I'm not much of a tech person and I have no idea if my observations are worth anything, but from where I'm sitting it seems computer technology isn't advancing anywhere near as quickly as it was from the 80s to the early 2010s.
The original Moore's law is dead and has been for a very long time, but the less specific trend of rapidly increasing computational power doesn't seem to hold much water anymore either. The laptop I have now doesn't feel like much of an improvement on the laptop I had four years ago at a similar price point. And the laptop I had six years ago is really only marginally worse.
So for those in the know on the relevant industry, how are things looking in general? What is the expected roadmap for the next 10 to 20 years? Will we ever get to the point where a cheap notebook is capable of running today's most demanding games at the highest settings, 144fps, and 4k resolution? Sort of like how today's notebooks can run the most intensive games of the 90s/early 2000s.
The computers aren’t shittier, you’re poorer.
You said earlier itt that you’ve got a $400 new in box laptop and it sucks more than it should.
$400 is the same as $300 in 2010 and $200 in 2000.
I don’t think there was a new in box laptop for $200 during y2k and maybe you’d get a netbook for $300 in 2010…
That could be the case, but my comparison was to a four year old and six year old laptop, not one from 13 years ago in 2010.
That’s a fair point. I’d be interested to know what you’re comparing and what didn’t feel like much of an improvement to you.
Specifically, six years ago I had an Asus Vivobook with an i5-8250U, Intel HD 620 graphics, 8GB ram, and 1TB HDD. A couple months ago I got a Dell Inspiron with an i5-1035G1, Intel UHD G1 graphics, 8GB ram, and 256GB SSD.
Turns out the CPUs are only three years apart in age, but nevertheless I bought them both new, in box six years apart at roughly the same price point. The biggest difference has been the SSD hugely speeding up loading screens and boot times, but other than that they got roughly the same performance in the few games I play. Minecraft, KSP, some Civ, etc.
Since buying the Inspiron, I upgraded the ram to 16GB when I realized my brother had a broken laptop with the exact same 8GB sodimm stick inside it. That actually was a huge performance increase, but had I bought the laptop like that the price would have been much more than the Vivobook .
Windows eats up RAM lately, 16 GB is considered the minimum for playing games or even for office work, 100 web browser tabs use a ton of it.
Adding that other RAM stick to your PC doubled the memory throughput by making it dual-channel. AMD cpu/gpu combo processors greatly benefit from having faster RAM. It might be the same for Intel.
A few years back I was looking at buying a used AMD laptop with built-in graphics, so I could play games that wouldn't work as well on an Intel GPU. For some fucking reason, laptop makers used to sell AMD laptops that had a limitation that prevented the GPU performance boost of dual-channel RAM by having some bottleneck in the motherboard because it was slightly cheaper.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure as well the ram upgrade massively boosted that little iGPU. For the first time ever I was able to play KSP at above 30fps with clouds and atmospheric scattering enabled. The difference was like night and day. Had I known dual channel was this helpful to iGPUs, I'd have gotten more ram for every single laptop I've ever had.
your old processor was clocked literally 60% faster than your new one (1.6ghz vs 1.0ghz).
For most people’s use case the ram and ssd really are the only thing that matter. The new media handling extensions in the tenth gen chip might make video chat or streaming better though.
E: I’m dying. You made a post asking if computer technology is advancing slower and everyone (including me) ran in to explain how it was a broader phenomenon when you just bought a slower computer than the last one! We’ve all been had!
It's my understanding you can't compare CPUs across different generations by clock speed these days. Also, the i5-1035G1 in my laptop is almost literally never at the 1.0ghz base speed. That's only what it does when the battery is nearly dead and I have all the battery saving options turned on. The vast majority of the time it's around 2.4ghz when it's actually working on something.
And it's worth noting the maximum boost speed of the i5-1035G1 is 3.6ghz whereas the i5-8250U only reaches up to 3.4ghz. I think the clock speed metric is irrelevant in this case.
I mean, youre kinda right. intel (and amd) adds so much stuff each generation that you cant just say "more cycles means more faster". it's not always clear how those new instruction sets impact normal stuff people do on computers though.
why not compare them with benchmarks?
the newer chip is a little faster on most stuff and a lot faster on some stuff, but there are also loads where it's slower than the old one, sometimes significantly.
At that price you should just get a tablet. Laptops I'd spend no less than $1100 on for something thats functional. You can get a galaxy 7 tab which is pretty decent for around $500 bucks and will last you a good number of years.
Computers like a mid tier gaming rig looking at $1200-1500 to god tier for 3000+
Steam decks and ROG Ally are gaming laptops that have been getting a lot of praise for around $500.
What we are seeing is a lot more diversity in highly specialized devices. Like CPUs - do you want more concetrsted game fuel or do you want more data crunching? So theres more thought going into beyond I want low mid high tier but what do you want the machine to do best of?
To be honest, I just massively prefer the form factor of a laptop to a tablet. I never really got accustomed to the whole touchscreen only thing.
But other than that, I wouldn't call my 400 dollar laptop non-functional. I actually quite like it a lot, it's been great at the things I got it for. It's not really meant for gaming, but it does alright on non-graphically intensive indie-games that I absolutely could not play without a physical keyboard. My post mostly just stems from noticing it's not a huge improvement over a laptop from 2017 in the same way a PC from 2010 would be a massive improvement compared to a PC from 2004.
That's fine. My husband had a couple of $400 laptops that lasted maybe a couple years before they broke down they couldn't handle much more than one or two open tabs on a browser. That's the source of my prejudice.
If it works for you then cool it's doing what you need.
Definitely, I see where you're coming from on that . I've seen laptops priced similarly that belong in a trash can, it might be that I just got a really good deal on this one.
i actually think the op got a pretty decent new computer for $400.
the inspiron 3000 series can take 16Gb of ram, an nvme ssd and a 2.5" sata drive iirc. they could have a 5tb hdd to go with their fast ssd.
plus at the risk of sounding lame, it's a dell inspiron. how many non-alienware dells blow their mosfets regularly? I don't work with the 3000 series too often (a good sign!) but generally dells midrange/business/institutional offerings run forever.