[HN Gopher] The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fel...
___________________________________________________________________
The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first
time
Author : doener
Score : 297 points
Date : 2025-02-12 20:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cpubenchmark.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cpubenchmark.net)
| cluckindan wrote:
| Hyperthreading and speculative execution are going out of
| fashion?
|
| Now if we could just get rid of fake frames on the GPU side.
| feifan wrote:
| I'd suspect some sort of economic factor, or sampling ... e.g.
| just people with lower specs submitting and bringing down the
| average
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It just got introduced and NVDA needs to inflate its stock
| more.
|
| But yes, I agree on principle:
| https://gist.github.com/bazhenovc/c0aa56cdf50df495fda84de58e...
| utopcell wrote:
| Well, Intel abandoned hyperthreading with Lunar Lake, so it's
| definitely going out of fashion.
| esseph wrote:
| For Intel, yes.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Price increases due to multiple factors from higher interest
| rates to trade wars, etc. are tempering the financial enthusiasm
| of customers to buy at the higher end, maybe?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Moore's law crushed by capitalism? Does anyone else have a better
| explanation?
| Gigachad wrote:
| Most likely explanation is that we are comparing 1 months worth
| of data for 2025 to the full years worth on previous years. The
| laptops people will have over 2025 haven't been purchased yet.
| I'd expect the chart to be basically flat for the year to date,
| but a tiny drop isn't particularly surprising either.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I am super curious, if you'll indulge me. What kind of economic
| policy would have let Moores law continue as it had been?
| Conversely, do you think Moores law would have been faster than
| 18? months if... someone else identified Moores law? Slower?
| Exist at all?
| derkster wrote:
| Intel spend was spending upwards of 15% a quarter on stock
| buybacks, while also being stalled out on 10nm with the yield
| improvements "right around the corner", every quarter, for at
| least 18 months. I don't blame capitalism, but I do blame lack
| of regulation regarding stock buybacks, especially talking
| about the United States only home fab.
| veltas wrote:
| Capitalism started Moore's law.
| slyall wrote:
| Discussion from a day or so ago. 59 comments:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43017612
| RachelF wrote:
| I wonder why? Some possibilities:
|
| 1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of
| extra performance?
|
| 2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using
| increasing overhead with newer versions?
|
| 3. Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities?
|
| 4. Most computers are now "fast enough" for the average user, no
| need to buy top end.
|
| 5. Intel's new CPUs are slower than the old ones
| dehrmann wrote:
| 4 has been true for over a decade.
| kome wrote:
| i use a 10 years old macbook air and honestly i can do
| everything i need, statistics, light programming, browsing
| and photo editing. perfect.
|
| i wait it to break before moving on, changing for the sake to
| changing feels like waste.
| skyyler wrote:
| I use a 10 years old macbook pro and the only thing I
| dislike is the battery life and the heat generated.
|
| I simply can't afford the replacement 16" MBP right now.
| Hopefully it lasts another couple of years.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Surely, the new MacBook Airs offer better performance
| than a 10 year old MacBook Pro. The M3 is very
| reasonable, 16GB/512GB for $1,100 or $1,300 for 15 inch I
| think. Could be going lower too with M4 MacBook Air
| purportedly releasing in Mar or Apr.
| omnimus wrote:
| I have cheapest air 8gig and its just fine for anything i
| do if i dont open 80tabs. But for sure wait for M4 as
| 16gig ram will be the base model. Coworker just got
| MacMini m4 and i dont see why that machine wouldnt be
| enough for 90% of people.
| trinix912 wrote:
| I just wish they upped the storage a bit. 512GB on an
| $1100 machine in 2025 just feels like a bad deal,
| especially if you already have a machine from 10 years
| ago that has _the same amount_.
| skyyler wrote:
| My ten year old computer has an SD card slot and an HDMI
| port.
|
| I would like to replace it with something that has an SD
| card slot and an HDMI port, as I use those frequently and
| don't want to deal with adapter solutions.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Literally the only reason you need a computer less than 10
| years old for day to day tasks is to keep up with the layers
| of javascript that are larded onto lots of websites. It's
| sad.
|
| Edit: oh and electron apps. Sweet lord, shouldnt we have
| learned in the 90s with java applets that you shouldnt use a
| garbage collected language for user interfaces?
| whatever1 wrote:
| What is wrong with garbage collection and UI?
| wtallis wrote:
| Latency spikes, probably. But most UIs shouldn't be
| churning through enough allocations to lead to noticeable
| GC pauses, and not all of today's GCs have major problems
| with pause times.
|
| I don't think Electron's problems are that simple.
| skydhash wrote:
| From a non expert point of view, it's about bringing in
| so much dead code. Like support for every os audio
| subsystem for a graphic app, or the whole sandboxing
| thing while you're already accessing files and running
| scripts. Or even the table and float layout while
| everything is using flex. All those things need to be
| initialized and hooked up. At least Cordova (mobile) runs
| only on the system web engine which was already slimmed
| down.
| mook wrote:
| I work on an Electron app, and we have a ticket open to
| investigate why the heck it's asking the OS for Bluetooth
| permissions even though we'd never use it. There are, of
| course, higher priority things to get to first, bugs that
| have larger effects. I'd love to be able to get to that
| one...
| iforgot22 wrote:
| The renderer isn't going to pause on JS execution or GC.
| pmontra wrote:
| My laptop is 11 years old and handles Slack quite well, and
| Jira. I eventually maxed it out at 32 GB and that probably
| helps. It's only an i7-4xxx though.
|
| Java in the 90s was really slow. It got much faster with
| the JIT compiler. JavaScript and browsers got many
| optimizations too. My laptop feels faster now than it was
| in 2014 (it has always run some version of Linux.)
|
| The other problem of Java was the non native widgets, which
| were subjectively worse than most of today's HTML/JS
| widgets, but that's a matter of taste.
| bitwize wrote:
| I use a GC'd language for UI every day -- Emacs -- and it
| runs well even on potato-tier hardware. The first GUI with
| all the features we'd recognize was written in a GC'd
| language, Smalltalk.
|
| GCs introduce some overhead but they alone are not
| responsible for the bloat in Electron. JavaScript bloat is
| a development skill issue arising from a combination of
| factors, including retaining low-skill front end devs,
| little regard for dependency bloat, ads, and management
| prioritizing features over addressing performance issues.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| There's also a lot of fast software written in Golang. GC
| has an undeserved bad reputation.
| TuxSH wrote:
| It's all nice and fast until the GC eats up all the CPU
| time under memory pressure (e.g. container memory limit).
| GC deserves its bad rep, even if GC implementations have
| gotten a lot better over time.
|
| GC also disqualifies a language from ever being used for
| anything but userland programs.
| anthk wrote:
| Containers for Go software have no sense. You can cross
| compile stuff from anywhere to anywhere. And the binaries
| are self contained.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Which isn't really going to happen or be noticeable in
| this case. Yeah GC is slightly slower, but it's like
| blaming a 10-minute mile on your shoes. SDN or DBMS
| written in a GC'd language is probably not a good idea.
| jart wrote:
| It's not that they lack the skill. It's that they don't
| care.
|
| If they do care then they probably depend on someone who
| doesn't.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I hate the framing that developers are the people not
| caring. It's a ridiculous misrepresentation of the
| dynamics I've seen everywhere. Developers usually love
| optimizing stuff. However, they are under pressure to
| deliver functional changes. One could blame "the
| business" for not caring and not making time for shipping
| a quality product. However, these business decisions are
| made because that's what wins customers. Customers might
| complaint that that wasn't more lightweight software. But
| clearly their stated preference doesn't match their
| revealed preference.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| I think even a blank Electron app is rather heavy because
| it's basically a whole web browser, which btw is written in
| C++. BUT my 2015 baseline MBP still feels fine.
| nicoburns wrote:
| For me the big improvement from upgrading was better
| responsiveness while on a video call (no small improvement
| in the modern world)
| throwawee wrote:
| I hate bloat and don't use Electron apps, but garbage
| collection is such a silly thing to pin it on. Tossing
| stuff like Lua and D in the same bin as the massive
| enterprise framework du jour is throwing the baby out with
| the bathwater.
| trinix912 wrote:
| I have a 2005 Core 2 Duo desktop running Windows 7. The
| only things that make it unusable are today's Internet and
| Electron apps. Everything else (including Visual Studio
| 2019!) runs at a performance comparable to my 2020 ThinkPad
| with Core i7. I know it's anecdotal, I'm just saying, if we
| fixed the bloat on the web, most people could just keep
| running their 10-15 year old PCs (using Linux if you want).
