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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#171

Post by close04 »

raincole wrote: post #65
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…

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

> We'll have a demand crunch

This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud.

I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GPU is so expensive, you move to a rental model and the subsequent drop in demand will make GPUs even more expensive. They're far from the only ones with dollar signs in their eyes, between the money and total control over customers this future could bring.

Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#172

Post by foolserrandboy »

vladde wrote: post #123

when you click away to another tab, the title and favicon of the page changes to something weird , but really legit looking. a couple of my favorites: "rust programming socks - Google", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up", "censorship on hacker news - Google"

It actually gives you warning in an overlay first that the favicon would change if you open a new tab. I did and I got "zuckerberg nudes"

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#173

Post by layer8 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #115
cheschire wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the upgrade treadmill you would stop using, and stick to the initial entry device.

If only there wasn't a security update treadmill forcing everyone to do regular hardware upgrades.

I’m running Windows 10 ESU on a 13 year old PC without issues. While it’s admittedly near the end of its life (mostly just due to Windows 11, though I might repurpose it for Linux), I’m expecting the next one to also last a decade or longer.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#174

Post by einr »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #160
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

So $50/yr for 4 years gives you ~$150 with $50 extra for shipping or whatever, which gets you a decent Lenovo M700 Tiny with much better performance in both power and power consumption.

I guess. It's hardly an open-and-shut case of "throw your old computer away!" though, especially when this is a worst-case scenario of running a desktop computer at full blast 24/7 without it ever going into sleep mode or being turned off, and when you don't know what the user's needs are. Maybe a mini-PC with basically no expansion just won't really work for them?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#175

Post by gryfft »

sfn42 wrote: post #170
vladvasiliu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 applicat…

"chrome uses 2gb of ram"

these days individual _tabs_ are using multiple gb of ram.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#176

Post by pcblues »

I think what many people don't realise is that there will be a glut of cheap computer parts including CPUs, GPU cards, and memory when the AI and AI-adjacent businesses go bust and a bunch of data centres get pulled down.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#177

Post by bluGill »

lpcvoid wrote: post #110
skydhash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.

I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.

I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#178

Post by layer8 »

mememememememo wrote: post #3

In such a future the iPhone and android ecosystem is dead? Because a single $1k phone is a hell of a computer. So if you can still buy a phone you can still get a computer. Local AI aside these are very capable.

You don’t really own an iPhone in terms of being a computer. It’s different for certain Android phones where you can install a custom OS. Those are also less powerful, however.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#179

Post by adamwong246 »

I have often imagined writing a book, roughly "Fahrenheit 451 but with computers instead of books". Imagine a world you do not buy an iPhone- one is assigned to you at birth, a world were "installing software" on "a computer you own" are not just antiquated or taboo, but unthinkable.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#180

Post by bluGill »

shevy-java wrote: post #77
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…

> We won't be in a supply crunch forever. I don't share the same 1:1 opinion with regards to the article, but it is absolutely clear that RAM prices have gone up enormously. Just compare them. That is fact. It may be cheaper lateron, but ... when will that happen? Is there a guarantee? Supply crunch can also mean that fewer people can afford something because the prices are now much higher than before. Add to this th…

General predictions are in 3-5 years things will return to normal. 3 years if the current AI crunch is a short term thing, 5 years if it isn't and we have to build new RAM factories.
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