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The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

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Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#221

Post by afterburner »

shocks wrote: post #111
gtaylor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was surprisingly easy. I'm not saying you over-paid, but for $2,500 I could have built something pretty ridiculous. Most of my money went into processor and GPU, which are typically your two big ticket items. I trolled around Newegg looking for upper-middle tier components with a higher quantity of good reviews. A lot of the times you won't see a lot of the recently released stuff with useful reviews, so some of t…

Post your specs to give your post some legitimacy… I hope you didn't skimp out on your motherboard… 2010 $1000 rig running all 2013 AAA titles at the highest settings sounds unlikely to me…

Not the parent poster, but I also bought a computer in 2010 for about $1000 and am very happy with it today. I still play games at max or near max settings with no problem. This does not include a monitor though; also I only bought a 1650x1050 monitor, so I save a bit on graphics power by not having the full HD pixel count (or more).

EDIT: don't know my full specs offhand; i5, gtx 460, either 4 or 8 gigs RAM (4 I think), a 120gb SSD and 2G HD

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#222

Post by X4 »

zalzane wrote: post #216
simonsarris wrote: post #96

I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…

>because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines Devil's advocate: if that is true, then why are macbook pros such a hot sell? I'm typing this here in a college library's lobby. When I look around, I see roughly 3/4 of the laptop-using students are using a macbook pro, with a few macbook airs littered around. If I were to walk around and glance at what people were working on, it'd probably be something l…

People who believe in being able to buy social status are the ones perfectly fooled by advertisements! Someone can be butt ugly, poor and stupid, but still have the highest social status and popularity in most social environments. What makes one an attractor of popularity is demonstrating power, will and the ability to achieve what you want.

Who would be more popular?

A) A rich guy who thinks he can buy friends, by inviting everybody to an expensive cocktail to an exclusive restaurant?

B) A guy who own lots of expensive high-tech and luxury car + his own house?

C) A guy with charme and charisma, who can make anyone feel special, or have a fun time, even in the dirtiest place?

Choose yourself. I believe you all experienced A,B and C already. But I would rely on the scientific evidence that C) has a higher long term chance of staying an attractor of popularity. (I'm sorry, I couldn't put the references together, but hope you understand)

Side story: A weird guy in my old class possessed a bluetooth wireless headphones with integrated mp3 player in 2006, a 3000EUR laptop and all sorts of other very expensive gimmickry. That didn't make him cooler at all. People still didn't like him and it just made him more vulnerable to attacks of the some of the more primitive pupils.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#223

Post by mathattack »

simonsarris wrote: post #96

I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…

I agree. Much of this is just because the processing is moving off of the machine too. When you were doing all of your own computations, any incremental thing you did required a stronger PC. Now that computation is happening on the server.

There are programmers, mathematical and financial users who are still stretching their desktops, but for most of the rest of us the need to upgrade is going away. It's almost like it's time to upgrade when there's just too much clutter on the old machine.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#224

Post by afterburner »

usaphp wrote: post #188
arjunnarayan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You overpaid. You're better off spending $800 and upgrading 3 times as often.

That's not the point. He said he can run any modern game on high settings on the computer he bought 3 years ago, I doubt you can play any game in 2016 on high settings if you buy a computer for $800 today.

I can do the same, also with a $1000 computer bought in 2010.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#225

Post by dageshi »

This is pretty much dead on. What I think will happen is that PC manufacturers are going to look around for new markets and the obvious one is going to be consoles. Once SteamOS comes out I expect a slow but massive ramp up in PC-Console production in a similar vein to the way that Android powered devices have come to dominate the smartphone market (in numbers shipped).

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#226

Post by corin_ »

X4 wrote: post #222
zalzane wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines Devil's advocate: if that is true, then why are macbook pros such a hot sell? I'm typing this here in a college library's lobby. When I look around, I see roughly 3/4 of the laptop-using students are using a macbook pro, with a few macbook airs littered around. If I were to walk around and glance at what people were working on, it'd probably be something l…

People who believe in being able to buy social status are the ones perfectly fooled by advertisements! Someone can be butt ugly, poor and stupid, but still have the highest social status and popularity in most social environments. What makes one an attractor of popularity is demonstrating power, will and the ability to achieve what you want. Who would be more popular? A) A rich guy who thinks he can buy friends, by i…

He said that a product being a status icon justifies a high price, not that a high price makes something a status icon.

edit: parent comment has completely changed since I replied

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#227

Post by btbuildem »

I'd argue a similar pattern is happening with laptops (well, at least ones with exchangeable parts).

My old T400 was "dying" until I put an SSD in it. Blew my mind how significant an upgrade that was. When it started "dying" again I maxed out the RAM @ 16GB.

The CPU is a bit lacking now that I want to run multiple VMs side by side, and the chassis has seen perhaps a bit too much wear, so a replacement is coming -- but I've managed to put it off for years, with relatively inexpensive upgrades.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#229

Post by roc »

RussianCow wrote: post #210
roc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those users are overwhelmingly the ones that tablets suit just fine. That's the problem in this type of "PCs are fine, people just don't have to upgrade" argument. (And I've made it myself, before I really worked it through and took stock of just how far tablets have already come.) The use cases satisfied by an old PC could all be satisfied just as well by today's tablets. Yes, the software support for keyboards,…

I completely agree. I wasn't trying to say that PCs aren't dying, I was just trying to contend the notion that power users make up a significant portion of the market we're talking about. In fact, I think tablets directly show that the vast majority of consumers don't need powerful hardware, because tablets aren't very powerful machines at all.

Oh I was absolutely agreeing with you and just expanding and making explicit how this totally contradicted the article's argument.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#230

Post by carterschonwald »

dikei wrote: post #133
awef wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of problems are those? I would love to find problems, ultimately examples, where smart Haskell and c blends are superior to pure c.

It's not neccesarily which language is faster, but the which algorithm is faster. He said naively written C, which mean the algorithm may be entirely different and run in O(n2) and much slower than a Haskell version which use a different algorithm and run in O(nlogn).

actually in the specific example I'm thinking about, i'm talking about memory locality being the performance difference (and in this case, array layout for matrix multiplication).

The naive obvious "dot product" matrix mult of two Row Major matrices is 100-1000x slower than somewhat fancier layouts, or even simply transposing the right hand matrix can make a significant difference, let alone more fancy things.

Often the biggest throughput bottleneck for CPU bound algorithms in a numerical setting is the quality of the memory locality (because the CPU can chew through data faster than you can feed it). Its actually really really hard to get C / C++ to help you write code with suitably fancy layouts that are easy to use.

Amusingly, I also think most auto vectorization approaches to SIMD actually miss the best way to use SIMD registers! I've actually some cute small matrix kernels where by using the AVX SIMD registers as a "L0" cache, I get a 1.5x perf boost!

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