The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time
cpubenchmark.net
cpubenchmark.net
- [1] 1366 x 768 was the strongest growing monitor resolution
- [2] Dual- and Quad core CPUs went up, 6-16 Cores are down
- [3] 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM went up, 16/32 GB fell
[1] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html
[2] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html
[3] https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html
[from 3dcenter.org : https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 [German]]
Very little in education needs more computing power than that.
We've just told ourselves that computing power will always grow and that we will always need that growth.
That might not be be true and computers might be like cars: we don't need (want) faster cars, we want cheaper and safer cars. Top speed no longer sells.
Having tried to install a modern Linux on a 2012 laptop, it simply is not as cozy as your memory records it.
For reference even Linux designed for old hardware takes about 6 minutes to boot and even just using the console lags
There is no reason for computers to get slower over time. Especially on linux.
But what matters is the software you're using, and that will be modern software (mostly). Modern browsers visiting JS-heavy websites, or a heavier office suite than 15 years ago.
And if this is the context, then computers must get slower over time, right?
I wish I could explain what is going on but it is physically painful to use, like you are remote desktoping over an iridium satellite
Pretty much anything from 2011 that was not a Core i5 or better will probably not run well today unless you use a purpose-built ultralight distro.
Big revolution of last 20 years was spinning drives to ssd. Otherwise, my daily drivers are all 8th generation Intel CPUs - I just got a ThinkPad x1 carbon for $300 cad from Facebook marketplace. 7 years old and runs brilliantly. My wife's daily driver is a t580.
Which is all to say I have no idea how Linux is taking 6 minutes to boot or even worse, lagging on terminal - something is horribly wrong there :-(
- your framebuffer is hardware accelerated
- your systemd doesn't have any timeouts or service hangups
- run a lightweight environment such as fluxbox
in fact i only admin it via ssh. first to the gcp instance, then to the atom inside the wg tunnel.
its not that horrible.
It also worked perfectly fine for basic web browsing, including youtube.
Biggest issue honestly was battery life.
Either, clone the OS or else do a fresh install. The old drive goes into a USB enclosure if it's a laptop.
It feels like a brand new computer, going from minutes to seconds to do anything.
(Going from a Raspberry Pi 4 on a MicroSD to a pi5 with an nvme drive is a similar night and day difference. The pi5 feels like a snappy modern computer. Previous pis always felt slow.)
Screen resolution on windows/Mac is important because scaling support is so bad that a low resolution is barely usable when all the icons end up huge.
On the web, which scales well, it really is just a matter of blurryness. Plenty of people can live with a slightly blurry screen to save $50.
However, 1366 x 768 screens were very common in cheaper chromebooks until 1-2 years ago, and most retailers are still selling new old stock of older models with 1366 x 768 screens and n4020 cpus.
(Now a lot of the really cheap models have 1080p screens and n100 or similar cpus which is a massive improvement.)
Nope, as your next sentence says, they're learning off forums, Stack Overflow, YouTube and ChatGPT like the rest of us. :P
1366 x 768 definitely sounds like it's just an increase in older machines though.
HP 15-fd0023dx ($280, 12th-gen i3, Win 11 S, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" touchscreen)
HP 15-fc0025dx ($580, Ryzen 5 7520U, Win 11 S, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" touchscreen)
HP 15-fd0067nr, 15-fd0077nr ($510–$900, 13th-gen i5 or i7, Win 11 Home or Pro, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" non-touch)
HP 14-DQ0052DX Stream 14 ($230–$280, N4120, Win 11 Home or Pro, 4 or 8 GB RAM, 14" non-touch)
Lenovo IdeaPad 3 ($350, 11th-gen i3, Win 11 Home, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" touchscreen)
ASUS Chromebook CM14 ($155–$280, MediaTek Kompanio 520, 4 GB RAM, ChromeOS, 14" non-touch)
[1] a search engine will give you the intel ark page if you search for "1215U" which tells you thats a 2P+4E 15W Alder Lake CPU, however "12th-gen i3" could be a 4P+0E, but also a 2P+8E or a 4P+4E, and anything between 9W and 60W Basepower.
As the chart is updated bi-weekly, but the data point that may change is for the current year. The first few days or weeks of a new year are less accurate compared to the end of a year.January 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130185431/https://www.cpube...
Still, both previous years were notably up after the first month already. This is different and perhaps notable regardless. Either the release schedule is skewed forward or the hardware is genuinely stagnating. Or perhaps the benchmark is hitting some other CPU unrelated bottleneck.
