Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Biggest ones are Book Off (books, comics...), Hard Off (electronics, computers, musical instruments...) and Hobby Off (toys, collectibles, video games...).
They even have a Liquor Off ! (not second hand, just discount/overstock)
Also: mode off (fashion).
Software takes a lot of time to build. Codebases live for decades. There's often an impossibly large cost in starting over with a less wasteful architecture/language/etc. Think going from an Electron/Chromium app to something built using some compiled language and native OS GUI constructs that uses 10x less resources.
Hardware by nature forces redesigns whereas software it's always possible to just keep building on top of old bad designs, and so much cheaper and faster to do so. That's why hardware is 10,000x faster than 30 years ago, and even simple word processors are debatabely faster than 30 years ago. Maybe even slower.
The ARM Core starts up, does crypto, Loads the SecureOS and the BIOS, then it starts the x86 CPU - In 16 bit mode! Which then boostraps itself through 32 then 64 bit mode.
So in the first couple sends of power on, your CPU is at various points ARM, i386, x86, and x86_64.
At best, they might have been able to confine the needed logic patches to the instruction-decoding front end.
Well, what if I want to run a 16-bit OS?
Also, I wonder if the transistor count of a literal entire 8086 processor is so small relative to the total that they just do that.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Microprocesso...:
1978 Intel 8086: 29,000
2021 Rocket Lake: 6,000,000,000
Compatibility mode doesn't work by having a separate 16-bit core. It's random bits of spaghetti logic to make the core work like a 16-bit core when the 32-bit flag isn't set.
First I'm learning about this and I'm curious why this needs to be the case? Seems so wild that it works this way, but I'm sure there's a logic to it.
> it's always possible to just keep building on top of old bad designs, and so much cheaper and faster to do so
It began life as an "out of band" way to administer servers so that an ops. team could do everything (other than actual hardware changes) remotely that would otherwise need a person to be standing in front of the server in the datacenter poking commands into a keyboard.
It then grew in responsibilities to also support the "secure boot" aspect of system startup, and beyond some Intel CPU version point (I do not remember which point), it exists in every Intel CPU produced.
What does the ARM CPU do?
Game developers might have to do something though if high-end GPUs are going to end up being $5000.
https://www.techpowerup.com/344578/leaks-predict-usd-5000-rt...
Which makes sense: the latency is determined by the underlying storage technology and the way to access that storage, which the same for both.
RAM manufacturers are switching lines over from DDR to make HBM.
I've declined the refresh I've overdue for. My 2021 model MBP has 32gb and a 1TB SSD. They're currently giving out the base model Air: 16gb and 256gb. No thanks.
We used to get whatever was most appropriate for our role, now we get whatever is cheapest.
this way all the RAM that AI data centers scoop up will be used to lessen demand for RAM that those same datacenters created
net-zero RAM!
Nodejs and Python were used in 2012, why is now any different?
I do enjoy golang, but Rust gives me nightmares. I make my living in higher level languages.
When I started learning to program JavaScript was just starting to gain popularity outside of the browser. It was the first language I could actually grasp, and I largely think it for giving me a career.
No more evictions for me!
The only real downside to JavaScript, you know being used as a tool for native apps with stuff like electron is it eats ram. Everything needs to a ship a full chrome binary.
But if we go back to native applications, we don't get things like quality Linux ports. If you would have told me 15 years ago that Microsoft would create the most popular IDE on Linux I'd assume that you had misspoke.
Yes, even though the Javascript was written using Doubles and the WASM was written using 64 bit ints. It just means that it's possible to write optimized Javascript (mainly by reducing object allocations, reuse objects instead)
Of course it is always possible to write highly optimised code. But that’s not what people actually do, because of time, skill and maintenance constraints. Here’s a case study: in 2018 Mozilla ported some code from JS to Rust + WASM and got a 6x speed up [1]. An expert in V8 responded to this with highly optimised JavaScript, saying Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS [2]. Both articles are worth reading! But it is worth remembering that it’s a lot quicker and easier to write the code in #1 than #2 and it is easier to maintain as well.
[1] - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/oxidizing-source-maps-with...
[2] - https://mrale.ph/blog/2018/02/03/maybe-you-dont-need-rust-to...
Performance sucked when I used native Javacsript BigInts. When I made my own BigInt by using an array of doubles, and pretended that the doubles were 48-bit integers, performance was much better. Using the arrays meant that all allocation of temporary values completely stopped. I had to write my own multiply-and-add function that would do bigint = bigint * 48-bit number + other bigint + other 48-bit number.
Idle power usage is what matters.
The 15 seconds it takes to launch Discord and install updates isn't going to be driving the overall efficiency of your PC.
Not when Windows gets its grubby mitts on them. I will frequently hear the fans spin up on my Win10 laptop when it should be doing nothing, only to find the Windows Telemetry process or the Search Indexer using an entire fucking CPU core.
Incidentally, cars are also a lot more fuel efficient these days than they used to be.
Make the cutoff 2026. If you really need more cycles than we have today to solve a problem you're doing something wrong! Stop creating waste and forcing us to buy new trash all of the time.
I have an old laptop with 8GB of RAM and an ancient CPU that I haul around with I when something small for basic work. I can run Discord, Visual Studio Code, and Chrome just fine.
Something else was going on with that PC.
Or the kid did an excellent job of socially engineering his parents into an upgrade.
I also wish I built a new gaming rig during the summer last year.
Also, if demand for AI chips continues to be sky high for years and year, the memory that is being developed now will eventually be phased out for new standards (DDR6/7/8???) and the DDR5 from existing products will be stripped and resold by other companies.
Also, if demand continues to stay high, then new companies will enter the market to cut off a slice of that monopoly pie and drive down prices. Supply and demand dictate that prices must go down if supply increases.
Personally, I think the demand will drop off a cliff if/when the AI bubble pops, but we don't know when that will happen. Until then, everyone can enjoy their Steam backlog and wait it out :)
That's a perfectly fine modern PC. Similar to or faster than what some of my casual gaming friends use.
The RAM alone would probably sell for $350 or more.
Wow RAM prices have gotten absolutely insane.
The specs are still more than enough for any of the development I do. My main issue is just the form factor - a laptop is so much better for my current situation. The power consumption also kind of bugs me - things have improved a LOT in that regard since 2019 - although it's kind of nice for heating my office in winter. It also doesn't help that I built it with a full ATX motherboard and a giant case (Fractal Design Define R6), which is kind of ugly and takes up a ton of space.
As far as gaming is concerned, the "gaming" parts of Akihabara mainly concerned locally produced pastel toned 2D slideshow pornographic games("visual novels"), the genre that lead to gacha games like FGO. Local populace is horrible at handling 3D first-person content in general and that never helped.
Non-console gaming in Japan is growing somewhat but a lot is also going into phones, namely Genshin. So where the trend is headed is still pastel toned soft-porn games without much PvP.