| bentcorner wrote:
| But has it been true for the type of person who runs CPU
| benchmarks?
| dbtc wrote:
| Programmers failing to manufacture sufficient inefficiency to
| force upgrade.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| I very much doubt that is the cause.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Can't force upgrade with money you don't have. For a non-
| enthusiast, even the lowest specs are more than good enough
| for light media consumption and the economy would affect what
| they invest in.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| As an experiment, I've tried working with a Dell Wyse 5070
| with the memory maxed out. Even for development work,
| outside of some egregious compile times for large projects,
| it actually worked ok with Debian and XFCE for everything
| including some video conferencing. Even if you had money
| for an upgrade, it's not clear it's really necessary
| outside of a few niche domains. I still use my maxed out
| Dell Precision T1700 daily and haven't really found a
| reason to upgrade.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| > 1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of
| extra performance?
|
| I'm not an expert in silicon design, but I recall reading that
| there's a limit to how much power can be concentrated in a
| single package due to power density constraints, and that's why
| they are adding fluff instead of more cores.
|
| >2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using
| increasing overhead with newer versions?
|
| This is a huge problem as well. I have a 2017 15" MacBook Pro
| and it's a decent computer, except it is horribly sluggish
| doing anything on it, even opening Finder. That is with a fresh
| install of macOS 13.7.1. If I install 10.13, it is snappy. If I
| bootcamp with Windows 11, it's actually quite snappy as well
| and I get 2 more hours of battery life somehow despite Windows
| in bootcamp not being able to control (power down) the dGPU
| like macOS can. Unfortunately I hate Windows, and Linux is very
| dodgy on this Mac.
| gaudystead wrote:
| That is WILD that Windows 11 runs faster than the machine's
| native OS...
|
| Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it,
| MORE resource efficient than modern macOS?! That feels like a
| ludicrous statement to type, but the results seem to suggest
| as much.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Modern macOS might be optimized for Apple Silicon CPUs. But
| even when it was Intel only, there were probably times when
| Windows was lighter, albeit bad in other ways.
| p_ing wrote:
| It's a microkernel OS, it's going to be slower by its
| very nature. And on ARM it wastes memory due to its 16KiB
| pages.
| ryao wrote:
| Neither of them use microkernels. They are monolithic
| kernels with loadable module support ("hybrid" kernels).
| The cores of both Windows NT and XNU were originally
| microkernels, but then they put all of the servers into
| the kernel address space to make them into the monolithic
| kernels that they are today.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| > It's a microkernel OS, it's going to be slower by its
| very nature.
|
| Yawn. Ever heard of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family ?
|
| Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode ?
|
| (Wenn man keine Ahnung hat...)
| p_ing wrote:
| You're comparing a modern microkernel to something
| originating from the 80s?
|
| Keep your rude attitude to yourself.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| It's from 1993. Also be more precise about what exactly
| you are meaning by writing " _It's a microkernel OS, it's
| going to be slower by its very nature._ "
|
| Otherwise don't be offended when people are offended by
| regurgitated and meanwhile disproven non-sense.
|
| kthxbye
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| I'm just as surprised. Also, I was using Windows 11 LTSC
| 2024, not the standard version, which could impact the
| validity of my comparison.
| imglorp wrote:
| The pessimistic viewpoint is the hardware vendor would not
| mind if you felt your machine was slow and were motivated
| to upgrade to the latest model every year. The fact that
| they also control the OS means they have means, motive and
| opportunity to slow older models if their shareholders
| demanded.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Or they simply keep supporting old models with new
| versions of the OS, even though newer software versions
| are optimized, and contain new features, enabled by newer
| hardware improvements.
|
| If you machines have more RAM, you can use a more RAM
| intensive solution to speed many things up, or deliver a
| more computationally intensive but higher quality
| solution, or simply add a new previous challenging
| feature.
|
| What would be interesting, is how fast to old but high
| spec'd models slow down. What slow downs are from
| optimizing for newer architectures, vs. optimizing with
| expectation of higher resources.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| The problem seems to be CPU bound, it's got 16GB of
| memory and memory pressure is low. The CPU is a
| i7-7820HQ, though I thought that it was interesting that
| my iPhone XR (Apple A12) scores higher on a synthetic
| benchmark than my top of the line MacBook Pro from the
| same time.
| taurknaut wrote:
| This doesn't feel terribly surprising to me. MacOS has
| always had impressively performant parts, but their
| upgrades always generally lower responsiveness. On modern
| hardware it's less perceptible obviously, and they want to
| sell machines, not software. But the last iteration that
| felt like it prioritized performance and snappiness was
| Snow Leopard, now twenty years ago.
|
| I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core
| explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the
| entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot
| better at adapting to variable loads.
|
| I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a
| windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably
| a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not
| a good reason to use macos--it's the fact that the
| keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire
| OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field
| across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a
| single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-
| behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe)
| administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and
| for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store,
| download apps, and run them by double clicking.
|
| I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal
| with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect
| my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I
| tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never
| want to go back. The only time that worked for me was
| working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS.
| macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around
| making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work
| I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two
| decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland,
| both indicate that the community is solving different
| problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is
| fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're
| successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable,
| but it models the computer and documents and apps in a
| completely different way than I am used to or want to use.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| I love Linux and run it on my servers, but on the
| desktop, it requires too much tinkering--I often spend
| more time troubleshooting than working. Laptops are
| especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep,
| and battery life. Windows is a mess--I hate the ads,
| bloat, and lack of a Unix-like environment. WSL2 works
| but feels like a hack. macOS, on the other hand, gives me
| full compatibility with Unix tools while also running
| Office and Adobe apps. Also Command+C for copy, Command+V
| for paste is much nicer than Control+Shift+C and
| Control+Shift+V. macOS does have absolutely terrible
| screen snapping though in comparison to Windows 11. The
| hardware is solid--great screen, trackpad, speakers, and
| battery life. I considered getting a high-end PC laptop
| (based on Rtings' recommendations), but every option had
| compromises, either a terrible screen, terrible processor
| or terrible battery life. By the time I configured it to
| a non crappy config, it would've cost more than a MacBook
| Pro 16.
| caleblloyd wrote:
| > Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like
| Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life.
|
| 100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for
| development. It is the same os+architecture as the
| servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select
| hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the
| screen resolution does not require fractional scaling.
| Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being
| able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip
| things like running VMs for docker.
| amarant wrote:
| Same! That's One less OS that I have to remember how it
| works!
|
| I'm not sure I understand the whole tinkering thing.
| Whenever I tinker with my Linux, it's because I decided
| to try something tinkery, and usually mostly because I
| wanted to tinker.
|
| Like trying out that fancy new tiling Wayland WM I heard
| about last week...
| kelnos wrote:
| I feel like the main times Linux requires tinkering are:
|
| 1. You're trying to run it on hardware that isn't well-
| supported. This is a bummer, but you can't just expect
| any random machine (especially a laptop) to run Linux
| well. If you're buying a new computer and expect to run
| Linux on it, do your research beforehand and make sure
| all the hardware in it is supported.
|
| 2. You've picked a distro that isn't boring. I run Debian
| testing, and then Debian stable for the first six months
| or so after testing is promoted to stable. (Testing is
| pretty stable on its own, but then once the current
| testing release turns into the current stable release,
| testing gets flooded with lots of package updates that
| might not be so stable, so I wait.) For people who want
| something even more boring, they can stick with Debian
| stable. If you really need a brand-new version of
| something that stable doesn't have, it might be in
| backports, or available as a Snap or Flatpak (I'm not a
| fan of either of these, but they're options).
|
| 3. You use a desktop environment that isn't boring. I'm
| super super biased here[0], but Xfce is boring and
| doesn't change all that much. I've been using it for more
| than 20 years and it still looks and behaves very
| similarly today as it did when I first started using it.
|
| If you use well-supported hardware, and run a distro and
| desktop environment that's boring, you will generally
| have very few issues with Linux and rarely (if ever) have
| to tinker with it.
|
| [0] Full disclosure: I maintain a couple Xfce core
| components.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| First, thanks for Xfce. I'm a (tiny) donor.
|
| Two kinds of linux tinkering often get aliased and cause
| confusion in conversations.
