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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#81

Post by sangnoir »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

> when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade?

Earlier this year. I upgraded (my personal computer) from a 2010 dual-core i5 (Arrandale) laptop to a 12-core Threadripper. My old laptop was still usable for single-thread tasks - I upped the memory to it's limit (8GB) and upgraded to SSD, and this contributed to my long upgrade cycle.

My workflow has changed since I bought the laptop in 2010 - I now tend to run multiple VMs and docker in parallel, and there I noticed a BIG uptick in performance. I could only run 2 VMs (slowly, with swapping) at most before the upgrade, post-upgrade, I'm now able to run 6 VMs with no signs of slow-down - I haven't tried to find the upper limit to number of VMs, but there's plenty of room for growth for additional RAM and SATA disks.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#82

Post by ubermonkey »

dsr_ wrote: post #49
ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

Given: - gigabit ethernet LAN and a speedy Internet connection - doing "desktop" work -- browser, SSH, office docs, media consumption All my machines feel snappy, ranging from the $250 NUC through the MBP2011 (with 16GB RAM and an SSD) through the midrange Intel desktop (also 16GB RAM and an SSD). I don't play any significant games and major computation happens on servers, not on anything I'm typing directly on. It's…

Great point. I went from 25Mbps DSL to symmetric gigabit fiber last year, and that'll change your life.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#83

Post by sp332 »

dsr_ wrote: post #49
ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

Given: - gigabit ethernet LAN and a speedy Internet connection - doing "desktop" work -- browser, SSH, office docs, media consumption All my machines feel snappy, ranging from the $250 NUC through the MBP2011 (with 16GB RAM and an SSD) through the midrange Intel desktop (also 16GB RAM and an SSD). I don't play any significant games and major computation happens on servers, not on anything I'm typing directly on. It's…

Since everyone mentioned SSDs, I'll second getting a gigabit local network connection. Now I store everything on the server in another room, and my laptop, desktop, and consoles can load and share files almost like the hard drive was connected to each directly.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#84

Post by equalunique »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

+1 for experiencing a noticeable improvement with SSDs.

One more I would submit is the transition from DDR2 to DDR3. I do not yet have a DDR4 machine, but I am anticipating some kind of "aha! so this is what I have been missing out on" moment when the time comes.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#85

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

sfink wrote: post #70
ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

This is heavily correlated with your age (or, as you put it, "years in the business".) We old-timers clearly remember the days of Moore's Law, or more precisely, the days when Moore's Law had a direct impact on single-processor performance. For me, every upgrade was at least a factor of two improvement to pretty much everything. It was a qualitative difference -- things that just didn't make sense to run were now rea…

It used to be that each generation of CPU was a significant performance jump.

DOOM on a 386 was nearly unplayable. On a 486 it was perfect. Quake on a 486 was awful, was great on a Pentium, and was smooth as butter on a Pentium II.

These days, each generation is less than 20% faster in single-core performance. My desktop at home is an i7-3770k. In a couple months, it'll be 6 generations out of date, and yet it's still fast enough for everything I do, even gaming!

My CPU is 6 years old, yet doesn't feel like it. If you were running a 6 year old computer in the year 2000, you'd be running a 133 Mhz Pentium while everyone with a new system at the time would be on a 1 Ghz Pentium III. The performance difference was at least and order of magnitude and definitely noticeable.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#87

Post by keldaris »

sangnoir wrote: post #80
keldaris wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing and I would argue there shouldn't be. The notion that you could use a "nearly identical UI/UX" across a desktop application, a mobile application and a web page invariably leads to horrible results. The usecases are just too different. The only reason people pretend otherwise is laziness and cost cutting - a context in which Electron seems reasonable as well, to the horror of technically litera…

> There is no such thing and I would argue there shouldn't be It's one thing to not want to use Electron app, it's another to say no one should use them. It rubs me the wrong way. There are a lot of things I'd never use, but they don't rile me to that level. > The only reason people pretend otherwise is laziness and cost cutting - a context in which Electron seems reasonable as well, to the horror of technically lite…

> It's one thing to not want to use Electron app, it's another to say no one should use them. It rubs me the wrong way. There are a lot of things I'd never use, but they don't rile me to that level.

The reason this trend riles me so much is that we now have companies like Slack, which easily have enough resources to do an efficient desktop app on any platform they choose, releasing utter garbage that, far from merely wasting memory, takes up ridiculous amounts of CPU time (and therefore battery time and energy) to do the simplest things (like render emoji, or even a blinking cursor). The aggregate waste of resources is mind boggling, and we've gone far past the point where Electron was solely used as a quick solution for very resource constrained companies or single devs.

> "Laziness and cost cutting" is just your label for trade-offs you don't agree with. That would apply to cross-platform Java/Swing apps or Gnome. The "technically literate" users don't have to worry about business considerations and engineering tradeoffs - the authors do. If memory usage is such a big deal, then the market will self-correct, I was told it's a meritocracy.

It certainly does apply to Swing apps, Qt, Gnome, etc. I've always considered all three of those frameworks ludicrously bloated, by the way, but Electron has far exceeded my worst nightmares in that regard.

I'm not sure who told you the market is a meritocracy or why you believe it, but I don't see much evidence for that view, personally.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#88

Post by fapjacks »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

Oh, but booting is faster because systemd, remember? /s

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#89

Post by GordonS »

equalunique wrote: post #84
ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

+1 for experiencing a noticeable improvement with SSDs. One more I would submit is the transition from DDR2 to DDR3. I do not yet have a DDR4 machine, but I am anticipating some kind of "aha! so this is what I have been missing out on" moment when the time comes.

I was reading about DDR3 vs DDR4 the other week, and apparently it's not so clear cut - DDR4 can be slower in some cases.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#90

Post by GordonS »

bluejekyll wrote: post #27
scarface74 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron allows small teams to focus their most costly investment on developing toward one product being developed across many platforms. At the cost of battery life and memory usage for the users....

I use VSCode (electron based) on a flight cross country regularly. I generally have enough power for the flight (4-5 hours), without much problem. The memory usage hasn’t been bad enough for me to notice it stealing resources from other apps that need it. I don’t think most users notice. I’m not talking about you. It’s clear this is a big deal to you, and so I assume you don’t use any electron apps. I think that’s a…

VSCode is like the poster child for Electron, Electron done right. I often bring up VSCode when people are hating on Electron here.

Yes, it's easy to make crappy memory hogs with Electron, but it's also possible to make fully-featured, snappy, great applications. Such as VSCode.

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