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Comment by adgjlsfhk1 | Hacker News Reader

also how far you can get with a single machine has changed massively in the past 15 years. 15 years ago a (really beefy) single machine meant 8 cores with 256GB ram and a couple TB of storage. Now a single machine can be 256 cores on 8TB of ram and a PB of storage.

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Exactly, and the performance of consumer tech is wildly faster. Eg, a Ryzen 5825U mini pc with 16GB memory is ~$250USD with 512GB nvme. That thing will outperform of 14 core Xeon from ~2016 on multicore workloads and absolutely thrash it in single thread. Yes lack of ECC is not good for any serious workload, but great for lower environments/testing/prototyping, and it sips power at ~50W full tilt.

Curiously, RAM sizes haven't gone up much for consumer tech.

As an example: my Macbook Pro from 2015 had 16 GiB RAM, and that's what my MacBook Air from 2025 also has.

Ehhh Macbook Pros can be configured with up to 128 now, iirc 16 was the max back then. But I guess the baseline hasn't moved as much.

Yes, there has been some movement. But even an 8 fold increase (128/16) over a decade is nothing compared to what we used to see in the past.

Oh, and the new machine has unified RAM. The old machine had a bit of extra RAM in the GPU that I'm not counting here.

As far as I can tell, the new RAM is a lot faster. That counts for something. And presumably also uses less power.

I saw a twitter thread recently where someone tried to make this point to someone shilling AWS spaghetti architectures. They were subsequently dog-piled into oblivion but the mental gymnastics people can do around this subject is a sight to behold.

Simplicity is uncomfortable to a lot of people when they're used to doing things the hard way.

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