|
| The first kind is the enthusiast changing their init
| system bootloader and package manager and
| "neofetch/fastfetch" and WM and... every few weeks.
|
| The second kind is the guy who uses xfce with a hidpi
| display who has to google and try various combinations of
| xrandr(augmented with xfwm zoom feature), GDK_SCALE,
| QT_SCALE_FACTOR, theme that supports hidpi in the
| titlebar, few icons in the status tray not scaling
| up(wpa_gui), do all that and find out that apps that draw
| directly with OpenGL don't respect these settings,
| dealing with multiple monitors, plugging in hdmi and then
| unplugging messing up the audio profile and randomly
| muting chromium browsers, deciding whether to use xf86-*
| Or modesetting or whatever the fix is to get rid of
| screen tearing. Bluetooth/wifi. On my laptop for example
| I had to disable usb autosuspend lest the right hand side
| USB-A port stop working.
|
| If our threshold for qualifying well-supported hardware
| is "not even a little tinkering required" then we are
| left with vanishingly few laptops. For the vast vast
| majority of laptops, atleast the things I mentioned above
| are required. All in all, it amounted to couple of kernel
| parameters, a pipewire config file to stop random static
| noise in the bluetooth sink and then a few xfce setting
| menu tweaks (WM window scaling and display scaling). So
| not that dramatic, but it is still annoying to deal with.
|
| The 2nd kind of tinkering is annoying, and is required
| regardless of distro/de/wm choice since it's a function
| of the layers below the de/wm, mostly the kernel itself.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I think that for your example of having problems with
| HiDPI you might have had in mind another desktop
| environment than XFCE.
|
| I have been using XFCE for more than 10 years almost
| exclusively with multiple HiDPI monitors.
|
| After Linux installation I never had to do anything else
| except of going to XFCE/Settings/Appearance and set a
| suitably high value for "Custom DPI Setting".
|
| Besides that essential setting (which scales the fonts of
| all applications, except for a few Java programs written
| by morons), it may be desirable to set a more appropriate
| value in "Desktop/Icons/Icon size". Also in "Panel
| preferences" you may want to change the size of the
| taskbar and the size of its icons.
|
| You may have to also choose a suitable desktop theme, but
| that is a thing that you may want to do after any
| installation, regardless of having HiDPI monitors.
| bboygravity wrote:
| My first thought is that Apple is throttling performance of
| older machines on purpose (again). As they did with the
| phones.
|
| Would explain why Windows runs faster.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > My first thought is that Apple is throttling
| performance of older machines on purpose (again).
|
| The battery life argument was relevant, but where one
| sits on the issue is going to depend on the poison one
| picked.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
| flomo wrote:
| I have a 2016 MBP-15 (sticky keyboard). I suspect Apple
| changed something so the fans no longer go into turbo vortex
| mode. Normally it isn't sluggish at all, but when it
| overheats, everything grinds to a halt.[1] (Presumably this
| is to keep the defective keyboard from melting again.[0])
| Perhaps old OS/bootcamp still has the original fan profiles.
|
| [0]Apple had a unpublicized extended warrantee on these, and
| rebuilt the entire thing twice.
|
| [1] kernel_task suddenly goes to 400%, Hot.app reports 24%.
| Very little leeway between low energy and almost dead.
| p_ing wrote:
| > 2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using
| increasing overhead with newer versions?
|
| Shouldn't be an issue. Foreground applications do get a
| priority boost; I don't know if Passmark increases priority of
| itself, tho. Provided there isn't any background indexing
| occurring, i.e. letting the OS idle after install.
| NBJack wrote:
| As someone obsessing over small performance gains for his
| processor recently, there is definitely overhead to consider.
| Note by default you get things now like Teams, Copilot, the
| revised search indexing system, Skype, etc. Passmark in many
| tests will max out all cores at once; this tends to make it
| sensitive to 'background' processes (even small ones).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| COVID. People start working from home or otherwise spending
| more time on computers instead of going outside, so they buy
| higher-end computers. Lockdowns end, people start picking the
| lower-end models again. On multi-threaded tasks, the difference
| between more and fewer cores is larger than the incremental
| improvements in per-thread performance over a couple years, so
| replacing older high core count CPUs with newer lower core
| count CPUs slightly lowers the average.
| Macha wrote:
| I don't buy this really. COVID to now is less than 1 laptop
| replacement cycle for non-techie users who will usually use a
| laptop until it stops functioning, and I don't think the
| techie users would upgrade at all if their only option is
| worse.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| A lot of laptops stop functioning because somebody spills
| coffee in it or runs it over with their car. There are also
| many organizations that just replace computers on a 3-5
| year schedule even if they still work.
|
| And worse is multi-dimensional. If you shelled out for a
| high-end desktop in 2020 it could have 12 or 16 cores, but
| a _new_ PC would have DDR5 instead of DDR4 and possibly
| more of it, a faster SSD, a CPU with faster _single thread_
| performance, and then you want that but can 't justify 12+
| cores this time so you get 6 or 8 and everything is better
| except the multi-thread performance, which is worse but
| only slightly.
|
| The reticence to replace them also works against you. The
| person who spilled coffee in their machine can't justify
| replacing it with something that nice, so they get a
| downgrade. Everyone else still has a decent machine and
| keeps what they have. Then the person who spilled their
| drink is the only one changing the average.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| ARM?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| there's 4 which has a couple different component
|
| * battery life is a lot higher than it used to be and a lot of
| devices have prioritized efficiency
|
| * we haven't seen a ton of changes to the high-end for CPU. I
| struggle to think of what the killer application requiring more
| is right now; every consumer advancement is more GPU focused
| bitwize wrote:
| People are buying more HP Streams and fewer ASUS ROGs than in
| previous years?
| Legend2440 wrote:
| You're forgetting the most likely possibility: it's an artifact
| of data collection or a bug in the benchmarking software.
| chvid wrote:
| People spending less on new computers.
| torginus wrote:
| I think it's that the measure of modern CPU performance-
| _multithreaded performance_ is worthless and has been worthless
| forever.
|
| Most software engineers don't care to write multithreaded
| programs, as evidenced by the 2 most popular languages - Js and
| Python having very little support for it.
|
| And it's no wonder, even when engineers do know how to write
| such code, most IRL problems outside of benchmarks don't really
| yield themselves to multithreading, and due to the parallizable
| part being limited, IRL gains are limited.
|
| The only performance that actually matters is single thread
| performance. I think users realized this and with manufacturing
| technology getting more expensive, companies are no longer keen
| on selling 16 core machines (of which the end user will likely
| never use more than 2-3 cores) just so they can win benchmark
| bragging rights.
| silverlinedjik wrote:
| >multithreaded performance is worthless and has been
| worthless forever.
|
| I have a very opposite opinion; single threaded performance
| only matters to a point where any given task it's doing isn't
| unusable. Multithreaded performance is crucial from keeping
| the system from grinding to a halt because users always have
| multiple applications open at the same time. Five browser
| windows with 4-12 tabs on each, on three different browsers,
| 2-4 Word instances, some electron(equivalent) comms app, is
| much less unusual than I'd like it to be. I have used laptops
| with only two cores and it gave a new meaning to slow when
| you tried doing absolutely anything other than waiting for
| your one application to do something. Only having one
| application open at a time was somewhat useable.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| > The only performance that actually matters is single thread
| performance. I think users realized this and with
| manufacturing technology getting more expensive, companies
| are no longer keen on selling 16 core machines (of which the
| end user will likely never use more than 2-3 cores) just so
| they can win benchmark bragging rights.
|
| How can you state something like this in all seriousness? One
| of the most used software application has to be the browser,
| and right now _firefox_ runs 107 threads on my machine with 3
| tabs open. _gnome-shell_ runs 22 threads, and all I 'm doing
| is reading HN. It's 2025 and multicore matters.
| torginus wrote:
| Those threads don't necessarily exist for performance
| reasons - there can be many reasons one starts a thread
| from processing UI events, to IO completion etc. I very
| much doubt Firefox has an easy time saturating your CPU
| with work outside of benchmarks.
| windward wrote:
| Well yeah - what CPU bound task do you need to be
| performant? Beyond many tabs - which is embarrassingly
| parallel - it's all either GPU, network or memory bound.
|
| Firefox failing to saturate your CPU is a win-state.
