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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

Bured lede: i7 CPUs for border patrol.. why?

For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc

If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.

You seem to live in a bit of a bubble, personally I've never seen anything other than penny-pinching on corporate laptops and everybody everywhere complaining about the same.

(I don't mean that IT departments hand out bottom-of-the-barrel plastic laptops which break every five minutes, but rather fairly low-spec Thinkpad/HP/Dell business laptops with just enough RAM that their bloated Windows 11 installs are barely not swapping when idle and just enough SSD space that Windows Update doesn't fail)

I work in e-waste recycling. Most of the PCs and laptops I see are corporate IT decommissions. Most of those have i5 CPUs, and only a handful are i7. Few are cruel enough to afflict their wage slaves with an i3 or less.

Poorly run IT organizations certainly exist, even in F500. I’m telling you why it’s done, not that it universally is.

Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.

We are on 3 year refresh cycles at my office. I always feel guilty when I am forced to get a new machine to replace the perfectly working but 3 year old one. At least a 3 year old machine will still sell as surplus.

i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.

The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.

At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.

At certain point people just don't care about saving money. You get a budget and then get quotes and pick one that matches what you are allowed to spend. If there is multiple with same spend go for one with bigger numbers.

Customs and Border Patrol has been granted huge budget increases this year.

Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)

Isn't Palantir a webapp? Full of maps and lists of stuff? Seems like a recipe for "chrome has stopped responding..."

I would also say in general that the federal government's software contractors are likely building tons of complex HTML5 / WebRTC / webassembly software packages that will choke a cheaper desktop PC. Ever viewed 20 cameras simultaneously in one browser tab in Frigate and seen the CPU usage? Now imagine something like that but for watching border sensor cameras and stuff...

That's usually a RAM limit, and only six computers had RAM swapped out of them.

Because it runs Windows hehe

It's just a typical enterprise PC configuration. Probably because nobody writes efficient software these days.

45 security apps cut the ram and CPU performance in half out of the gate, then you have Win11 with its web gui and users who complain about any slowness so i7 or r7 is about the norm most places / bulk big 3 oems make for business.

and rowhammer etc mitigations microcode updates

personally I have an i7 in the lab that turned into a crawl on Youtube because they started sending VP9 video by default, but i7 doesn't have hardware decode for it. Got a plugin to force h264 (h264ify) and it's back to normal.

Then you have situations where a software update adds a CPU instruction dependency and straight up doesn't work anymore.

Had to install and force-retain an old version of Spotify client on a bench lab PC because the new versions require AVX-1/2. It's a streaming audio player...

> because the new versions require AVX-1/2

Well, an 128kbit MP3 requires at least a 486DX2-66 but you also need to run the OS. /s

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