Comment by eightysixfour
2 days ago
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.
For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.
Yesterday I had to setup a rig for a massive down load that was larger than any spare SSD I had laying around, so I got a 2TB HDD out of an old PVR and turned it into the main drive for an old Optiplex I have.
I had forgotten just how slow spinning disks are. The delay on everything is significant. Even just opening the file manager has a few second delay, Firefox took something like 15+ seconds to load in once it loads all its dependencies, something I haven't had in over a decade now.
You start to wonder if it is loading, you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.
> you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.
When I hit occasional delays - like opening a Windows Start menu or File Explorer - I still find myself straining my ears to hear that, despite no mechanical drives in use...
Now it's all calls to the internet.