Just because the error isn't presented the same here doesn't mean it's error free...
They have more than twice as many samples on their Feb 10 update this year (47810) as they did last year on Feb 14 (22761). They have shown some growth year on year in sample size, but nowhere near doubling.
That suggests this month has been an outlier in having a strangely large number of samples already, which could all be related—maybe their software started being bundled with a specific OEM or was featured on a popular content creator or whatever.
As a sibling notes, less accurate just means less accurate, not necessarily skewed upward. There simply is less data to draw conclusions on than there will be later, so any medium-sized effect that adds 20k extra samples will have a larger effect now than later.
Worst are the ones where he number is the number of times some random event happened. In that case there's a decent chance the difference is less than twice the square root, so assuming a Poisson distribution you know the difference is insignificant.
Few people bothered to look at the probability distributions the forecasters published which showed decent probabilities for landslide wins in either direction.
Next time you're doing something that isn't a professional STEM job, see how far you can get through your day without adding or multiplying.
Unless you're totting up your score in a board game or something of that ilk, you'll be amazed at how accommodating our society is to people who can't add or multiply.
Sure, when you're in the supermarket you can add up your purchases as you shop, if you want to. But if you don't want to, you can just buy about the same things every week for about the same price. Or keep a rough total of the big items. Or you can put things back once you see the total at the till. Or you can 'click and collect' to know exactly what the bill will be.
You don't see mainstream discussion of variance because 90% of the population don't know WTF a variance is.
Whatever pays the bill I suppose.
1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of extra performance?
2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions?
3. Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities?
4. Most computers are now "fast enough" for the average user, no need to buy top end.
5. Intel's new CPUs are slower than the old ones
i wait it to break before moving on, changing for the sake to changing feels like waste.
I simply can't afford the replacement 16" MBP right now. Hopefully it lasts another couple of years.
I would like to replace it with something that has an SD card slot and an HDMI port, as I use those frequently and don't want to deal with adapter solutions.
Edit: oh and electron apps. Sweet lord, shouldnt we have learned in the 90s with java applets that you shouldnt use a garbage collected language for user interfaces?
I don't think Electron's problems are that simple.
Java in the 90s was really slow. It got much faster with the JIT compiler. JavaScript and browsers got many optimizations too. My laptop feels faster now than it was in 2014 (it has always run some version of Linux.)
The other problem of Java was the non native widgets, which were subjectively worse than most of today's HTML/JS widgets, but that's a matter of taste.
GCs introduce some overhead but they alone are not responsible for the bloat in Electron. JavaScript bloat is a development skill issue arising from a combination of factors, including retaining low-skill front end devs, little regard for dependency bloat, ads, and management prioritizing features over addressing performance issues.
GC also disqualifies a language from ever being used for anything but userland programs.
If they do care then they probably depend on someone who doesn't.
I'm not an expert in silicon design, but I recall reading that there's a limit to how much power can be concentrated in a single package due to power density constraints, and that's why they are adding fluff instead of more cores.
>2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions?
This is a huge problem as well. I have a 2017 15" MacBook Pro and it's a decent computer, except it is horribly sluggish doing anything on it, even opening Finder. That is with a fresh install of macOS 13.7.1. If I install 10.13, it is snappy. If I bootcamp with Windows 11, it's actually quite snappy as well and I get 2 more hours of battery life somehow despite Windows in bootcamp not being able to control (power down) the dGPU like macOS can. Unfortunately I hate Windows, and Linux is very dodgy on this Mac.
Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it, MORE resource efficient than modern macOS?! That feels like a ludicrous statement to type, but the results seem to suggest as much.
Yawn. Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family ?
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode ?
(Wenn man keine Ahnung hat...)
Keep your rude attitude to yourself.
Otherwise don't be offended when people are offended by regurgitated and meanwhile disproven non-sense.
kthxbye
If you machines have more RAM, you can use a more RAM intensive solution to speed many things up, or deliver a more computationally intensive but higher quality solution, or simply add a new previous challenging feature.
What would be interesting, is how fast to old but high spec'd models slow down. What slow downs are from optimizing for newer architectures, vs. optimizing with expectation of higher resources.
I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot better at adapting to variable loads.
I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not a good reason to use macos—it's the fact that the keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe) administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store, download apps, and run them by double clicking.
I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never want to go back. The only time that worked for me was working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS. macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland, both indicate that the community is solving different problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable, but it models the computer and documents and apps in a completely different way than I am used to or want to use.
