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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#551

Post by rldjbpin »

while one should make the most of our electronics, the theory behind the article's headline is fuelled by fear-mongering most of us are jaded by.

personally been stretching the most life out of my machines. particularly because there has been some supply-demand "issue" happening ever since i could afford to.

my previous computer was a laptop without any tensor cores. it was bought right on the onset of lockdown-related supply chain issues. i was ok to stretch it beyond the better half of a decade before it died on me.

now had to build a computer out of necessity while paying 5x for ram. it took a lot to suppress the internal rationalisation of waiting it out for overall costs to improve. but in this decade, they almost never have!!

stepping back, we forget to appreciate how the cost of computing against cost of living have been so good to us for almost two decades. now thanks to opportunistic greed and real issues, it is coming back to the older times. one could still, for the price of a month's rent*, afford a decent computer which can last years.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#552

Post by account42 »

guessmyname wrote: post #28
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…

> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a sing…

It's really not. I got 128 GB over 5 years ago and I paid far less than 20k for that PC.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#553

Post by account42 »

efficax wrote: post #423
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…

i thought i was crazy with a $7k threadripper w/ 128G of ram

Same, but that was over 5 years ago.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#554

Post by account42 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140
doom2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.

> there's no reason for companies to drop prices Competition.

A good joke.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#555

Post by account42 »

phito wrote: post #502
elevation wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

16MB still seems massive for this kind of app. I ran Visual Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy. A TODO list app that uses system UI elements could be significantly smaller. What do I gain if more developers take this approach? Lightning fast performance. Faster backups. Decreased battery drain => longer battery service lifetime => more time in between hard…

Less RAM usage doesn't equal better performances or faster software. It actually might mean the opposite, if you're not caching things in RAM.

If a TODO list app has more than 16MB of data it could possibly cache in RAM then there is already something seriously wrong.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#556

Post by account42 »

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.

On the other hand the original comment was about turning it off when not in use - and idle power consumption should be a lot less than the TDP.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#557

Post by leptons »

faust201 wrote: post #547
leptons wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cute that you think any of that optimization will happen just because Apple crapped out a budget laptop.

It is saddening that you are ignorant in knowing that technology companies follow Apple's devices more carefully that other OS.

They don't. There's myriad laptops out there that are nothing like Apple's products, not even trying to be like them at all.

You can get PCs in formats Apple has never ventured to make and never will.

And let's not forget that Apple copies everyone else.

Folding phone? How long did it take until Apple "invented" the folding phone market? Oh, that's right, they don't have one (yet, but they are followers after all).

VR Goggles? Also late to that race, and they did a stupid thing with it.

Even the iPhone was really, really late to the game (and no, I don't care about their ~30% worldwide mobile market share).

Apple fanboys love to think that Apple invented all the things and everyone else copied them, but those are fanboy thoughts.

Sorry, Apple simply is not the technology leader you think they are.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#558

Post by ekaryotic »

balamatom wrote: post #543
kps wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no market for it.

Not real talk. To have a market for something you need people to find it valuable. What drove the shift in values?

could have been a pressure to decrease wages, decreasing quality in exchange for increased quantity of code.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#559

Post by balamatom »

ekaryotic wrote: post #558
balamatom wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not real talk. To have a market for something you need people to find it valuable. What drove the shift in values?

could have been a pressure to decrease wages, decreasing quality in exchange for increased quantity of code.

Alright, if we were to replace "quantity of code" with something like "feature velocity", I might agree that something like that could be the case.

Of course, then the next question is: how was this accomplished?

I mean, we're talking people's values here - i.e. the preferences of economic actors - IIUC the phenomenon underlying the entire market model?

Are those so flimsy so as to be completely overwritten in a generation's time? Is this something that happens every generation?

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