.

I do contracting for a professional services outfit, and they gave me the Windows corporate laptop (Dell Latitude) and also sent me a MacBook Pro 16", which my manager had to explicitly ask for.

The only difference? I can receive encrypted emails only on the Windows laptop due to some software not being available for the Mac.

I do all my development on macOS, and if spending $4k on a machine means I am more productive, can get work done faster, it's a return on investment that pays back multiple times.

Do note that laptop refreshes in my past companies (current is ~2 years) have been on average every 2.5 year... so it's not like I get a new laptop yearly.

That Dell Latitude is frustrating to use. The trackpad is absolutely atrocious, the display is dim, the keyboard is really mushy and causes pain in my hands when I use it for short periods of time...

Had a similar situation (a Windows and a MBP) and just putting VMWare and Windows 10 on the MBP solved pretty much all the problems of having to lug around two machines.

There's a Citrix setup as well, which while slow works fine for the one or two times a month that I need access to encrypted email... so I haven't carried around the Windows laptop.

My company is working on upgrading all of us to that config. Currently we mostly use the 2013 13", and people get upgraded when that one burns out. I'm debating asking for a halfway trade, getting a nice Thinkpad X1 and being able to use my favorite linux tools on it.

I'm in the US, but I've been in a similar position to you; my last job gave me a tower with 8GB of ram and a Core 2 Duo running Windows 7 32-bit. Utterly useless. I had to sneak Ubuntu onto it when nobody was looking. They couldn't even tell the difference.

I ended up having the last laugh when every computer in the office got wiped because somebody decided running the mail server on our ActiveDirectory server was a good idea, and also thought that leaving ports open on the mail server was a good idea.

Silicon Valley startups are pretty much, hey what do you want as far as laptop specs go? At my company new hires can pretty much order anything they want (which is mostly MacBook Pro max CPU and RAM) and one or more monitors, no issue. Heck we have one or two crazy people with Windows laptops :) Old employees are welcome to refresh at 2 years no issues. I am on my 3rd laptop in 5 years. In my case I travel so I have swapped MacBook Pro for a MacBook then a MacBook Air. I have the same Apple 4K LG on my desk at home and work paid for by the company. Same mechanical keyboards also.

This is pretty typical here.

Heck we swap build servers every 6-12 months based on test speed. We buy one of every new CPU and do a test run of auto build and ptest. If it is reasonably faster we order a new rack and replace the old boxes. Power and cooling is way more $$ then the HW. Every month we do not need a new cage is a win. We are deploying AMD Epyc now with 10G-T + 4x1G (not network limited in our test, just segmentation to test DUTs) with a core of 100G for fileservers and 25G for services. File servers are TrueNAS SSD shelves for test and with spinning rust for build artifacts. We run ~1000 containers on a single server in ptest (scaling that was fun to figure out ... hint you have to play with networking stack ARP timers - strace is your friend).

Big companies too. It’s too important not to. I’ve been in companies where employees constantly complain about their machines, and it legitimately causes people to leave their jobs. I’ve seen people offer to buy their own laptop, if they were just allowed to use it.

In a place where talent is as competitive as the bay, you wouldn’t survive making people use subpar machines.

I am in the UK, and I've only found startups willing to spend money on developer hardware. The larger companies seem to pick up low-end Lenovos for developers, and better i7 Lenovos for those managers who would never use them.

Though I would gladly dump the MacBook Pro 16" I currently have to use for work in an instant for a high-end Lenovo/Dell. Apart from MacOS being extremely flakey these days (why does Spotlight only seem to pop up 50% of the time), I don't understand why they don't provide proper ISO and instead give us some form of ANSI that has the dancing alien (§) dedicated key, and why they hide the # which as a Pro developer I use all the time.

That it also spends its entire time overheating so it burns my lap is just the icing on the cake.

Shot in the dark here but have you tried to charge it from the other side? See this Stackoverflow thread that was also featured on hn: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...

No, switching the charging did nothing for me or any of my colleagues.

But when I used a MacBook Pro about 10 years ago the machine overheated all the time and burnt my lap. They are just a shitty design, but they look pretty.

I recommend using the PC layout.

They keyboard is still wrong, and doesn't match the layout.

Plus it seems to disable the switch between windows in the same app.

My boss is very nice. He treats every person as an individual. Also we are fairly small.

Last place I worked I got an HP Windows desktop and told to remote in from a 12" laptop whenever I needed to work from home or show off something in a meeting. That place also wanted to knock down three single-person offices so they could fit 10 developers in the same space. And for the last month or so I had a developer working next to me on my own desk since management didn't prioritise us developers over HR.

