Comment by rpcope1
3 months ago
I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.
3 months ago
I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.
Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.
I have come to doubt that single core or CPU performance in general, other than maybe specialty applications like CAD and some games, is all that noticeable for most computer users in the last decade. I can take relatively pedestrian users like my parents or my wife and put them in front of a decade old high end Haswell system or a brand new mega-$$$ threadripper/epyc and for almost all intents and purposes they don't notice a different. What they do notice is when things die. I'm sure consumer hardware might be OK for 2-3 years (maybe), but like for my parents, they're happier to keep using the same computer, and honestly the same Dell Precision system I gave them almost 10 years ago works great today, and I have a suspicion that the hardware, outside of maybe the SSD finally wearing out, will probably work right a decade from now too.
> Very few applications scale with cores
You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.
Compilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ...
(Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.)
I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.
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Test suites often don't scale, actually. Unit tests usually run single-threaded by default, and also relatively often have side effects on the system that mean they're unsafe to run in parallel. (Sure, sure, you could definitely argue the latter thing is a skill issue.)
In theory, do you need a single machine for any of that, or would it be cheaper to use a low-availability cloud cluster? Tests are totally independent, and builds probably parallel enough.
Only a small percentage of computer users are programmers.
There were several years where used cheese grater Mac Pros could be bought and upgraded for very cheap, and were still not too outdated. I only replaced my MacPro4,1 when the M1 mini came out, mainly cause of wattage.
I've had zero issues with AMD's consumer tier of non-WX Threadripper and Ryzen models, FWIW.
overblown? billions of users use consumer tier hardware just fine. i have servers at home with years of uptime without any ECC memory
But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.
If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware.
I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.
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I'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.
I hate my workstation desktop I assembled 15 years. It just doesn't break! I have no excuses to buy a new one (except for video card).