Don't know about you, but I am thankful I don't have to upgrade my PC every one or two years just to be able to play the latest video games acceptably...

F2bnp wrote:

Don't know about you, but I am thankful I don't have to upgrade my PC every one or two years just to be able to play the latest video games acceptably...

Way to make a bad thing sound like a good thing. Yes, this is true, but does anyone force you to play latest videogames? It is not like it is a human right, and I think the competition between manifacturers would make more powerful PCs cheaper. Sure, 90s games had insane requirements for their time, but for example at that time a good work PC and a good gaming PC was about the same, a Pentium 100 with an S3 Trio was good for Word and Netscape, but it was also good for Duke Nukem 3D and Descent 2, there weren't really special "gamer PCs" and if you suddenly decided to also play games on your PC you didn't really have to upgrade the graphics card as long as it was not an OAK or a Trident (and I've never seen a Pentium with any of these 2 cards, all was either ATI Mach64 or S3 Trio, both excellent 2D cards). I played Diablo, Duke 3D etc... on my mom's Pentium 133 laptop while she used it for Excel and Word.

CPU upgrades were insane, true, but you could justify a new CPU better than a GTX Titan, because a Titan won't speed up Excel while a new CPU would speed up Excel and also speed up Quake and everyone would be happy.

Nowadays, any remotely decent GPUs are "for gamers only" and companies get rich of selling cheapish computers crippled by bus stealing integrated graphics. When Cyrix MediaGX tried that in the 90s it was rightfully bood by everyone, when they do it today we all happily eat it up.

Reaching Full HD as put a ceiling on things. I'm also happy about this to be honest. Now the consoles and games just need to catch up 😀

With video cards we still see huge gains. I mean I will always get value cards like the GTX660, but it's cool to be able to have an SLI system of 780GTX and play on Ultra HD or three monitors.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

The weakest link however for me was storage. A SSD just unlocks all this hidden power. I do like the speed. I can't work on a Core 2 Duo anymore, even with SSD, it's just not snappy enough for my liking...

No offense, but I think you're just spoiled. I work on mostly Pentium Dual Core/Celeron desktops daily in my parents office. They all have Windows XP on it and they seem snappier and faster to me than my i7 875k desktop with Windows 7. They are perfectly adequate for anything other than gaming. I'll buy a SSD for my home PC as soon as it will become a little cheaper for the GB size offered but honestly, I used PCs ranging from an 386SX16 to an i7 875k and I never got "spoiled" by any of them. I don't expect a computer to do tasks instateniously or to always produce smoothy buttery snappiness or whatever some of you people obsess about. For me when a computer is not slow sometimes, it is a sign I am not using it to its fullest potential 😀 . Many people throw out perfectly OK computers for ridiculously stupid reasons, I heard an older lady saying yesterday how she wants to throw her computer out just because it "doesn't play videos" (from what she said it seemed like her simply not being able to install Adobe Flash Player). We had a PC in the office that took 20 minutes to start. I formatted the HDD and reinstalled Windows XP on it, it now starts in cca 30 seconds. The only reason why you think you cannot use a Core 2 Duo is that you live in a country where people can actually afford new computers, I know exactly 2 people who use a CPU from the i3/i5/i7 series and one of them is me.

And GTX 660 a value card? Intel HD Graphics or Geforce GT 610 are "value cards" for me, not something that costs half of the average monthly income in this country.

You can call it being spoiled, for me it's time vs money. Nothing more frustrating than losing time because of a slow computer. I know that an old machine is snappy after a fresh load of Windows. But after a year or two and all the service packs, not so much.

I want my computer to be ready to go by the time I put the keys on the bench 😀

You're right, over here computers are dirt cheap.

PS: Value for me is not about $$$ figure, but about things like frames per dollar or gigabyte per dollar. And the GTX660 is amazing value from that point of view. German Computerbase.de is the ONLY website I know that actually does performance per dollar graphs.

A 610 is a waste of money. The bottom and top cards are the ones with worst value.

NJRoadfan wrote:

The problem isn't x86. Even the processor architecture of the future, PowerPC, ran into similar brick walls despite being RISC and much newer. Its the reason Apple dumped it for x86. After 2006, Intel focused on reeling in the excessive power consumption and heat of their CPUs. Some smart engineering and revisiting old ideas (P6 arch.) made it possible.

The focus on cores is a way to sidestep the issues Intel ran into with NetBurst and increase performance. The problem is most applications are still single threaded and not optimized to take advantage of multiple cores. Doing so is HARD since programmers have to deal with concurrency issues.

x86 is part of the problem. Intel and partners worked to completely replace it by an VLIW type instruction set that solved most of x86 limitations. I'm not going into why it failed, it's been properly discussed around the web. But it's a testimony of how the computing world became x86 dependant and things are stalling.