My current workplace and my previous are both in the public sector in Norway.

Hm, when I worked for a public lab in France we got the "pro" line Dell laptops. We actually got complaints from users that the software was slow because we only ever tested it on high end machines. Later when working for a startup they gave us choice for a reasonable workstation, this was when the company was doing well in the beginning though.

I think if you have any way of escalating then the best thing is to come up with numbers, such as "a faster computer would let me compile the program in 20 less seconds, which is this much time earned", or "a better screen would not require me to have an external monitor".

Now, I think that to get a 16" MBP for work requires quite a specific use case, because it's really a machine one should use only when it's the only computer they have. For the same price I think you could get a faster desktop + a more portable laptop.

Most of the top Finnish software consultancies have a (basically) unlimited budget for your main laptop and give you freedom to pick whatever you want.

Yes, Moore's law is hitting its limits: For example 5nm distance equals like about 25 silicon atoms. That's like: Quantum electron tunnelling will ruin your life.

So if we want increase our chip's performance any further, we need a fundamental change in our technology. And since silicon atom is 210 pm big and carbon atom (graphene is made from carbon) is 170 pm big, we need to change our architecture as shrinking transistors will not be possible anymore. I mean CISC/RISC, drop x86 support and so on.

5nm is marketing name, it doesn't have anything in common with real sizes of transistors. They are much bigger than that.

Blaming Moore's Law is not fair since Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, HiSilicon,... can deliver reasonable improvement in these 3 years while only Intel is stagnant.

To be fair, most of that is them catching up to where Intel already was. Noone seems to actually be fabbing meaningfully smaller feature sizes (or higher layer counts) than what Intel is stagnating at.

The difference is that ARM has been able to deliver desktop-grade performance at power levels that are suitable for use in an iPad.

Intel and AMD might be able to deliver somewhat higher performance by throwing a whole bunch of cores at the problem, but they do so at a much higher cost in power requirements. And it would be easy enough to design ARM machines with an equal number of cores (or even way more), and still have much lower power requirements.

Intel stagnated, and has high power requirements. ARM has caught up, and has much lower power requirements.

The reasoning seems pretty simple to me.

Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture; that they've made better use of the transistors available, not that they've achieved better feature density than what would be expected from where they are on the Moores law curve.

Also Intel and AMD have not delivered higher performance via more cores; they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon (edit: or at least in the same package). (There are some slight improvements in inter-processor interrupt and cache-forwarding latency, but if that's a performance bottleneck, the problem is bad parallelization at the code level.)

> they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon.

Arguably AMD did the exact opposite - lower prices via splitting a processor into multiple pieces of silicon. (Chip price scale exponentially with area at the high end)

Well, my point there was that a 64-core CPU is not (significantly) higher performance than 64 single-core CPUs, so multi-core is - if a improvement at all - a price improvement, not a performance improvement, but fair point about the price-vs-area scaling.

    Sure, but that's them having a competent 
    (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture

Hasn't x86 been basically RISC-like internally since the pentium-pro/amd k6? Is the translation layer that big of a hindrance?

ISA doesn't matter nearly as much as people think, unless it's something really different (like VLIW/EPIC/...).

> Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA

Have you looked at the encoding of Thumb-2 (T32) and particularly A64 (their newly designed instruction set for 64 bit)? Their instruction encoding is in my opinion much more convoluted than x86.

> The difference is that ARM has been able to deliver desktop-grade performance at power levels that are suitable for use in an iPad.

ARM hasn't. Apple has. Apple's implementation of the ISA since A6 is unrelated to ARM's.

> To be fair, most of that is them catching up to where Intel already was. Noone seems to actually be fabbing meaningfully smaller feature sizes (or higher layer counts) than what Intel is stagnating at.

Eh, Intel's 14nm is 37M transistors/mm2. TSMC and SS are both up to 52M/mm2 at 10nm, and 92M/mm2 at 7nm. Both Apple and AMD's latest gen stuff is on TSMC's 7nm process _today_. Yes, Intel's 10nm is at 101M/mm2, but until they can get mass production on that they're falling substantially behind.

Ah, thank you and I'm glad I used "seems", there; the last I had heard they were all still trying to get reliable production at 10/7nm.

(I stand by "most", but it's nice to hear that someone's making actual progress again.)

If you look at long-term trends transistor density has kept pace (slowed down consistently but not dramatically along the years), the big difference is that it no longer gives you as much as a performance boost as it used to.

> I think it’s Moore’s law approaching its limits and the direction of chip improvements isn’t core speed but the number of them

Note that this is still Moore's law. You're thinking of Dennard scaling. That basically ran out 12 years ago.

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