100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for development. It is the same os+architecture as the servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the screen resolution does not require fractional scaling. Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip things like running VMs for docker.
I'm not sure I understand the whole tinkering thing. Whenever I tinker with my Linux, it's because I decided to try something tinkery, and usually mostly because I wanted to tinker.
Like trying out that fancy new tiling Wayland WM I heard about last week...
1. You're trying to run it on hardware that isn't well-supported. This is a bummer, but you can't just expect any random machine (especially a laptop) to run Linux well. If you're buying a new computer and expect to run Linux on it, do your research beforehand and make sure all the hardware in it is supported.
2. You've picked a distro that isn't boring. I run Debian testing, and then Debian stable for the first six months or so after testing is promoted to stable. (Testing is pretty stable on its own, but then once the current testing release turns into the current stable release, testing gets flooded with lots of package updates that might not be so stable, so I wait.) For people who want something even more boring, they can stick with Debian stable. If you really need a brand-new version of something that stable doesn't have, it might be in backports, or available as a Snap or Flatpak (I'm not a fan of either of these, but they're options).
3. You use a desktop environment that isn't boring. I'm super super biased here[0], but Xfce is boring and doesn't change all that much. I've been using it for more than 20 years and it still looks and behaves very similarly today as it did when I first started using it.
If you use well-supported hardware, and run a distro and desktop environment that's boring, you will generally have very few issues with Linux and rarely (if ever) have to tinker with it.
[0] Full disclosure: I maintain a couple Xfce core components.
Two kinds of linux tinkering often get aliased and cause confusion in conversations.
The first kind is the enthusiast changing their init system bootloader and package manager and "neofetch/fastfetch" and WM and... every few weeks.
The second kind is the guy who uses xfce with a hidpi display who has to google and try various combinations of xrandr(augmented with xfwm zoom feature), GDK_SCALE, QT_SCALE_FACTOR, theme that supports hidpi in the titlebar, few icons in the status tray not scaling up(wpa_gui), do all that and find out that apps that draw directly with OpenGL don't respect these settings, dealing with multiple monitors, plugging in hdmi and then unplugging messing up the audio profile and randomly muting chromium browsers, deciding whether to use xf86-* Or modesetting or whatever the fix is to get rid of screen tearing. Bluetooth/wifi. On my laptop for example I had to disable usb autosuspend lest the right hand side USB-A port stop working.
If our threshold for qualifying well-supported hardware is "not even a little tinkering required" then we are left with vanishingly few laptops. For the vast vast majority of laptops, atleast the things I mentioned above are required. All in all, it amounted to couple of kernel parameters, a pipewire config file to stop random static noise in the bluetooth sink and then a few xfce setting menu tweaks (WM window scaling and display scaling). So not that dramatic, but it is still annoying to deal with.
The 2nd kind of tinkering is annoying, and is required regardless of distro/de/wm choice since it's a function of the layers below the de/wm, mostly the kernel itself.
I have been using XFCE for more than 10 years almost exclusively with multiple HiDPI monitors.
After Linux installation I never had to do anything else except of going to XFCE/Settings/Appearance and set a suitably high value for "Custom DPI Setting".
Besides that essential setting (which scales the fonts of all applications, except for a few Java programs written by morons), it may be desirable to set a more appropriate value in "Desktop/Icons/Icon size". Also in "Panel preferences" you may want to change the size of the taskbar and the size of its icons.
You may have to also choose a suitable desktop theme, but that is a thing that you may want to do after any installation, regardless of having HiDPI monitors.
Would explain why Windows runs faster.
The battery life argument was relevant, but where one sits on the issue is going to depend on the poison one picked.
[0]Apple had a unpublicized extended warrantee on these, and rebuilt the entire thing twice.
[1] kernel_task suddenly goes to 400%, Hot.app reports 24%. Very little leeway between low energy and almost dead.
Shouldn't be an issue. Foreground applications do get a priority boost; I don't know if Passmark increases priority of itself, tho. Provided there isn't any background indexing occurring, i.e. letting the OS idle after install.
And worse is multi-dimensional. If you shelled out for a high-end desktop in 2020 it could have 12 or 16 cores, but a new PC would have DDR5 instead of DDR4 and possibly more of it, a faster SSD, a CPU with faster single thread performance, and then you want that but can't justify 12+ cores this time so you get 6 or 8 and everything is better except the multi-thread performance, which is worse but only slightly.
