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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#161

Post by duskdozer »

torben-friis wrote: post #43
barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.

>My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage

That's "non powerful" to you?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#162

Post by nhecker »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #102
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then

Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first. (A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much le…

Ditto. My personal equipment includes a home server (128GB DDR3 ECC) and a tablet with a keyboard. It's honestly astonishing what you can do without a full-fledged laptop, if you're willing to go through some gymnastics to get there. And it travels light compared to a laptop! (The tablet, that is. Not the headless box. :-))

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#163

Post by fmajid »

drecked wrote: post #119
molszanski wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We won't be in a supply crunch forever. This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut

I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen. Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead. Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a fe…

They have seen boom and bust cycles previously and are understandably wary of expanding capacity for expected demand that may fizzle. If they stay too conservative, China’s CXMT is chomping at the bit to eat their lunch, backed by the Chinese government, but that’s not going to help until late 2027 at best.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#164

Post by dade_ »

https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Nortel-Completes-Acquisit...

Oh bubbles... their so bubbly. Remember when there was an unlimited demand for fibre optics because - The Internet? So Nortel and other manufacturers lent the money to their clients building the Internet because the growth was unlimited forever? Except they actually didn't have any money, just stock valuations?

"This is a critical step in our effort to unleash the full potential of our high-performance optical component solutions business," said Clarence Chandran, COO of Nortel Networks. "This acquisition really strengthens Nortel Networks' leadership position in high-performance optical components and modules which are essential to delivering the all-optical Internet."

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#165

Post by 1970-01-01 »

cjs_ac wrote: post #150
einr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh. 0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year

In the UK, residential electricity tariffs are currently capped by the regulator at 27.69p per kWh, resulting in a total yearly cost of £72.77. Much higher than in the US, but still much cheaper than a new PC.

£72.77 is more than enough for a PC: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/377057425659

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#166

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
guardian5x wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?

We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.

[deleted]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#167

Post by pjmlp »

I have been holding for my hardware for decades, some of my private hardware traces back to 2009.

Phones and tablets only get replaced when they die.

Why should I throw away stuff that still works as intended?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#169

Post by kibwen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #64
adrianN wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.

Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere . Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.

The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#170

Post by sfn42 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #147
teeray wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.

If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has. I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.

Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an application does use it people whine about it. And it's not even like "this makes my pc slow" it's literally just "hurr durr ram usage is x" okay but is there an actual problem? Crickets.
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