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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

20 years ago is about when SSDs came to consumer PCs. Which is the last time I remember thinking that my computer became faster than the previous one was when it was new (if by computer we mean the hardware combined with a mainstream up-to-date software stack)

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Your computer may not feel faster than a 20 year old PC, but CPUs have gotten way, way faster.

Compare the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to the AMD A12-9800, you go from 4 cores to 8, and you double the power consumption. But it's not twice as fast. It's 10 times faster. Depending on the exact metric, it could be as little as twice as fast or as much as 1000 times faster, depending on the exact operations.

On top of that memory throughput between DDR4 and DDR6 is about 2.5 times faster as well.

Oh and this isn't 20 years apart, this is 7 years apart. 20 years will see almost an exponentially larger gap even still.

I kind of hoped my point would come across more clearly. Obviously my current computer is faster than one from 20 years ago. But, it doesn't really react more quickly. It just does more: higher resolution video, advanced graphics, etc. The moment we add capability we rush to use it all up. This is not _always_ bad when it comes to computing, but I wouldn't mind if people in general had more restraint.

I suppose that's true superficially, but how many of us utilize 100 percent of our CPU and GPU power.

AI datacenters, absolutely. People? Nah we probably use 10 percent for 90 percent of the time.

But when I need to compile MAME, oh boy is it nice having a fast CPU.

Right -- in the details this is heavily task dependent. If we're talking about word processing, then computing has mostly gotten worse in the past 20 years.

If we're talking about video game graphics it's a bit of a mixed bag.

If we're talking about local LLM models then you need all the power you can get.

Etc, etc.

That is OP's point. The underlying technology has gotten faster but the computer you use feels the same as 20 years ago because the software that utilizes it does a lot more too.

You had SSDs in 2006? Was I missing out?

I don't think I had any in my builds until 2014ish

Samsung commercialized the first high-volume consumer notebook PC utilizing an SSD in 2006. The Intel X25-M was released in sept 2008 and cut SSD hard drive prices per gigabyte by 60% pretty much instantly

ohhhhh yeah they had those sata ssds out a few years before the nvme thing came out, I almost forgot about those! but in 2006 yeah that woulda not been cheap, like year zero early adopter type stuff too, pay 1200 for 32 gigs and its dead in 2 years maybe 5 years tops. I got my first one of those quite a few years later once 256gb was comparable in price to 1tb harddisk drive.

I can still feel performance increases, most recently was when I got an M4 Mac Mini. Compared to my M2 Air, which is no slouch by any means, there was a very perceptible improvement in latency, app opening, general task completion, and so on. But very slight, and some coming from placebo effect/marketing.

These days, I feel the most performance uplift when I switch from Windows/macOS over to a Linux or BSD installation, if only because there is so little wasted effort in running a bajillion little background tasks for crap I didn't ask for. Windows 10 on my PC is highly debloated and optimized, very little in my startup services and so on, but CachyOS on the same hardware feels leagues better.

Windows XP was a decent OS. You could start with a golden ISO (remove a whole lot of crap) and then tweak the registry to your hearts content. Max out RAM, then when you add an SSD, it felt sublime.

Its not Linux, but all hardware worked on Windows XP. Nerds were familiar with tweaking the registry, doing all kinds of hacks and helping all their friends and family. Of course, cleaning out the thousands of viruses from friends computers wasn't fun ..

Then Microsoft released Windows Vista, yuck!

I presume you're a Windows user then.

When the M1 was released, I couldn't believe how fast it was.

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