751–760 of 942 posts
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You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies gave their developers of client-facing software slower computers the resulting software would end up being faster.
Yep because they would not get anything done ;) In my experience as a web dev, all the performance goes out the window as soon as the tracking scripts are added.
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My gaming PC is almost 10 years old and is with an i7 3770. Only upgrade was a GTX 980 five or six years ago. That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through. One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.
Yeah, I have two thinkpads -- one from 2010 and one from 2012. Both of them have enough grunt to get through most any task, the heaviest of which is compiling large codebases. One of them was my daily driver for eight years; I only upgraded to a Ryzen because I wanted MOAR COARS and more RAM. It's funny how today's computers could theoretically handle a user's workload for decades yet Apple builds them to fall apart…
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What about Safari?
That's a perfectly valid question. Lots of people use Chrome because they've used Chrome, and that's the whole reason. Some people need Chrome because it supports some site or tool that they require. I recommend that everyone else at least try Safari and see what they think of it.
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Maybe because every tier 1 cloud provider is starting to design its own CPU. If this is the trend there will be little left to sell them.
Can you name a cloud provider that has recently launched their own CPU?
Disrupt the hosting market, Apple. We're ready for your EC2. Achieving a quantum power/performance leap without swinging for server market share is an massive wasted opportunity. But Apple is Apple. I'll keep dreaming. Oh look, an AWS invoice.
AWS is bringing ARM to the cloud in the form of their new Graviton instances, so in a way we already have this. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
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At one point I think hyperthreading was i7 only too?
Mobile i5s always had hyperthreading from the beginning. Edit: nope, actually, I'm wrong - Core i5-430M was a straight dual core, no hyperthreading part.
Some of it is inevitable, they have too many aspects to contain in a reasonable product name, but letting the names become divorced from any sort of reality helps nobody.
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> " Apple didn’t do black magic. [...] Other ARM manufacturers could equal or exceed the M1 if they wanted. " I see lots of people saying "If only $company had an ARM device", and I don't understand it. My experience of ARM device is slow laggy janky products - from competing smartphones, tablets, router and network device management interfaces, year on year, the pairing is always (arm + fucking slow). It's only Appl…
Apple has had a vision for this for at least 12-13 years. Most likely, ever since (before) the transition to Intel. The first A-series chip they officially released and named was the A4 in March 2010 . That is 11 years ago. That is the beginning of M1. And the reason is originally in this amazing Ars Technica article [1]. Apple has always wanted to fully control the entire stack. Any competitors in the same space lac…
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Yep and take computer from 2001 and run it in 2011, you wouldn't have been nearly as happy with the performance. There have been incremental upgrades but mostly just the core count which is great for handling server stuff but not nearly as noticeable as Hz counts increases
The other main improvement in the past 10 years is the power draw. You can get more than 10 hours of battery life in a machine that weighs less than 3 lbs. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago. CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.
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> decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte While true, that's not going to motivate anybody. Memory is not a very scarce resource, we're making more all the time, we can continue to make more, and it's reusable. Moreover, memory that isn't being used is almost completely useless - the only thing it does is act as disk cache. Better to use memory than CPU, as the latter actually consumes power (leading to clima…
DRAM refresh takes power. I don’t have the numbers, but I’m not sure that, in the average smartphone or tablet of today that energy usage is negligible compared to that of the CPU. Reason for that is that DRAM must be refreshed 24 hours a day, while the CPU is sleeping a lot of the time, even if the device is in use.
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Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm, one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs open in Preview. I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers. The unfortunate part i…
I am genuinely curious how you keep track of all that. Presumably this is all spread out over maybe a dozen workspaces?