The reticence to replace them also works against you. The person who spilled coffee in their machine can't justify replacing it with something that nice, so they get a downgrade. Everyone else still has a decent machine and keeps what they have. Then the person who spilled their drink is the only one changing the average.
* battery life is a lot higher than it used to be and a lot of devices have prioritized efficiency
* we haven't seen a ton of changes to the high-end for CPU. I struggle to think of what the killer application requiring more is right now; every consumer advancement is more GPU focused
Most software engineers don't care to write multithreaded programs, as evidenced by the 2 most popular languages - Js and Python having very little support for it.
And it's no wonder, even when engineers do know how to write such code, most IRL problems outside of benchmarks don't really yield themselves to multithreading, and due to the parallizable part being limited, IRL gains are limited.
The only performance that actually matters is single thread performance. I think users realized this and with manufacturing technology getting more expensive, companies are no longer keen on selling 16 core machines (of which the end user will likely never use more than 2-3 cores) just so they can win benchmark bragging rights.
I have a very opposite opinion; single threaded performance only matters to a point where any given task it's doing isn't unusable. Multithreaded performance is crucial from keeping the system from grinding to a halt because users always have multiple applications open at the same time. Five browser windows with 4-12 tabs on each, on three different browsers, 2-4 Word instances, some electron(equivalent) comms app, is much less unusual than I'd like it to be. I have used laptops with only two cores and it gave a new meaning to slow when you tried doing absolutely anything other than waiting for your one application to do something. Only having one application open at a time was somewhat useable.
How can you state something like this in all seriousness? One of the most used software application has to be the browser, and right now firefox runs 107 threads on my machine with 3 tabs open. gnome-shell runs 22 threads, and all I'm doing is reading HN. It's 2025 and multicore matters.
Firefox failing to saturate your CPU is a win-state.
But multicore performance does matter significantly unless you're on a microcontroller running only one process on your entire machine. Just Chrome launches a quarter million processes by itself.
Strong disagree, particularly on laptops.
Having some firefox thread compile/interpret/run some javascript 500 microseconds faster is not going to change my life very much.
Having four extra cores definitely will: it means i can keep more stuff open at the same time.
The pain is real, particularly on laptops: i've been searching for laptops with a high-end many-core cpu but without a dedicated gpu for years, and still haven't found anything decent.
I do run many virtual machines, containers, databases and stuff. The most "graphic-intensive" thing i run is the browser. Otherwise i spend most of my time in terminals and emacs.
During the last 20 years, i.e. during the time interval when my computers have been multi-core, their multithreaded performance has been much more important for professional uses than the single-threaded performance.
The performance with few active threads is mainly important for gamers and for the professional users who are forced by incompetent managers to use expensive proprietary applications that are licensed to be run only on a small number of cores (because the incompetent managers simultaneously avoid cheaper alternatives while not being willing to pay the license for using more CPU cores).
A decent single-threaded performance is necessary, because otherwise opening Web pages bloated by JS can feel too slow.
However, if the single-threaded performance varies by +/- 50% I do not care much. For most things where single-threaded performance matters, any reasonably recent CPU is able to do instantaneously what I am interested in.
On the other hand, where the execution time is determined strictly by the multithreaded performance, i.e. at compiling software projects or at running various engineering EDA/CAD applications, every percent of extra multithreaded performance may shorten the time until the results are ready, saving from minutes to hours or even days.
The times where you saw one core pegged and the rest idle are a decade ago.
> Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities?
I don't know if they'll keep doing it, but hardware unboxed had been doing various tests with Windows 10 vs 11, and mitigations on vs off, as well as things like SMT on vs off for things like AMD vcache issues, or P cores vs E cores on newer intels... it's interesting to see how hardware performs 6-12 months after release, because it can really go all over the place for seemingly no reason.
ok I lied, my phone is only two years old, but what happened is that two years ago my phone experienced a sudden drop test on concrete followed by pressure test of a car tyre, and it was easier to buy a new one with nearly identical specs than to repair the old one.
I know, I know: all the software you use is slow and awful. But it's generally bad thanks to a failure to work around slow network and disk accesses. If you use spinning rust, you're a power user.
It's also a minority of video games that rely more on CPU performance than GPU and memory (usually for shared reasons in niche genres)
Or: The average speed of new computers just isn't going up. People are just buying lower end computers because they're good enough. I think it's mostly that: the average is just trending a bit lower because lower is fine. The thirst for the high end is disappearing for most segments, because people don't need it.
It doesn’t have to be literally India, it’s an example for illustration.