| foldr wrote:
| If Firefox smears its CPU usage over multiple threads,
| that leaves more single-threaded performance on the table
| for other apps that may need it. So there could still be
| an effect on overall system performance.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Lots of problems can be nicely parallelized, but the cost of
| doing so usually isn't worth it, simply because the entity
| writing the software isn't the entity running it, so the
| software vendor can just say "get a better PC, I don't care".
| There was a period when having high requirements was a badge
| of honor for video games. When a company needs to pay for the
| computational power, suddenly all the code becomes
| multithreaded.
| jart wrote:
| Yes but look at the chart in the article. Both multi-threaded
| and single-threaded performance is getting slower on laptops.
| With desktops, multi-threaded is getting slower and single-
| threaded is staying the same.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Superscalarity is largely pointless yes, given that memory
| access between threads is almost always a pain, so two of
| them rarely process the same data and can't take advantage of
| using a single core's cache at the same time. It doesn't even
| make much sense in concept.
|
| But multicore performance does matter significantly unless
| you're on a microcontroller running only one process on your
| entire machine. Just Chrome launches a quarter million
| processes by itself.
| znpy wrote:
| > The only performance that actually matters is single thread
| performance.
|
| Strong disagree, particularly on laptops.
|
| Having some firefox thread compile/interpret/run some
| javascript 500 microseconds faster is not going to change my
| life very much.
|
| Having four extra cores definitely will: it means i can keep
| more stuff open at the same time.
|
| The pain is real, particularly on laptops: i've been
| searching for laptops with a high-end many-core cpu but
| without a dedicated gpu for years, and still haven't found
| anything decent.
|
| I do run many virtual machines, containers, databases and
| stuff. The most "graphic-intensive" thing i run is the
| browser. Otherwise i spend most of my time in terminals and
| emacs.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The fact that multithreaded performance is worthless for you
| does not prove that this is true for most computer users.
|
| During the last 20 years, i.e. during the time interval when
| my computers have been multi-core, their multithreaded
| performance has been much more important for professional
| uses than the single-threaded performance.
|
| The performance with few active threads is mainly important
| for gamers and for the professional users who are forced by
| incompetent managers to use expensive proprietary
| applications that are licensed to be run only on a small
| number of cores (because the incompetent managers
| simultaneously avoid cheaper alternatives while not being
| willing to pay the license for using more CPU cores).
|
| A decent single-threaded performance is necessary, because
| otherwise opening Web pages bloated by JS can feel too slow.
|
| However, if the single-threaded performance varies by +/- 50%
| I do not care much. For most things where single-threaded
| performance matters, any reasonably recent CPU is able to do
| instantaneously what I am interested in.
|
| On the other hand, where the execution time is determined
| strictly by the multithreaded performance, i.e. at compiling
| software projects or at running various engineering EDA/CAD
| applications, every percent of extra multithreaded
| performance may shorten the time until the results are ready,
| saving from minutes to hours or even days.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Please open your task manager and see how much stuff is
| running.
|
| The times where you saw one core pegged and the rest idle are
| a decade ago.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| > (increased overhead with newer versions of Windows)
|
| > Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities?
|
| I don't know if they'll keep doing it, but hardware unboxed had
| been doing various tests with Windows 10 vs 11, and mitigations
| on vs off, as well as things like SMT on vs off for things like
| AMD vcache issues, or P cores vs E cores on newer intels...
| it's interesting to see how hardware performs 6-12 months after
| release, because it can really go all over the place for
| seemingly no reason.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I think it's reason #4. I bought a PC 12 years ago, the only
| upgrade I did was buying an SSD, and now it's being used by my
| father, who's perfectly happy with it, because it's fast enough
| to check mail and run MS Office. My current gaming PC was
| bought 4 years ago, and it's still going strong, I can play
| most games on high settings in 4k (thank you DLSS). I've
| noticed the same pattern with smartphones - my first smartphone
| turned into obsolete garbage within a year, my current
| smartphone is el cheapo bought 4 years ago _, and it shows no
| signs of needing to be replaced.
|
| _ ok I lied, my phone is only two years old, but what happened
| is that two years ago my phone experienced a sudden drop test
| on concrete followed by pressure test of a car tyre, and it was
| easier to buy a new one with nearly identical specs than to
| repair the old one.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| Maybe it's all the new Intel CPUs that failed?
| giljabeab wrote:
| It's everyone jumping ship and switching from 14th gen to AMD
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| I mean the CPUs were tested early on, but later they
| failed, and no longer raise the average. It should be
| visible in more detailed statistics if it is so.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| The number of people who swap CPUs or even pay attention to
| the "Intel inside" sticker on a PC must be very small.
| windward wrote:
| 4 and 1.b: extra silion being used by _G_ PUs. CPU performance
| isn't that important anymore.
|
| I know, I know: all the software you use is slow and awful. But
| it's generally bad thanks to a failure to work around slow
| network and disk accesses. If you use spinning rust, you're a
| power user.
|
| It's also a minority of video games that rely more on CPU
| performance than GPU and memory (usually for shared reasons in
| niche genres)
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| It's either the Chromebook effect: people are just buying
| slower computers, possibly in poorer-ish countries.
|
| Or: The average speed of new computers just isn't going up.
| People are just buying lower end computers because they're good
| enough. I think it's mostly that: the average is just trending
| a bit lower because lower is fine. The thirst for the high end
| is disappearing for most segments, because people don't need
| it.
| wiredfool wrote:
| As the chart is updated bi-weekly, but the data point that may
| change is for the current year. The first few days or weeks of a
| new year are less accurate compared to the end of a year.
| moffkalast wrote:
| January 2024:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240123174954/https://www.cpube...
|
| January 2023:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230130185431/https://www.cpube...
|
| Still, both previous years were notably up after the first
| month already. This _is_ different and perhaps notable
| regardless. Either the release schedule is skewed forward or
| the hardware is genuinely stagnating. Or perhaps the benchmark
| is hitting some other CPU unrelated bottleneck.
| palijer wrote:
| This is just still a sample size of three for a data period
| that is stated to be less accurate" not "has lower values"
|
| Just because the error isn't presented the same here doesn't
| mean it's error free...
| lolinder wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240221001449/https://www.cpuben.
| ..
|
| They have more than twice as many samples on their Feb 10
| update this year (47810) as they did last year on Feb 14
| (22761). They have shown some growth year on year in sample
| size, but nowhere near doubling.
|
| That suggests this month has been an outlier in having a
| strangely large number of samples already, which could all be
| related--maybe their software started being bundled with a
| specific OEM or was featured on a popular content creator or
| whatever.
|
| As a sibling notes, less accurate just means less accurate,
| not necessarily skewed upward. There simply is less data to
| draw conclusions on than there will be later, so any medium-
| sized effect that adds 20k extra samples will have a larger
| effect now than later.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I had the same thought. The common reasons for such a
| decline would be something like change of CPU architecture
| prioritizing energy efficiency over raw performance,
| limitations in manufacturing processes, or changes in
| benchmarking methodologies wouldn't had such steep decline.
| So I would guess either change of methodology or as you
| said weaker CPUs in general are measured by that.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So if I understand right, more old hardware makes it into
| the sample now than before, increasing the unreliability of
| early data? That makes sense I guess.
| lolinder wrote:
| Not increasing the unreliability--it's unreliable no
| matter what this early in the year--but it's possible
| that more old hardware made it in this past month than in
| previous early years which would explain why the number
| went down this time.
| ellisv wrote:
| Really makes you wish the chart showed some measure of variance
| throwaway287391 wrote:
| Or just have the last data point include everything from the
| full 12 month period before (as the title "year on year"
| would suggest) and maybe even put it in the correct place on
| the x-axis (e.g. for today, Feb 12, 2025, about 11.8% of the
| full year gap width from the (Dec 31) 2024 point).
| contravariant wrote:
| And then write an article every month about how the year on
| year difference has(n't) gone up/down yet.
| kqr wrote:
| We still know the current data point has about three times
| the standard error of the previous point, but I agree it's
| hard to say anything useful without knowledge of the within-
| point variance.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| variance. Have you noticed that the mainstream public-level
| discussion of almost any topic never progresses farther than
| a point estimate? Variance implies nuance, and nuance is
| annoying to those who'd just rather paint a story. Variance
| isn't even that much nuance, because it is also just a point
| estimate for the variability of a distribution, not even its
| shape. Public discourse is stuck at the mean point estimate,
| and as such, is constantly misled. This is all an analogy,
| but feels very true.
