gradenko_2000 posted:

I went back to the office for a full shift for the first time since March 2020 and I had to work out of my laptop with an i5-7200U (2c/4t Kaby Lake) and 8 GB of RAM and goddamn that poo poo was chugging with nothing but Edge browser tabs

gradenko_2000 posted:

I went back to the office for a full shift for the first time since March 2020 and I had to work out of my laptop with an i5-7200U (2c/4t Kaby Lake) and 8 GB of RAM and goddamn that poo poo was chugging with nothing but Edge browser tabs

I've been using my personal rig to work all this time, and I used to be a snob about "why are we buying mini-PCs with an i5-10400T for workstations? shouldn't a Pentium be enough?" and I swear to you I am never going to do that again because I've taken all that firepower for granted and I realize that it matters even if you're just pushing spreadsheets

CFox posted:

I'll go against the grain a bit and say I'm actually surprised how well Windows and Edge works on low end hardware. I got my kids a couple of laptops to do their schoolwork on, they have 4gb of ram and a Pentium Silver N5030. It's a quad core 1.1 base 3.1 boost in a fanless laptop. This thing handles the web without a hitch including youtube and even plays Stardew Valley, Untitled Goose Game, and A Short Hike without any slowdowns. Not like those are demanding games or anything but for what I consider bottom of the barrel specs I'm nothing but impressed. I will add the caveat that the laptops are running LTSC which is based on 1809 and not whatever the current version of Windows is, I was concerned about ram usage more than anything with that choice. Plus I'm not a fan of being Microsofts beta tester for updates, I do enough of that doing QA at work, but that's a whole different conversation.

I think the problem with corporate laptops is all of the absurd security programs they throw on there. I think mine has 3 different ones running at all times. You need all of the power you can get just to compensate for that nonsense.

shrike82 posted:

Seems like a Chromebook would be better if you're going that low end and if it's for school work

CFox posted:

I think the problem with corporate laptops is all of the absurd security programs they throw on there. I think mine has 3 different ones running at all times. You need all of the power you can get just to compensate for that nonsense.

shrike82 posted:

Seems like a Chromebook would be better if you're going that low end and if it's for school work

CFox posted:

I think the problem with corporate laptops is all of the absurd security programs they throw on there. I think mine has 3 different ones running at all times. You need all of the power you can get just to compensate for that nonsense.

Beef posted:

Yep, this is why corporate machines need more firepower than a chromebook or 2/4 threads. Although more threads don't help much if McAfee decides that now it a good time to scan your entire HD.

mobby_6kl posted:

And yet. My brand new X1 thinkpad, with the i7-1185g7 (which is supposed to be at least twice as fast as the desktop CPU) takes like 5 minutes to be usable after a restart because of all the poo poo that gets loaded by the corporate overlords. Yeserday I had to abort a meeting with a friend because it was getting choppy and audio was dropping out because it decided to install updates while McAfee was doing whatever the gently caress McAfee does.

movax posted:

Is the thermal throttling on it totally hosed? Mine will occasionally just decide to drop to 400 MHz and sit there until I reattach AC power (disconnect, reconnect) — even when not thermally limiting. Zoom, as far as I can tell, also uses some instruction set that ensures that the 1185 runs somewhere 3-4 GHz; I legitimately pull out my iPad now and set it next to my laptop for video calls — its just not worth it to me to murder my battery on the Thinkpad.

The last ‘good’ laptop I used was my 2018 XPS 13 which I think was a Kaby Lake-R CPU. 2021 XPS 13 with Ice Lake (10th gen) was a total piece of unusable poo poo, just BSODs regularly and the X1 (1185G7) doesn’t BSOD but its TDP management leaves much to be desired still, IMO.

Naturally, my M1 devices suffer none of the above and run circles around the Intel parts. Maybe if I move further into management and away from fun engineering things, I can start to daily drive a Mac instead of a Windows machine.