I was a bit bummed since I wanted to use it as a kind of streaming box, and while it can do it, it is definitely slow.
PS. If you need more power than that I have a hard time coming up with a better deal than M4 Mac Mini, perhaps with some extra usb storage. It's possibly the only non-workstation computer that is worth buying in the not-inexpensive category (in the base version, obviously).
The question isn't whether it could be faster, but whether it's slow enough to be annoying for the tasks you use it for.
I bet most people would find the N100 annoyingly slow when opening documents or browsing the web, or doing crazy things like opening a few programs at the same time.
I'm actually not convinced. If you're used to a fast box, yes; I'd argue most people actually aren't.
However the blame lies squarely with Microsoft. What the hell is their office suite up to?
They are propped up by demand and the fact that most of the new GPUs are marginally better than previous ones.
Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years. Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech
And the generated frames are misleading because they don't work very well if your source framerate is low.
As you say you need a good framerate to start with before generated frames make sense so either you're already running well with a high tier card and are further able to show off the combination of framerate/resolution/detail level, or running a lower tier card at lower settings turning the graphics down further which can be a very obvious trade off. Less demanding games which are generally online competitive usually wouldn't do as well with any extra latency introduced, and the situation where I've heard it would be a good fit is emulators or any kind of game where the CPU is the limiting factor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030465
It's caused by people failing to read the fine print on the graph.
The best we can say is that the sampling skew this month is different than the sampling skew in past Januaries. That could be due to some interesting cause, it could be totally random, and there's zero point in speculating about it until we have more data.
(a) changes in methodology/non-random sampling, with 60 % probability,
(b) random sampling effects that go away on longer timelines, with 20 % probability,
(c) any actual change in CPUs, with 20 % probability.
In my experience, when a metric shows weird behavious these are usually the reasons with roughly those proportions.
This thing barely can handle Office, Teams and the browser. Hot, noisy as hell and performance wise I see no difference over laptops from decade ago. Tragic.
To be fair I don't think I could do anything. Task manager showed CPU as under utilised, yet fans were blasting, editing Word document looked like a slideshow.
ASUS tools showed no problems.
I don't know, feels like people are getting scammed with these new laptops.
I still have M1 Max and never experienced anything like this.
Windows is a heavy operating system compared to the others and can cause that problem but that likely isn't Windows alone causing the problem (though bloatware / other AV solutions could also have something to do with it)
I wanted to say gaming laptops are a scam, but the older Intel MBPs with dedicated GPUs suffered too. More trouble than they're worth.
Been fine, but suddenly it was slow af. Near zero CPU, GPU and disk usage in Windows Task Manager, but I could feel it was burning hot, which it wasn't just 15 minutes prior.
Did a reboot and all was fine again.
Surely some firmware that messed up, though no idea why.
Anyway, I'd start by removing crap, that goes for 3rd party anti-virus and vendor tools especially. Use something like Bulk Crap Uninstaller[1] or Revo[2], and then reinstall drivers.
Totally agreed on the sad state of laptops these days.
[1]: https://www.bcuninstaller.com/ (open source)
[2]: https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-fr...
On the consumer level and for non technical end users, as more functions are offloaded to "the cloud" with peoples' subscriptions to office365, Google workspace, iCloud, whatever, having a ton of cpu power in the laptop also isn't as necessary anymore. Along with things like h.265 and av1 video encode and decode being done with GPU assist rather than purely in software.
These days I have two main machines which boot to Windows in about a minute.
Somehow I remember my old 486 machine was able to boot to DOS within the snap of a power button.
Buying anything new for me is out of question since a few years ago, because it just cannot be guaranteed to survive half a year, hence now I always buy second-hand, because this way at least it was tested by the previous owner.
But even so, modern hardware is hellishly unreliable.
I bought a Dell 7 series laptop (17 inches), and:
1. Already had to replace the battery back panel three times, just because it is being held by tiny plastic hooks which are easily torn away.
2. It's assembly-reassembly process is a nightmare (which used to not be the case for Dell in the past).
3. Already had to replace the fans (the laptop is not even 5 years old).
4. When running with a smaller battery (official), it CANNOT RUN THE GPU AT FULL SPEED EVEN WHEN PLUGGED INTO THE MAINS. Really? This is just ridiculous. A laptop using the battery when plugged in is just insane.
5. You MUST use a smaller battery to install a 2.5" SATA drive. So you much choose: either a SATA drive, or a GPU.
6. The power on/off button does not work if your BIOS battery has low charge. This is just maddening! What is the connection?