| contravariant wrote:
| Sometimes even an average is too much to ask. One of my pet
| peeves is articles about "number changed". Averages and
| significance never enter the discussion.
|
| Worst are the ones where he number is the number of times
| some random event happened. In that case there's a decent
| chance the difference is less than twice the square root,
| so assuming a Poisson distribution you _know_ the
| difference is insignificant.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| This reminds me of the presidential election where most
| credible institutions talked about 50/50 odds and where
| subsequently criticized after Trump's clear victory in
| terms of electoral votes.
|
| Few people bothered to look at the probability
| distributions the forecasters published which showed decent
| probabilities for landslide wins in either direction.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Have you noticed that the mainstream public-level
| discussion of almost any topic never progresses farther
| than a point estimate? [...] Variance isn 't even that much
| nuance, because it is also just a point estimate for the
| variability of a distribution, not even its shape._
|
| Next time you're doing something that isn't a professional
| STEM job, see how far you can get through your day without
| adding or multiplying.
|
| Unless you're totting up your score in a board game or
| something of that ilk, you'll be amazed at how
| accommodating our society is to people who can't add or
| multiply.
|
| Sure, when you're in the supermarket you _can_ add up your
| purchases as you shop, if you want to. But if you don 't
| want to, you can just buy about the same things every week
| for about the same price. Or keep a rough total of the big
| items. Or you can put things back once you see the total at
| the till. Or you can 'click and collect' to know exactly
| what the bill will be.
|
| You don't see mainstream discussion of variance because 90%
| of the population don't know WTF a variance is.
| mcmoor wrote:
| Seems like there's only bandwidth of 4bit that can be
| reserved for this, and variance couldn't make the cut. It's
| actually already generous since sometimes only 1 bit can
| barely make it through, whether something is "good" or
| "bad".
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| So they have a dataset, and they've cherry picket a time period
| to time period, and not done any location based sorting etc, to
| suit a narrative.
|
| Whatever pays the bill I suppose.
| vladms wrote:
| People got smarter and buy only what they need?
| ZiiS wrote:
| :shrug: CPU performance is a rounding error on your GPU and RAM
| bottlenecks.
| Osiris wrote:
| The GPU being a bottleneck over the CPU is only in very
| specific scenarios.
|
| Can you be more specific about what message you're trying to
| convey?
| ZiiS wrote:
| In the 90s and 00s paying more for CPU ment I could work
| faster. I was extreemly grateful for each breakthrough.
|
| Even in the 10s this wasn't really true. Storage and bandwith
| took a bigger slice and CPU was in abundance.
|
| We are now at the point I could easy serve the DB and App
| servers of a multi-million SaaS off my mobile phone.
|
| The few remaining areas where compute is still the bottleneck
| at all: video encoding, 3d rendering, mining, and
| predominantly now AI; also tend not to focuse on the CPU.
| Osiris wrote:
| Looking at the top end chart, which flat lined, it seems that the
| biggest contributor would be a slower release cycle of the most
| performant chips. It looks like the score of the top end chips
| were dragging up the average. With the top spot not changing, the
| average is falling.
|
| I'm curious what median and std dev look like.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Arguably a majority of improvements in 2025 haven't happened yet,
| seems premature to conclude anything in February.
| varispeed wrote:
| Friend of mine bought Zephyrus G16 with Intel 185H and 32GB RAM.
| He thought this will help him studying and he chose it because
| some software he has to use is only available for Windows. He
| called me to have a look as the laptop has been sluggish for him.
|
| This thing barely can handle Office, Teams and the browser. Hot,
| noisy as hell and performance wise I see no difference over
| laptops from decade ago. Tragic.
|
| To be fair I don't think I could do anything. Task manager showed
| CPU as under utilised, yet fans were blasting, editing Word
| document looked like a slideshow.
|
| ASUS tools showed no problems.
|
| I don't know, feels like people are getting scammed with these
| new laptops.
|
| I still have M1 Max and never experienced anything like this.
| truekonrads wrote:
| Uninstall all security except for Windows defender and see how
| it feels.
| odo1242 wrote:
| What were the disk specs? HDD or SSD? GPU?
|
| Windows is a heavy operating system compared to the others and
| can cause that problem but that likely isn't Windows alone
| causing the problem (though bloatware / other AV solutions
| could also have something to do with it)
| varispeed wrote:
| 1TB NVMe and 4060 GPU
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Sounds a lot like a dedicated GPU is running and heat-
| throttling the whole thing, since you don't see CPU usage.
|
| I wanted to say gaming laptops are a scam, but the older Intel
| MBPs with dedicated GPUs suffered too. More trouble than
| they're worth.
| varispeed wrote:
| One thing I notice is that Google Drive was using 15% of ARC
| GPU (laptop also has nVidia 4060). When I shut down that
| process, it cooled down a bit after a while, but system is
| still sluggish and fans work all the time, even if I switched
| it to "Silent" mode.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Does it have an option to shut off the dGPU entirely and
| rely on integrated? Just as a test.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Had something similar with my work laptop today. Lenovo X1
| Carbon, couple of years old. Got reinstalled very recently.
|
| Been fine, but suddenly it was slow af. Near zero CPU, GPU and
| disk usage in Windows Task Manager, but I could feel it was
| burning hot, which it wasn't just 15 minutes prior.
|
| Did a reboot and all was fine again.
|
| Surely some firmware that messed up, though no idea why.
|
| Anyway, I'd start by removing crap, that goes for 3rd party
| anti-virus and vendor tools especially. Use something like Bulk
| Crap Uninstaller[1] or Revo[2], and then reinstall drivers.
|
| Totally agreed on the sad state of laptops these days.
|
| [1]: https://www.bcuninstaller.com/ (open source)
|
| [2]: https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-
| fr...
| speed_spread wrote:
| It's an Intel powered gaming laptop with discrete GPU running
| Windows. Of course it's gonna heat like crazy. But that box can
| also do things an M1 can't do. Like play games... And heat up a
| small room.
| varispeed wrote:
| The discrete GPU is barely used, so it shouldn't be getting
| hot.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Yeah, that's the Intel part. They do that. AMD would have
| been much better although still not M1 cool.
| bjourne wrote:
| Could it be related to world-wide inflation and decreasing real
| wages? Salaries have not kept up, hence people can't afford as
| powerful hardware as they used to. It also seems that top-of-the-
| line hardware don't depreciate as fast as it used to. Many
| several year's old GPUs are still expensive, for example.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive,
|
| They are propped up by demand and the fact that most of the new
| GPUs are marginally better than previous ones.
| ttt3ts wrote:
| New GPUs are quite a bit better than previous ones but perf
| oer dollar has been flat for a while now.
|
| Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given
| there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years.
| Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| For gaming GPUs the 5090 is something like 20-50% better
| than the 4090 in raster performance.
| blangk wrote:
| Yep. The whole fake frames thing seems like a witch hunt
| to me. If you can actually get a 5090 and were previously
| fully utilising a 3090 or 4090, it is a significant
| upgrade, as long as it doesn't burn your house down.
| 7speter wrote:
| I just don't think the 5090 is for gamers; it's for
| hobbyist AI people who want to buy multiple to run high
| parameter LLMs. Fake frames are irrelevant to this crowd,
| even if they take one of their 5090s aside to game once
| in a while.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| In situations where the budget matters, you need to take
| that 20-50% better performance and drop it by the 25%
| higher launch price.
|
| And the generated frames _are_ misleading because they
| don 't work very well if your source framerate is low.
| keyringlight wrote:
| The generated frames thing is interesting as it's an
| obvious example of the whole discussion around halo
| products (the x080 or x090 cards), "the rich get richer",
| it takes up a lot of air in the room but is only
| appropriate for a small vocal proportion of the market.
|
| As you say you need a good framerate to start with before
| generated frames make sense so either you're already
| running well with a high tier card and are further able
| to show off the combination of
| framerate/resolution/detail level, or running a lower
| tier card at lower settings turning the graphics down
| further which can be a very obvious trade off. Less
| demanding games which are generally online competitive
| usually wouldn't do as well with any extra latency
| introduced, and the situation where I've heard it would
| be a good fit is emulators or any kind of game where the
| CPU is the limiting factor
| m4rtink wrote:
| Apparently also 50% more likely to make things catch on
| fire! ;-)
| Rury wrote:
| Sure they are better... but once you factor for die size,
| core count, wattage and so on... the improvements being
| made are less impressive than they first seem.