Agreed posted:

So I am just personally kind of uncomfortable with water cooling my system, too anxious about leaks or malfunctions and I prefer and trust big rear end air cooling setups which have been giving me great results since the Hyper 212 days (though best results since I switched to Noctua coolers back in like 2011).

On my new build, I'm using a NH-15D, and I have to say I am really impressed with the performance of my new 12900K CPU with a PL1/2 of 190W/190W and a -0.05V offset. I haven't had it top 83ºC in 100% utilization testing, and that's momentary temperature spikes while it mainly stays in the mid to upper 70s while running 189-191W through it with 100% all core utilization. In real world usage it has rarely gone above 72ºC with big workloads and for general use, low 60s and under.

It seemingly turbos to the same frequencies as before, and I've lost almost no score in benching by setting the voltage offset, and only a hair that seemingly manifests only in multi-threaded tests (and is still as good as benchmarks with my RAM configuration online!) from setting the power limit.

Intel went close to the sun on this thing to chase the label of fastest but you can get great performance out of it on air, too, while favoring a little more efficient operation. Of course nowhere near what Apple is achieving with their new direction but it wasn't ever going to be that. I wanted outrageous single threaded performance with great multi threaded performance for DAW usage and this is nailing it for me.

mobby_6kl posted:

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

Sorting by memory is about the most useless thing you can do, because it gives you the virtual size, not the resident set size (or some completely made-up number, there doesn't seem to be agreement on what it gives).
You need vmmap from sysinternals.

Part of what you're talking about, though, is the sheer bloat of any software stack.
Windows as an OS is thought to be over 100 million lines of code, whereas a Linux distribution like Debian is on the order of 85 million (with 31 million of that being the kernel, roughly 4/5th of which is driver code), and something like FreeBSD being absolutely svelte by coming in at just over 16 million lines in total (and about 3 million lines for the kernel).

Add to this that something like Firefox is 40 million lines of code (partly in Firefox itself, partly in the Mozilla Shared Core), and something like Photoshop is probably on the same order of magnitude as Windows itself, and it's quite frankly astonishing that we can get any work done, whatsoever.

Mr Crucial posted:

What am I missing?

ConanTheLibrarian posted:

So that I could remap the buttons on a new Corsair mouse, I had to install an 836MB download. Despite the size, it was remarkably unintuitive to use and occasionally forgets the mappings. At least OSes and browsers do something.

Hughmoris posted:

Honest question here:

From the benchmarks I've seen, DDR5 offers very little performance advantages over DDR4 and costs a lot more. Is the DDR5 showing unimpressive because this is the first generation, or is the DDR5 standard itself just bleh?

Or am I way off base?

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

Inter-generational differences would mean a lot more if things like command rates, latency, and features like ECC or things of that nature were the sort of things we'd see improved/added, instead of just the bandwidth of the ICs and how big the ICs can get during intra-generational periods.

Methylethylaldehyde posted:

Most of the latency issues are fundamental to DRAM in general, and how we've placed it on the motherboard. Arbitrarily large power use could lower the latency some, but basically everything BUT speed and size are already as good as it's gonna get.

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

Nah, you can buy low-latency DRAM, if you pay enough.

Just look at the HFT servers Intel sell, after they bought BlackRock. Here's a brochure, but remember if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it.

Methylethylaldehyde posted:

You can buy it, but the difference between DDR4-3600 CAS 16 and CAS 8 is still a factor of 10 slower than SRAM in the best case. The '10ish ns' average latency across 2-3 generations suggests that it's near the fundamental limits of physics under the cost/capacity/speed/distance/power tradeoffs we've settled on for DRAM products.

If someone got a large enough hair up their rear end about latency in DRAM, you could trade capacity, power and speed for lower overall latency. But it would need to be a completely new mask set for a really niche product. It would probably be way easier to bring the memory to sub-ambient, crank the voltage to the bleeding edge of what it can handle, and bring the timings down as low as you can.

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

Although to be honest, if non-volatile flash ever gets to the write endurance of volatile DRAM, we may just move main memory to be non-volatile and completely get rid of notions of paging, installing, traditional filesystems, and basically anything else.