The amount of cacti you have to swallow to get used to modern hardware is just staggering.
- The "Top CPU Performance to Date" has flatlined, so even if the hypothesis that developing countries are running PassMark is true, it doesn't explain everything.
- The recent failures of high end Intel chips might be a factor.
- This data is after the initial round of developers being replaced by AI and outsourcing.
- PassMark doesn't include AI or ML benchmarks that the next generation hardware prioritizes.
- CPU top clock speeds have been going down for more than a decade now, instead prioritizing the number of cores.
- HPC labs are less likely to use PassMark because of licensing issues whereas free and open source alternatives exist.
- The average consumer doesn't know or care about the difference. Instagram is still limited to around 1000x1000 pixel images and at most 1080p video with 30 fps.
Personally, this signals that PassMark is not a good benchmark because I've seen a significant increases in my applications from recent CPU improvements like with AMD's EPYC offerings.
I'm curious what median and std dev look like.
Now if we could just get rid of fake frames on the GPU side.
But yes, I agree on principle: https://gist.github.com/bazhenovc/c0aa56cdf50df495fda84de58e...
I'll probably use the t530 as my primary machine for years to come.
> they screwed up because they said Linux, which doesn’t exclude Apple Silicon
In the context of the second graph, that means Apple Silicon is also failing to push the envelope forwards.
> I remember a tweet from a couple years ago where the hardware-accelerated IPC calls for a system-wide performance gain
Most kernels aren't bottlenecked by IPC throughput like XNU is. A modern Linux system might need IPC for dbus, a few journaling systems and systemd. Apple's entire kernel relies on the throughput of a message queue, so feasibly speeding that up matters quite a lot.
IT hardware performance has definitely been levelling off. The exponential curves have become logarithmic.
Fundamentally, they're both x86 CPUs, both "high end server chips", both in nearly identical (maxed-out) configurations, etc...
I just got used to computers getting so much faster over a three-year time period that it was almost pointless to benchmark them. The vendor hardly mattered, not within such a narrow market segment.
My main machine is from about 2012 - a garage sale hand-me-down ultra high end game machine of the time (24GB in 2012!) It does suck a fair bit of power, running 24/7 but it's comfortably adequate for everything, and that's with two simultaneous users. Such hand-me-down laptops as have come my way (garage sales or free) are also adequate.
So if the continuing evolution is, instead, in compute per per joule, rather than absolute compute, I'm all for it. Graphics card power connectors melting at 570W... not for me.
But, I dunno. I just bought an Asus Zenbook with an intel 9 ultra with Arc graphics 32Gb ram, 1tb SSD, and it seems pretty nifty to me, especially at the price.
My i7-13700H is shitting the bed due to poor software. Permanently on power-saving while charging because of "rapid charging". It'd be ok if it didn't render the whole computer useless at 400MHz, my first computer from circa 1996 is the only one clocked slower than that I ever had, and it had a turbo button
Fair enuf. I was really trying to comment on the ultra/arc chip performance.
> so 9 is fast?
seems to be - my previous laptop was a Core i7, and my new 9 Ultra one is definitely faster (for what I do with it). It goes into power saving only when it gets below about 30% of battery charge, and Asus give a lot of switches to fiddle about with that.
Even if we assume theres a bit of a skew because a recycler has run a bunch of benchmarks on old hardware, it's something that felt pretty inevitable.
Average users dont need any more power than they have right now for their common activities (browsing and such), so havent been upgrading.
There's been a large increase in low power machines, be it the N100's, portables such as the steam deck, etc.
Until the next 'big thing' theres not going to be much of a need or desire to upgrade, you're not gaining anything at this point if your activities arent cpu constrained.
Even on what could easily be called a "beefy" machine major websites on chrome make snails look like avatars of agility.
how about this interpretation: desktops are fast enough; laptops are getting faster but people tend to buy more usable laptops, not faster ones.
Well, a lot of HN users care more about battery life than performance, so it shouldn't be any issue. /s
After computers dumbed down (Android, iOS, Windows), we now have computers that do nothing. /s
Can you be more specific about what message you're trying to convey?
Even in the 10s this wasn't really true. Storage and bandwith took a bigger slice and CPU was in abundance.
We are now at the point I could easy serve the DB and App servers of a multi-million SaaS off my mobile phone.
The few remaining areas where compute is still the bottleneck at all: video encoding, 3d rendering, mining, and predominantly now AI; also tend not to focuse on the CPU.