| lolinder wrote:
| Someone already gave the answer:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030465
|
| It's caused by people failing to read the fine print on the
| graph.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I had the same instinct as you, but this comment changed my
| mind:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030614
| lolinder wrote:
| Nah, I read that but I'm not convinced. The reply to them
| from palijer is correct: inaccurate does not mean lower, it
| just means inaccurate. Fewer samples means less data means
| more room for weird sampling errors skewing the data.
| There's nothing inherent in that that suggests we ought to
| assume an upward skew.
|
| The best we can say is that the sampling skew this month is
| different than the sampling skew in past Januaries. That
| could be due to some interesting cause, it could be totally
| random, and there's zero point in speculating about it
| until we have more data.
| epolanski wrote:
| That would not change the expectation of having faster hardware
| with time at the same/lower price.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I have a theory that cpu performance in laptops plateauing is
| something we'll see more of in the future, as manufacturers
| further optimize for battery life and being very thin. 15 years
| ago I wanted a very powerful MacBook pro. Now I'm fine with a
| MacBook air and if I need to do something that requires heavy
| lifting, I have remote access (ssh, vnc over ssh, etc) into a
| loud, beefy hypervisor located somewhere else with 512GB of RAM
| in it.
|
| On the consumer level and for non technical end users, as more
| functions are offloaded to "the cloud" with peoples'
| subscriptions to office365, Google workspace, iCloud, whatever,
| having a ton of cpu power in the laptop also isn't as necessary
| anymore. Along with things like h.265 and av1 video encode and
| decode being done with GPU assist rather than purely in software.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I'm using a thinkpad t480 and it runs everything fine
| nosioptar wrote:
| My favorite computer is my t530. It's showing its age a bit,
| but the newer thinkpads I've used all feel like a step down
| quality wise
|
| I'll probably use the t530 as my primary machine for years to
| come.
| layer8 wrote:
| The chart also shows that single-thread performance hasn't
| improved that much in the past twelve or so years, compared to
| Moore's law. And this is compounded by Wirth's law [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| It's always interesting when I install Linux on a machine, and
| it can fit all running processes on a single page in top.
| altairprime wrote:
| It's remarkable how carefully the page is worded to not
| incorporate Apple's desktop and mobile CPU performance changes
| over time - but they screwed up because they said Linux, which
| doesn't exclude Apple Silicon like it used to thanks to Asahi.
| talldayo wrote:
| Ultimately Apple has hit the same dead end too. Their designs
| and TSMC's processes aren't putting Moore's law back on the
| map, you can see it in the year-over-year performance. If
| tariffs end up hitting any harder, Apple can't just go to
| TSMC's Arizona plant and get faster silicon than what Taiwan
| has today.
|
| > they screwed up because they said Linux, which doesn't
| exclude Apple Silicon
|
| In the context of the second graph, that means Apple Silicon is
| also failing to push the envelope forwards.
| markhahn wrote:
| average reflects the population, of course. max graph shows no
| such fall - laptops going up even.
|
| how about this interpretation: desktops are fast enough; laptops
| are getting faster but people tend to buy more usable laptops,
| not faster ones.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Could not get to the page.
|
| But, I dunno. I just bought an Asus Zenbook with an intel 9 ultra
| with Arc graphics 32Gb ram, 1tb SSD, and it seems pretty nifty to
| me, especially at the price.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| so 9 is fast? The rest of the specs are not CPU.
|
| My i7-13700H is shitting the bed due to poor software.
| Permanently on power-saving while charging because of "rapid
| charging". It'd be ok if it didn't render the whole computer
| useless at 400MHz, my first computer from circa 1996 is the
| only one clocked slower than that I ever had, and it had a
| turbo button
| zabzonk wrote:
| > The rest of the specs are not CPU
|
| Fair enuf. I was really trying to comment on the ultra/arc
| chip performance.
|
| > so 9 is fast?
|
| seems to be - my previous laptop was a Core i7, and my new 9
| Ultra one is definitely faster (for what I do with it). It
| goes into power saving only when it gets below about 30% of
| battery charge, and Asus give a lot of switches to fiddle
| about with that.
| zeroq wrote:
| Some 15 years ago I was playing DOTA on what you'd call today a
| gaming laptop (HP HDX9200) which would occasionally overheat
| causing BSOD and everytime it happened it was hail mary, because
| the boot time took around 5 minutes and it was the exact time for
| servers to flag me as leaver and ban me from future games.
|
| These days I have two main machines which boot to Windows in
| about a minute.
|
| Somehow I remember my old 486 machine was able to boot to DOS
| within the snap of a power button.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| My experience with recent hardware is that it is very poorly
| designed, not as "computational hardware", but as a "consumer
| product".
|
| Buying anything new for me is out of question since a few years
| ago, because it just cannot be guaranteed to survive half a year,
| hence now I always buy second-hand, because this way at least it
| was tested by the previous owner.
|
| But even so, modern hardware is hellishly unreliable.
|
| I bought a Dell 7 series laptop (17 inches), and:
| 1. Already had to replace the battery back panel three times,
| just because it is being held by tiny plastic hooks which are
| easily torn away. 2. It's assembly-reassembly process is a
| nightmare (which used to not be the case for Dell in the past).
| 3. Already had to replace the fans (the laptop is not even 5
| years old).
|
| but bear with me, the rest is more fun: 4. When
| running with a smaller battery (official), it CANNOT RUN THE GPU
| AT FULL SPEED EVEN WHEN PLUGGED INTO THE MAINS. Really? This is
| just ridiculous. A laptop using the battery when plugged in is
| just insane. 5. You MUST use a smaller battery to install a
| 2.5" SATA drive. So you much choose: either a SATA drive, or a
| GPU. 6. The power on/off button does not work if your BIOS
| battery has low charge. This is just maddening! What is the
| connection?
|
| Maybe it's just me and one single laptop? Well, in my experience,
| everything is getting similarly fragile. My phone has its thermal
| sensor installed ON THE BATTERY, so if you replace the battery,
| you have to replace the sensor as well, which is, oh, well, a
| harder thing to manufacture than a battery and on many non-
| official batteries always returns 0 (0 Kelvin that is, -273
| Centigrade).
|
| The amount of cacti you have to swallow to get used to modern
| hardware is just staggering.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Even in data centres, I'm starting to see performance
| regressions: I just benchmarked the recently released Azure
| Ddsv6/Edsv6 series of virtual machines, and in several metrics
| they're _slower_ than the Dadsv5 /Eadsv5 series that are more
| than three years older!
|
| IT hardware performance has definitely been levelling off. The
| exponential curves have become logarithmic.
| mook wrote:
| If I'm reading the model correctly, that's comparing Intel
| machines to AMD machines. I'd imagine it makes sense that there
| are workloads that AMD does better than Intel (and hopefully
| vice versa). How do Dadsv6 compare?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Azure doesn't have Dadsv6 in Australia yet. Any year now...
| any year.
|
| Fundamentally, they're both x86 CPUs, both "high end server
| chips", both in nearly identical (maxed-out) configurations,
| etc...
|
| I just got used to computers getting so much faster over a
| three-year time period that it was almost pointless to
| benchmark them. The vendor hardly mattered, not within such a
| narrow market segment.
| jart wrote:
| Sigmoid. That's the word you want.
| kqr wrote:
| Given the strong prior pattern, I forecast this is due to
|
| (a) changes in methodology/non-random sampling, with 60 %
| probability,
|
| (b) random sampling effects that go away on longer timelines,
| with 20 % probability,
|
| (c) any actual change in CPUs, with 20 % probability.
|
| In my experience, when a metric shows weird behavious these are
| usually the reasons with roughly those proportions.
| kqr wrote:
| I am somewhat surprised this has not happened earlier! In my
| circles there was a period around when the Eee PC and MacBook Air
| was new and manufacurers started cranking out ultra low power
| laptops that I felt we regressed in performance, but I suppose
| the majority of laptops sold were corporate things that didn't
| follow trends as closely.
| hulitu wrote:
| > The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the
| first time
|
| Well, a lot of HN users care more about battery life than
| performance, so it shouldn't be any issue. /s
|
| After computers dumbed down (Android, iOS, Windows), we now have
| computers that do nothing. /s
| reacweb wrote:
| A linear scale is no fit for a performance graph. Can we switch
| to a logarithm scale ?