Developing better SIMD and expanding the opcode space has accelerated through the years. How many SSE additions have happened? Heck even AVX is little more than SSE on 256 bit registers. Unfair competition and instruction set wars have not helped too. If i'm an Intel competitor and i develop a much more flexible and performant SIMD, Intel is not gonna be in a hurry to adapt it because of several reasons, the most obvious one is that it would leave the competitor with a potential advantage. Developing CPU's takes years, and whoever has to adopt the other competing instruction set is gonna lag behind. For Intel it is preferable to keep owning 90% of x86 market and evolve x86 at their own pace than to lose 10% or more of that market because a competitor has a better way of accelerating x86. There's no point in complaining things are slowing down. On the hardware side there's little more Intel and AMD can do to improve performance unless we have transistors that can clock at 100GHz.

They had to go multi core but software optimization still has a lot to catch up. And like you correctly pointed it is hard to do so. There's no way out of this problem.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

PS: Value for me is not about $$$ figure, but about things like frames per dollar or gigabyte per dollar. And the GTX660 is amazing value from that point of view. German Computerbase.de is the ONLY website I know that actually does performance per dollar graphs.

A 610 is a waste of money. The bottom and top cards are the ones with worst value.

I agree that GTX 660 is an amazing card, I have it myself after all 😀 . It is just that many people (and advertising agencies) use "value" as an euphemism for "cheap crap". As for wasting time, as I said, these PCs are faster than my i7 desktop when it comes to work tasks as they run Windows XP. We still use Office 2003 on them, it is fast and has all the features we actually need, and you don't have to lecture people just to learn them how to use the eye candy, butchered interface of newer Office versions. We use a database program that probably runs fast at anything over 400 Mhz even through it is very recent. I can see your point if you work with advanced graphics or CAD, but in this case, "upgrading" to a "modern" Windows 7/8 desktops would probably only make it all slower and introduce a dozen of incompatibilities.

And computers are not dirt cheap in the West, it is your income that it so much higher than the vast majority of the world. The real average monthly income in Slovakia is around 500-700 euro, and often 400 euro or less. We are still a rich country in the global scheme of things, because half of the worlds population lives on less than 2 dollars a day, so about 10x less than in Slovakia. That's reality. Most people in the world would be happy for any computers at all. I am aware of that, and I'm also aware that if my parents didn't run a medium sized company I wouldn't have an i7 with a GTX 660, I would probably have a Celeron laptop or a Pentium (the dual core version) desktop with integrated graphics, like almost everyone I know.

m1so wrote:

Way to make a bad thing sound like a good thing. Yes, this is true, but does anyone force you to play latest videogames? It is n […]
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F2bnp wrote:

Don't know about you, but I am thankful I don't have to upgrade my PC every one or two years just to be able to play the latest video games acceptably...

Way to make a bad thing sound like a good thing. Yes, this is true, but does anyone force you to play latest videogames? It is not like it is a human right, and I think the competition between manifacturers would make more powerful PCs cheaper. Sure, 90s games had insane requirements for their time, but for example at that time a good work PC and a good gaming PC was about the same, a Pentium 100 with an S3 Trio was good for Word and Netscape, but it was also good for Duke Nukem 3D and Descent 2, there weren't really special "gamer PCs" and if you suddenly decided to also play games on your PC you didn't really have to upgrade the graphics card as long as it was not an OAK or a Trident (and I've never seen a Pentium with any of these 2 cards, all was either ATI Mach64 or S3 Trio, both excellent 2D cards). I played Diablo, Duke 3D etc... on my mom's Pentium 133 laptop while she used it for Excel and Word.

CPU upgrades were insane, true, but you could justify a new CPU better than a GTX Titan, because a Titan won't speed up Excel while a new CPU would speed up Excel and also speed up Quake and everyone would be happy.

Nowadays, any remotely decent GPUs are "for gamers only" and companies get rich of selling cheapish computers crippled by bus stealing integrated graphics. When Cyrix MediaGX tried that in the 90s it was rightfully bood by everyone, when they do it today we all happily eat it up.

What's your point? Can't your mom for example still buy a cheap computer to do her work? If you want to play games you can always drop a decent GPU in there and you're set. The Pentium 133 laptop you mention was probably quite expensive back then. I don't see how you can't do the same thing with a 500-600 $ laptop nowadays. It can play most games adequately. Same deal and cheaper with a desktop PC.If you want to do just work related stuff, Excel and Word and other productivity applications, why not get a particularly cheap desktop?
If you want to use it for games later, just drop in a decent GPU like I said.
Very few people need a Titan, why even mention it? The key word here is options. You have a lot of options. You want to play games at 720p and don't care if you have more than 30fps? Get something like a GTX 650 or 7750 and you're set (or even a fast AMD APU). Want to play on Full HD? Get a 7870 or 660 Ti. Want to do insane triple monitor or 1440p stuff? Get the fastest thing... twice! You have the option to do it!
Like you said, you don't have, but you can!

