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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

I would say the "long ago" was 13 years ago with the release of the legendary Sandy Bridge line. Those things are still fast enough today that you don't need anything newer for most practical daily tasks.

Sandy Bridge's staying power even became a meme in Japan, with Sandy Bridge users refusing to upgrade due to lack of need becoming known as "Uncle Sandy" (サンディーおじさん, Sandy-ojisan).

At this point the only reasons to upgrade are one of two things: Software legitimately pushing the performance envelope, like vidja gaemz; and software demanding more resources for no good fucking reason.

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> Those things are still fast enough today that you don't need anything newer for most practical daily tasks.

A 13 year old CPU should definitely struggle to keep up with just the basic electron based chat applications we use today, which is only one piece of software that most need to use. There is still no incentive for startups/VC funded companies to make their software more performant.

See:

>and software demanding more resources for no good fucking reason.

That said, Discord runs just fine on my Sandy Bridge machines if I actually need to do so.

My mom has a i5 2500 ThinkCentre, for her needs that cpu it's good enough, she mostly browse the web and use basic apps like office or Spotify.

I'll say the biggest bottleneck is the old igpu, but I solved that using a cheap 1030. The performance it's a lot better than a current low end intel (with the main drawback being the power draw).

I used a 2700k for a long time - it was a great chip with great longevity. But there are a lot of basic apps today it would struggle with - even firefox with a few extensions would make it sweat. The platform RAM speed was a lot slower too.

I don't think I'd want to run a 2700k today unless there were no other computers available.

I've since upgraded to a 14700K and Windows 11, but I still have my previous 2700K machine around as a sub unit.

Aside from forced Windows 7 obsolescence, it can do practically everything except play the very latest games just fine. If I could have been bothered to downgrade the Windows 7 install to Windows 10 it would have been even more useful to this day.

I replace my desktop approximately every 5 years.

from the 2700k I went to the 7600k, and now to the AMD 7900x. I sold the 2700k a long time ago, but I still have the 7600k machine somewhere. I should get rid of it.

The Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge stuff definitely stayed relevant for a very long time, but we've hit a point where even high-end chips from that generation aren't really wide enough for a lot of users; four cores isn't really enough for midrange consumer workloads. You can with some (but not a ton, IMO) justification say that "software is slower now", but also software does more stuff and that's getting to the point where you need to juggle more than a quad-core chip, especially one with one-quarter the single-thread performance (rough estimate, Passmark single-thread between an i7-2600 and an i5-13600), is up for.

There's a glut of Skylakes that can't run Windows 11, however, for cheap, and those certainly have some value on the budget side.

> but we've hit a point where even high-end chips from that generation aren't really wide enough for a lot of users; four cores isn't really enough for midrange consumer workloads.

So "and software demanding more resources for no good fucking reason.".

You're really just reinforcing the parent's point.

That's silly. Even if you set aside that people want computers to do more things at once, the basic act of decoding 4K video is beyond a Sandy Bridge chip without a discrete GPU. The world has passed it by. Sorry that weirdo tech primordialism doesn't really work, but not that sorry.

> but we've hit a point where even high-end chips from that generation aren't really wide enough for a lot of users; four cores isn't really enough for midrange consumer workloads.

I dispute this - I had an i5-2500K (which is a 4 core, Sandy Bridge processor) that I upgraded about two years. But I didn't upgrade for performance reasons (I was still gaming on it!), but rather because one of my ram sticks had gotten crashy and I wanted to try building a mITX computer instead. It would definitely still be plenty for a lot of use cases. I still have the 2500k and motherboard sitting in a box, just in case someone desperately needs a computer.

Yeah; I have a 2600. I upgraded it to an SSD and midrange AMD GPU about 8 years ago.

Compared to my M2 macbook pro, it’s fine. The mac uses 10% as much electricity, but the desktop runs cool and quiet anyway.

> but we've hit a point where even high-end chips from that generation aren't really wide enough for a lot of users

Software-hardware coevolution in practice.

When the first dual cores appeared, they were dual hardware cores... in a software world that was designed to operating with a time-sliced single core.

It felt like magic!

However, now most pieces of heavy software can use multiple cores, so you need 'one more core' to get the same level of surplus capacity.

Also, the typical load of multiple tabs open with modern js web apps is much heavier than anything that would have been running constantly then.

In the 90s, 00s, you closed down your background programs if you needed to run something important.

All true, but I was there too, and having to shut down background programs to run something important sucked. It was bad! It is better now.

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