| dusted wrote:
| Interestingly, so did server cpu thread performance, I guess
| we're now starting to see more direct prioritization of core
| count versus core performance, which I kind of understand, it's
| superficially simpler to think about horizontal scaling, and for
| very many workloads, it's ideal, and for many it's at least
| doable, though I fear the invisible overhead in both compute and
| complexity
| lynguist wrote:
| My hunch is that more people in countries like India use
| cpubenchmark / buy computers and try out cpubenchmark; and that
| in countries like those lower performing laptops outsell more
| powerful laptops by an enough large number that it shows.
|
| It doesn't have to be literally India, it's an example for
| illustration.
| baq wrote:
| Or the 'slow CPUs' are actually truly Fast Enough. Intel N100
| and N150 systems are low key amazing value.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I bought into the N100 hype train because of Reddit. Sure its
| an amazing value, but I hope anyone reading this isn't
| convinced it's remotely fast. I ended up going with a
| minisforum ryzen for about 2x the price and 4x the
| performance.
|
| I was a bit bummed since I wanted to use it as a kind of
| streaming box, and while it can do it, it is definitely slow.
| baq wrote:
| I got a 16GB RAM 512GB SSD N100 minipc for less than $150
| last month. Yes it could be faster (always true for any
| computer), but I feel I got way more than I paid for.
| Certainly a much better deal than an RPi 5.
|
| PS. If you need more power than that I have a hard time
| coming up with a better deal than M4 Mac Mini, perhaps with
| some extra usb storage. It's possibly the only non-
| workstation computer that is worth buying in the not-
| inexpensive category (in the base version, obviously).
| esperent wrote:
| > it could be faster (always true for any computer)
|
| The question isn't whether it could be faster, but
| whether it's slow enough to be annoying for the tasks you
| use it for.
|
| I bet most people would find the N100 annoyingly slow
| when opening documents or browsing the web, or doing
| crazy things like opening a few programs at the same
| time.
| baq wrote:
| > I bet most people would find the N100 annoyingly slow
| when opening documents or browsing the web, or doing
| crazy things like opening a few programs at the same
| time.
|
| I'm actually not convinced. If you're used to a fast box,
| yes; I'd argue most people actually aren't.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm annoyed opening a doc pretty much daily on a year old
| MacBook Pro.
|
| However the blame lies squarely with Microsoft. What the
| hell is their office suite up to?
| dartharva wrote:
| Sounds possible, office laptops in India are generally shit-
| tier. But the largest non-bulk retail buyers of laptops in
| India seem to be (from my armchair market observation)
| school/college kids, and school/college kids increasingly
| prefer gaming laptops (India is the largest consumer of gaming
| laptops after the US) that will likely not give below-average
| benchmark results.
| Max-q wrote:
| Is the steep climb in 2021 due to Apple Silicon entering the
| scene? Or maybe not, servers seem to follow the same pattern.
| It's a remarkable increase in performance on a short time.
| Sweepi wrote:
| What also happened in the same time frame according to this
| website: - [1] 1366 x 768 was the strongest
| growing monitor resolution - [2] Dual- and Quad core CPUs
| went up, 6-16 Cores are down - [3] 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM
| went up, 16/32 GB fell
|
| So it comes down to: More old (ancient?) machines in the Dataset.
| Why? Unknown, but probably not indicating a trend regarding the
| hardware people use in the real World (TM) has changed.
|
| [1] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html
|
| [2] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html
|
| [3] https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html
|
| [from 3dcenter.org : https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-
| des-12-februar-2025-0 [German]]
| londons_explore wrote:
| I feel like it could simply be that some big PC recycler,
| perhaps in a poorer nation reselling Windows Vista machines for
| $15 a pop, has decided to run this benchmark as part of their
| recycling process and it has skewed all the results.
| silvestrov wrote:
| For me it sounds more like cheap ChromeBooks because that is
| enough for most people's need.
|
| Very little in education needs more computing power than
| that.
|
| We've just told ourselves that computing power will always
| grow and that we will always need that growth.
|
| That might not be be true and computers might be like cars:
| we don't need (want) faster cars, we want cheaper and safer
| cars. Top speed no longer sells.
| elif wrote:
| Ehhh
|
| Having tried to install a modern Linux on a 2012 laptop, it
| simply is not as cozy as your memory records it.
|
| For reference even Linux designed for old hardware takes
| about 6 minutes to boot and even just using the console
| lags
| josephg wrote:
| That's wild and disheartening. Those machines ran great
| at the time. I had a 2011 MacBook Air which I adored - it
| was fast, small and for the day, it had great battery
| life.
|
| There is no reason for computers to get slower over time.
| Especially on linux.
| cl3misch wrote:
| The computers don't get slower, and light Linux distros
| should still work fine.
|
| But what matters is the software you're using, and that
| will be modern software (mostly). Modern browsers
| visiting JS-heavy websites, or a heavier office suite
| than 15 years ago.
|
| And if this is the context, then computers _must_ get
| slower over time, right?
| echelon_musk wrote:
| > There is no reason for computers to get slower over
| time. Especially on linux.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
| elif wrote:
| Bodhi Linux is the one I used on a Celeron based system.
| The distro is purpose built for retro hardware.
|
| I wish I could explain what is going on but it is
| physically painful to use, like you are remote desktoping
| over an iridium satellite
| elif wrote:
| Technically the chipset was released in 2008 but I
| believe this is a 2012 laptop (*)
| cztomsik wrote:
| I suspect those so-called, "zero-cost abstractions".
| goosedragons wrote:
| On what laptop and what distro? Does that PC lack an SSD?
| I have Ubuntu on a Thinkpad W520 and it does not take
| anywhere close to 6 minutes to boot, nor does the console
| lag but it also has an SSD installed.
| onre wrote:
| Does not reflect my experience at all. T420 from 2011 is
| still completely usable. Haven't clocked the boot-up time
| but definitely not minutes, more like a couple dozen
| seconds. Everything worked out of box with latest stable
| Debian. Can do 2560x1600 over the DP connector, too. This
| is not even a top-spec model but the slowest i5 available
| back then.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| To be fair, they didn't say /what/ computer from 2011 ran
| terribly. The Intel Core CPU's were the best back then.
| There were also Atom netbooks, terrible AMD chips, etc.
| AMD solidly has the performance crown now, but in 2011
| they did not.
|
| Pretty much anything from 2011 that was not a Core i5 or
| better will probably not run well today unless you use a
| purpose-built ultralight distro.
| timisthief wrote:
| How is battery life?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I have a couple of ThinkPad t420s's from 2011 in active
| use. One has windows 10 the other kubuntu. Key part was
| installing a $40 sata 2.5" ssd, and both operating
| systems boot in well under a minute, completely
| unoptimized.
|
| Big revolution of last 20 years was spinning drives to
| ssd. Otherwise, my daily drivers are all 8th generation
| Intel CPUs - I just got a ThinkPad x1 carbon for $300 cad
| from Facebook marketplace. 7 years old and runs
| brilliantly. My wife's daily driver is a t580.
|
| Which is all to say I have no idea how Linux is taking 6
| minutes to boot or even worse, lagging on terminal -
| something is horribly wrong there :-(
| alamortsubite wrote:
| You're doing something very wrong. Debian Bullseye boots
| in under 30 sec on my Dell XPS L321X, which was released
| in 2012 (timed with a stopwatch). I use the machine
| regularly.
| hexagonwin wrote:
| My 2008 MacBook with T8100 and 2GB ram boots Devuan 4
| (debian11) in <30 secs and there's no lag. What hardware
| are you on?
| m3rc wrote:
| I was just using a 2012 X230 running Arch and it's plenty
| snappy on the command line or even running an electron
| based editor (or as good as such a thing can be)
| Moru wrote:
| There was no mention of what distribution of linux, just
| "modern" whatever that means. If the person installs the
| lastest testversion of some distribution that tries to
| jam everything in there but does not have actual grapics
| drivers for the right card, it will be very sluggish. In
| the meantime my raspberry pi has no problems whatsoever
| with the latest linux.
| samiv wrote:
| Make sure that: - your framebuffer is
| hardware accelerated - your systemd doesn't have
| any timeouts or service hangups - run a lightweight
| environment such as fluxbox
|
| And you should really be fine still.
| lazylizard wrote:
| i host mail with spamassassin, a static webpage, and
| roundcube.. on a single core 32 bit atom with 2gb ram,
| 500gb seagate sshd, and debian... via a wireguard tunnel
| to a gcp instance.
|
| in fact i only admin it via ssh. first to the gcp
| instance, then to the atom inside the wg tunnel.
|
| its not that horrible.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I used a 2011 i3 dual core laptop with only HDD storage
| until ~2021 running linux. Boot time was nowhere close to
| 6 minutes and that was with luks encryption. It was maybe
| 90 seconds at most.
|
| It also worked perfectly fine for basic web browsing,
| including youtube.
|
| Biggest issue honestly was battery life.
