Moore's law is dead dead, for real.
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Moore's law is dead dead, for real. My PC is five years old, and current generation CPUs aren't even twice as fast on any of the leading benchmarks. I built it to last, spending a bit more than seemed reasonable for all the components, because I don't like the disruption of switching to a new machine. But, it's probably the longest I've ever had the same primary computer in my life, and I'm surprised to find I probably ought to wait a bit longer, so the improvement is even noticeable.
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Moore's law is dead dead, for real. My PC is five years old, and current generation CPUs aren't even twice as fast on any of the leading benchmarks. I built it to last, spending a bit more than seemed reasonable for all the components, because I don't like the disruption of switching to a new machine. But, it's probably the longest I've ever had the same primary computer in my life, and I'm surprised to find I probably ought to wait a bit longer, so the improvement is even noticeable.
I should note I upgraded the GPU three years ago, not because I had any performance problems, but because AI was becoming a thing at work (computer vision and object detection, not chatbots) and Nvidia dominates in AI and I had an ATI (or AMD?) before. So, that's probably contributing to my general lack of urgency when it comes to building a new machine. Also, I rarely play games that need a lot of performance, so nothing ever reminds me my computer is approaching ancient.
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I should note I upgraded the GPU three years ago, not because I had any performance problems, but because AI was becoming a thing at work (computer vision and object detection, not chatbots) and Nvidia dominates in AI and I had an ATI (or AMD?) before. So, that's probably contributing to my general lack of urgency when it comes to building a new machine. Also, I rarely play games that need a lot of performance, so nothing ever reminds me my computer is approaching ancient.
OK, so, turns out the benchmarks I was looking at were a bit out of date. The current AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D (or 9800X3D) quite recently released is a bit more than three times faster than my current CPU on most benchmarks. And, since the options were to spend a few hundred bucks to double my RAM or spend $1300 for a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM (but newer RAM is cheaper than RAM for my old motherboard), I opted to get all new. Three times the performance feels worth the hassle and expense.
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OK, so, turns out the benchmarks I was looking at were a bit out of date. The current AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D (or 9800X3D) quite recently released is a bit more than three times faster than my current CPU on most benchmarks. And, since the options were to spend a few hundred bucks to double my RAM or spend $1300 for a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM (but newer RAM is cheaper than RAM for my old motherboard), I opted to get all new. Three times the performance feels worth the hassle and expense.
@swelljoe Based on your earlier post about not feeling that you needed to upgrade your CPU ("Moore's Law is dead"), I gather you're feeling cramped in terms of RAM on the current machine. I'm curious, how much RAM do you currently have, and what's using most of it?
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OK, so, turns out the benchmarks I was looking at were a bit out of date. The current AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D (or 9800X3D) quite recently released is a bit more than three times faster than my current CPU on most benchmarks. And, since the options were to spend a few hundred bucks to double my RAM or spend $1300 for a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM (but newer RAM is cheaper than RAM for my old motherboard), I opted to get all new. Three times the performance feels worth the hassle and expense.
Also, the NewEgg builder is really nice. Shows compatible stuff, makes suggestions, show deals, etc. It wasn't able to reliably suggest Mini-ITX motherboards, for some reason (including ATX in the list even after I set it to only Mini-ITX), but otherwise it's super nice to have it show compatible stuff in one place. I don't remember it being this easy/quick to spec out a new computer in the past.
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@swelljoe Based on your earlier post about not feeling that you needed to upgrade your CPU ("Moore's Law is dead"), I gather you're feeling cramped in terms of RAM on the current machine. I'm curious, how much RAM do you currently have, and what's using most of it?
@matt I have 32GB, which is usually sufficient, but I've been running a bunch of VMs lately for device bringup image building and testing (for robots and support hardware), and I just find I'm getting cramped either in the VM or in the host, if I give the VMs enough room to work effectively/quickly. It's not terrible, but it's enough to where I notice and even enough to where the OOM killer kicks in sometimes.
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@matt I have 32GB, which is usually sufficient, but I've been running a bunch of VMs lately for device bringup image building and testing (for robots and support hardware), and I just find I'm getting cramped either in the VM or in the host, if I give the VMs enough room to work effectively/quickly. It's not terrible, but it's enough to where I notice and even enough to where the OOM killer kicks in sometimes.
@matt I could add swap to push the purchase out longer, but I strongly believe in investing in tools. My time has value, and this is slowing down my work enough to where it's either double the RAM for $300 or more than double the performance and the RAM for $1300...I think it's time for the latter. Five years is a long time for me to go between computers. The longest I've ever gone, probably. It is the primary tool of my job, after all.
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@matt I could add swap to push the purchase out longer, but I strongly believe in investing in tools. My time has value, and this is slowing down my work enough to where it's either double the RAM for $300 or more than double the performance and the RAM for $1300...I think it's time for the latter. Five years is a long time for me to go between computers. The longest I've ever gone, probably. It is the primary tool of my job, after all.
@swelljoe Fair enough. I'm glad to hear the culprit isn't Electron or your web browser.
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@swelljoe Fair enough. I'm glad to hear the culprit isn't Electron or your web browser.
@matt I remain free of Electron in my daily life. I mostly use NeoVim for editing (though I'm testing Zed lately, which is native software built with Rust), and run the usual suspect (Slack) in my browser rather than using the standalone app, which I think is Electron. I find JavaScript apps sluggish...but, maybe that's because I've got a five year old computer.
Firefox isn't tiny, but adding a couple of big VMs is usually where a problem arises.