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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#321

Post by Culonavirus »

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, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.

Most affordable laptops have exactly that, 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage. Think about THAT!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#322

Post by einr »

intrikate wrote: post #275
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

Watts in TDP are not the same as watts in electricity, although they're both measures of energy. TDP is a thermal measurement, it's how much heat energy your heatsink and fan need to be able to dissipate to keep the unit within operational temperatures. It does not directly correlate to the amount of electricity consumed in operation.

I know, but it should be roughly correlated and only serves as comparison for wildly inaccurate napkin math anyway.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#323

Post by chmod775 »

Aurornis wrote: post #311
chmod775 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is able to do. A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.

> The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close. This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a big advantage. For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for single threaded work and comparable for mult…

> The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.

Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.

I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, but at least online available clang benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X, which released in 2024.

Anything single threaded it should match or even edge ahead though.

It gets for worse for multi threaded perf if you leave behind consumer-grade hardware and compare professional/workhorse level CPUs like EPYC/Threadripper/Xeon to Apple's "pro" lines. That's just a slaughter. They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for these kinds of workloads.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#325

Post by n2j3 »

I wish I was well versed into dialectic/Hegelian thought as I am sure there's a way of seeing this as a step towards abolition of private property altogether. The question is who owns the means of production(computation) I suppose.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#326

Post by einr »

Aurornis wrote: post #255
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

PC power draw at the wall is different than TDP. Idle power goes to a lot of components. Even CPU TDP is not an accurate measure. My latest AMD CPU will pull more than it’s rated “TDP” under certain loads.

Yup. But from the OP, all the information we have is the CPU model, and the GP decided that was enough to say it should be thrown in the trash for power inefficiency, so I thought it was enough for some bad math.

(FWIW, searching for the CPU model brings up an old review where the full system they’re testing pulls 145W under some amount of load. While that’s not nothing, it’s also not outrageous for a desktop PC that does the desktop PC things you require of it.)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#327

Post by daoistmonk »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #267
lpcvoid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days. ("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is m…

FWIW: the Tab Stash extension has worked well for me.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#328

Post by TheRoque »

margalabargala wrote: post #304
TheRoque wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats, trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ? You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas. And even if we figured out…

Expanding renewables to the easily replaceable items like power plants, generators, and most consumer vehicles would radically reduce oil usage to where it becomes a minor concern. Also things like biodiesel exist. A more sustainable, renewable-forward, electrified reality is easily possible. There is not a risk of resource shortage of copper. The doomer and prepper talking points you're parroting are not based in re…

The risk of copper shortage is a very well know fact https://press.spglobal.com/2026-01-08-Substantial-Shortfall-... You're into renewables, yet you can't grasp the fact that resources are limited on this planet ? That's peculiar.

And I don't even understand your other points to be honest. What do you mean "consumer vehicles" ? Are you taking about individual's cars ? I'm not taking about that, these don't matter that much. I'm taking about trucks, boats, planes, the stuff actually shipping you your lifestyle.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#329

Post by adregan »

WillAdams wrote: post #152
torben-friis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)

Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound? I don’t have experience with CAD, so I’m not sure if it’s due to entrenched solutions or something else.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#330

Post by opan »

sys_64738 wrote: post #264
skydhash wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.

Plex or Jellyfin client access.

mpv + sshfs is the way.
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