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| SSD installs were, for the longest time, the single best
| ROI on upgrading a laptop. I think a SATA SSD in that
| 2012 bad boy could considerably boost its performance.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I still do this for friends and family: put in an SSD and
| maybe add a bit of RAM.
|
| Either, clone the OS or else do a fresh install. The old
| drive goes into a USB enclosure if it's a laptop.
|
| It feels like a brand new computer, going from minutes to
| seconds to do anything.
|
| (Going from a Raspberry Pi 4 on a MicroSD to a pi5 with
| an nvme drive is a similar night and day difference. The
| pi5 feels like a snappy modern computer. Previous pis
| always felt slow.)
| mftrhu wrote:
| I am still using a 2012 X230 and it taking 40 seconds to
| boot already feels slow. Six minutes sounds like an HDD
| boot, but _console lagging?_ I don 't know how that could
| even happen - I occasionally run OpenBSD on an even older
| Atom netbook, and even (un-accelerated) X doesn't really
| lag.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Explain the desktop and server numbers.
| echoangle wrote:
| Are they currently selling new Chromebooks with 1366 x 768
| screens?
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| Yes
| nfriedly wrote:
| Almost half the Chromebooks on newegg have that
| resolution: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=chromebook&Orde
| r=8&Submit=ENE&...
| kube-system wrote:
| They're pretty common at low price points. Good displays
| are expensive, it's an easy thing to cheap out on to
| lower cost.
| babypuncher wrote:
| It has to be something like this. I could believe slower
| machines growing in market share during high inflation, but
| nobody's making new laptops or monitors with 1366 x 768
| panels.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Apparently Windows XP is the dominant desktop OS in Armenia.
| They were savvy enough not to go to Vista I guess. (Not that
| the country is anywhere near large enough to skew global
| benchmarks.)
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| As other commenter said, prob has more to do with growth of
| computing in the developing world. Very little labor now that
| can't be done by someone living in a country where breakfast
| costs less than 25 cents. I mean, theoretically at least. Most
| of those people probably aren't learning from professors who
| spend their whole day teaching and doing research, and that
| kind of activity can only be supported by a relatively wealthy
| society. But, the internet has also democratized a lot of that
| activity. Well, its complicated either way.
| keyringlight wrote:
| It seems like a similar challenge as looking at the steam
| hardware survey stats, it's probably the best public source
| of information but it's too much of an overview to make
| anything but the most general conclusions from it. Within
| that data there's going to be millions of different stories
| if you could divide it up a bit - what are common
| combinations of hardware, what are common combinations in
| different age ranges, what is used for playing games of
| different ages, what's common in different locations in the
| world. Valve could possibly tie hardware to software
| purchasing activity as well what is played.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| Possibly a shift from bulkier older laptops to tablet hybrids?
|
| 1366 x 768 definitely sounds like it's just an increase in
| older machines though.
| starkparker wrote:
| 1366x768 laptops I can find in 10 minutes of searching, all
| being sold as new, running from $150 to $900
|
| HP 15-fd0023dx ($280, 12th-gen i3, Win 11 S, 8 GB RAM, 15.6"
| touchscreen)
|
| HP 15-fc0025dx ($580, Ryzen 5 7520U, Win 11 S, 8 GB RAM, 15.6"
| touchscreen)
|
| HP 15-fd0067nr, 15-fd0077nr ($510-$900, 13th-gen i5 or i7, Win
| 11 Home or Pro, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" non-touch)
|
| HP 14-DQ0052DX Stream 14 ($230-$280, N4120, Win 11 Home or Pro,
| 4 or 8 GB RAM, 14" non-touch)
|
| Lenovo IdeaPad 3 ($350, 11th-gen i3, Win 11 Home, 8 GB RAM,
| 15.6" touchscreen)
|
| ASUS Chromebook CM14 ($155-$280, MediaTek Kompanio 520, 4 GB
| RAM, ChromeOS, 14" non-touch)
| Sweepi wrote:
| "12th-gen i3" is longer then "i3-1215U" or "1215U", but
| removes all important Information[1]. Why do you (and people
| in general) do this? I dont get it.
|
| [1] a search engine will give you the intel ark page if you
| search for "1215U" which tells you thats a 2P+4E 15W Alder
| Lake CPU, however "12th-gen i3" could be a 4P+0E, but also a
| 2P+8E or a 4P+4E, and anything between 9W and 60W Basepower.
| esskay wrote:
| Not sure why this would be surprising.
|
| Even if we assume theres a bit of a skew because a recycler has
| run a bunch of benchmarks on old hardware, it's something that
| felt pretty inevitable.
|
| Average users dont need any more power than they have right now
| for their common activities (browsing and such), so havent been
| upgrading.
|
| There's been a large increase in low power machines, be it the
| N100's, portables such as the steam deck, etc.
|
| Until the next 'big thing' theres not going to be much of a need
| or desire to upgrade, you're not gaining anything at this point
| if your activities arent cpu constrained.
| friendzis wrote:
| > Average users dont need any more power than they have right
| now for their common activities (browsing and such), so havent
| been upgrading.
|
| Even on what could easily be called a "beefy" machine major
| websites on chrome make snails look like avatars of agility.
| curvaturearth wrote:
| Lots of laptops marketed as AI powered but have lower CPU speeds
| and total ram?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Do these graphs not include Macs at all? The text would suggest
| this to be true, but PassMark has existed in at least some form
| on Macs for a long time.
| 42lux wrote:
| That happens every year after Christmas when old pcs hit the
| second hand market...
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| most new software runs in the cloud. you only need the browser
| for many tasks. I even code in the cloud. for many people, why
| pay for something you dont need.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Because people with this point of view infest us with Electron
| apps which need 100000x the processing power that took men to
| the moon in order to run a chat app.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| About time! Every bit of compute performance increase I've had
| personally, has been eaten up by software bloat. Admittedly as
| software goes to use 10x as much compute, it does get better, by
| maybe 10%, but the explosive increase in compute performance up
| to, say, the mid 2010s mostly just served to encourage bloat and
| obsolete older devices.
|
| My main machine is from about 2012 - a garage sale hand-me-down
| ultra high end game machine of the time (24GB in 2012!) It does
| suck a fair bit of power, running 24/7 but it's comfortably
| adequate for everything, and that's with two simultaneous users.
| Such hand-me-down laptops as have come my way (garage sales or
| free) are also adequate.
|
| So if the continuing evolution is, instead, in compute per per
| joule, rather than absolute compute, I'm all for it. Graphics
| card power connectors melting at 570W... not for me.
| janaagaard wrote:
| These charts should be on a log scale.
| segmondy wrote:
| My main desktop at home is a 2011 hp envy. I sometimes think of
| upgrading, but why? It works. my main laptop is a roughly 10yrs
| old thinkpad. Outside of macbooks, PCs haven't really given any
| reason to upgrade unless one is a hardcore gamer.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Here's my thoughts,
|
| - The "Top CPU Performance to Date" has flatlined, so even if the
| hypothesis that developing countries are running PassMark is
| true, it doesn't explain everything.
|
| - The recent failures of high end Intel chips might be a factor.
|
| - This data is after the initial round of developers being
| replaced by AI and outsourcing.
|
| - PassMark doesn't include AI or ML benchmarks that the next
| generation hardware prioritizes.
|
| - CPU top clock speeds have been going down for more than a
| decade now, instead prioritizing the number of cores.
|
| - HPC labs are less likely to use PassMark because of licensing
| issues whereas free and open source alternatives exist.
|
| - The average consumer doesn't know or care about the difference.
| Instagram is still limited to around 1000x1000 pixel images and
| at most 1080p video with 30 fps.
|
| Personally, this signals that PassMark is not a good benchmark
| because I've seen a significant increases in my applications from
| recent CPU improvements like with AMD's EPYC offerings.
| fsckboy wrote:
| commoditization (i.e. enshittification) of computer hardware was
| taking place all through Moore's Reign, it was simply disguised
| and overwhelmed by all of Moore's "more".
| blufish wrote:
| but we got more battery life
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