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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#441

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

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.

Simulation, analysis, rendering... All those gobbles memory, CPU, sometimes graphic card. Real time works also: huge data set in real time — sensor for production line or environmental monitoring for example.

For word processing, basic image manipulation, electron app (well...) even the "cheap" Macbook Neo is good enough, and it's a last year phone CPU. But that's not enough for a lot of use case.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#442

Post by josephg »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #437
Aurornis wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world. We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.

They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows games) and/or with the performance I want. Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".

They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines.

They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#443

Post by kps »

bit1993 wrote: post #396
m3nu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.

All we need is for HDMI to be unlocked so it works on phones, or maybe VGA adapters that work on phones. And a way to "sideload" our own apps. Hackers please make this happen.

Some modern phones do DisplayPort over USB C.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#444

Post by Aurornis »

barrkel wrote: post #387
Aurornis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max. And then, if your laptop is busy, your machine is occupied - I hate that feeling. I never run heavy software on my laptop. My machine is in the cellar, I connect over ssh. My desktop and my laptop are different machines. I don't want to have to keep my laptop open and running. And I don't want to drag an expensive piece of hardware…

> For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.

I would hope so, given that you can buy multiple M5 laptops for the price of that CPU alone.

I made a comment about how impressive the M5 laptops were above, so these comments trying to debunk it by comparing to $12,000 CPUs (before building the rest of the system) are kind of an admission that the M5 is rather powerful. If you have to spend 3-4X as much to build something that competes, what are we even talking about any more?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#445

Post by Aurornis »

embedding-shape wrote: post #315
Aurornis wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop. For CPU-bound tasks like compiling they’re not that different. For GPU tasks my desktop wins by far but it also consumes many times more power to run the giant GPU. If you think laptops are behind consumer desktops for normal tasks like compiling code you probably haven’t used a recent MacBook Pro.

> I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop. What are the exact CPU models used here though? Since my point was about CPUs in the "same class", and it's really hard to see if this is actually the case here. And yes, I've played around with the recent Apple CPUs, all the way up to M4 Pro (I think, thinking about it I'm not 100% sure) and still I'd say the same class of CPUs will do better in a desktop r…

> If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem, compare the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac Studio, and I'm sure you'll still see a difference, albeit maybe smaller than other brands

The same chip perform basically the same in the different form factors.

For all of the definitive statements you're making in this thread, you don't seem to know much about Apple M-series silicon.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#446

Post by [deleted] »

chmod775 wrote: post #360
Aurornis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here. The base M5 starts at 10 cores and scales to 18 cores. The performance is similar to high end dekstop consumer CPUs. > I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, If you don't compile large codebases, why do you care then? I do compile large codebases and I'm speaking from experience with the…

I don't compile Linux or other large C projects on my M5 (why would I). The only thing I have numbers for on both desktop and mobile is your typical JS/TypeScript/webpack shitshow that struggles to keep a high core count CPU remotely busy. Might as well do that on the M5. There's a large C++ codebase I need to compile, but it can't compile/run on OSX in the first place, hence the desktop that I use remotely for that.…

[deleted]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#447

Post by WillAdams »

Tossrock wrote: post #388
WillAdams wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....)

That sounds like pretty degenerate behavior. I typically have CAM toolpaths generate in seconds using Fusion or PrusaSlicer.

It's a very complex joint (which is why it's never been done before that I could find --- hopefully will be patentable), and the tool definition probably wasn't optimal, nor the CAM tool being used appropriate to the task, hence my working on developing the toolpaths more directly.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#448

Post by mattfrommars »

As someone who has been in the line of PC building, the entire “build your own” industry has been in a decline. And this “RAM apocalypse” is pretty much nail on the coffin.

Enterprise business from small, medium to large get laptops or use mobile application and online SAAS.

There entire PC industry is for enthusiasts and tiny segment of the worlds computing needs. The laptop variation has already been eating into PC market.

In today’s world, it’s just not practical to own a PC unless you are gamer. And for gamers, it’s just better to get console. And for developers, their is more money to be made selling games on console then PC.

In the end, from business, to revenue generation stand point, custom PC industry is just a legacy of old computing world. As I type this, custom PC is more of a “marketing segment” for Nvidia for example to upsell Nvidia cloud offering - i might be stretching too far - but that basically is the point.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#449

Post by kps »

balamatom wrote: post #366
ryandrake wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.

Real talk. Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s. That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?

There's no market for it.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#450

Post by mattfrommars »

bluejay2387 wrote: post #61

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people…

Yah but browser and computing are so much powerful, who needs to install software on their machine when web app and apps store is sufficient for general consumers
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