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Comment by whoIsYou | Hacker News Reader

I just don't know what is left to achieve really. I have an M1 pro and I just don't really hit any bottlenecks in my workflow as is (unless I am building some obscenely large legacy codebase)

It just seems to me that we are hitting a point of diminishing returns in terms of CPU performance because honestly, the speed of my laptop could triple and it would not noticeably affect my experience in any way.

The main areas of improvement that I would actually notice are better battery life, and faster RAM and SSDs (faster networking as well)

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I am a YouTuber, and I spend a significant amount of time editing and rendering video. My main laptop is a full-spec M1 Max MacBook Pro, and when I'm home, I work on a full-spec M1 Ultra Mac Studio.

Both computers are extraordinarily fast, but I still spend a lot of time waiting.

I would be willing to spend a lot of money:

(1) to reduce that time, (2) to significantly increase my laptop's battery life, and/or (3) to significantly increase the size of my laptop's already-rather-gargantuan 8TB SSD.

Maybe I should become a programmer. Sounds like there's less waiting :P

This is more GPU than CPU, but I want to infer 3D models from my security cameras in real time so I can do some CSI "turn left and look behind it" shit. And use the overlapping textures for superresolution so I can shout "enhance!" and read the license plate reflected in the perp's eyeball.

As for reading e-mails and so on, yeah, we've pretty much reached peak e-mail.

If you can’t do that stuff right now with today’s CPUs, in sub-realtime, then throwing more/faster CPU at it won’t make it possible.

I haven't described anything that can't already be done (well, reading a license plate in an eyeball was mostly an exaggeration). It just can't be done affordably in real time on a home computer. And it's just the first few out of many examples to come to mind.

I think people fall into the trap of conflating "this is what I do with my computer" with "this is what my computer is for." Obviously if computers are only for doing the things you can already do with them, then they won't benefit much from improvements.

> I just don't know what is left to achieve really.

Just use your imagination a little bit.

Unless you think your current workflow and the tasks you use your machines for are the pinnacle of what an individual will ever be able to accomplish?

Currently there are so many things that are so computationally intensive that they can only be processed on server farms that only the Googles and Amazons of the world can afford.

Better battery life is equivalent to more efficient power consumption (that the 3nm process improves on).

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