It actually wasn't expensive, she bought it in 2002 second hand. She has a Core 2 Duo laptop now for several years and she's happy with it.

Memory is another drag-inducing item in the equation.

m1so wrote:

Way to make a bad thing sound like a good thing. Yes, this is true, but does anyone force you to play latest videogames? It is not like it is a human right, and I think the competition between manifacturers would make more powerful PCs cheaper. Sure, 90s games had insane requirements for their time, but for example at that time a good work PC and a good gaming PC was about the same, a Pentium 100 with an S3 Trio was good for Word and Netscape, but it was also good for Duke Nukem 3D and Descent 2, there weren't really special "gamer PCs" and if you suddenly decided to also play games on your PC you didn't really have to upgrade the graphics card as long as it was not an OAK or a Trident (and I've never seen a Pentium with any of these 2 cards, all was either ATI Mach64 or S3 Trio, both excellent 2D cards). I played Diablo, Duke 3D etc... on my mom's Pentium 133 laptop while she used it for Excel and Word.

Computers were very, very expensive back then.

For instance, in 1996 a top ll of the line computer mightve been pentium 166/200mmx and cost say $3,000, we bought a cyrix 5x86-100 for about $1,000 If I recall correctly at the time, by late 98 or early 99 we bought another budget pc for about $1,000, it was a Celeron 333 on a BX motherboard, so 3 years later you had a budget pc stomping aover the top of the line system for a 1/3rd of the price!!!

I really dont get your point, a computer back in the 90s had a useful lifespan of about 2-3 years on average before it was obeselete and the more you spent the less you got in value for money, you say a pentium 100/133 could play games and do office work well but if it was new tech it cost a fortune and if it was a budget buy it'd be too slow to browse the net or play games in no time at all.

Here's what I don't get, why hasn't someone decided to come up with an all-new uber-powerful CPU architecture capable of emulating x86 well enough that people can easily transition from x86 to the new architecture? I firmly believe that x86 has pretty much hit its peak, and that we would be better off moving onto something better.

When a technology is very very refined its not easy to replace it with something "better".
Its the same with cars, the combustion engine is very refined and not easy to replace with some new "better" technology.

Its not only the CPUs or engines that you would need to replace, but also the whole infrastructure that support them.

Skyscraper wrote:

When a technology is very very refined its not easy to replace it with something "better".
Its the same with cars, the combustion engine is very refined and not easy to replace with some new "better" technology.

Its not only the CPUs or engines that you would need to replace, but also the whole infrastructure that support them.

Apple has done it already..... twice! The first time was the move from 68k to PowerPC. Than PowerPC to x86. Both times emulation was used to bridge the gap. There was even a bus architecture change in there, from NuBus to PCI in 1995. Intel tried to move away from x86 with IA-64/Itanium, you saw how well that went....

Both times Apple did it they jumped on a train that was already moving.

I would like to see the [All important x86 programs and games from the last 15 years] emulator 😀
Perhaps its possible with VMware like virtualization but the increase in performance has to be substantional for it to be worth the hassle.

Today's PCs have already moved substantially away from x86 architecture, there's actually very little still remaining of it. The last CPU that natively executed x86 code was Pentium (1) and x86_64 has cleaned up the instruction set as well. One could almost think of x86 instruction set as a bytecode executing on a modern CPU 😀
Sure Intel has tried the VLIW way with Itanium, but it's compilers never achieved the same performance as the current x86 microcode inside the hardware. And while ARM might be low-power king, it's nowhere near x86 on performance on high power. That's why Apple went x86 way... x86 might be bulky, but at the moment, no other architecture comes close in price, performance and power usage. And availability ofc 😀

I realize the focus is games perhaps, but for other duties, arguably more demanding I built many in the late 90's that held together for over 5 years with a few additions. I still use a later built P3TDLE (02 or 03) mentioned elsewhere. Anybody remember when VTech, a toy manufacturer now, made dual cpu 486's? One on board and one on a passive back plane like expansion slot? Or Jeronimo dual screen DOS video? My first single CPU was maybe my 4th or 5th computer, an Abit IT5H I still have. It started as a 75P clocked to 90 and ended a 292 Mhz. Then a P6SBM in 99 or so that went from a 333 and ended up a 1 gig server cpu that could hit 1200 Mhz and supported 768 MB ram. I still have it. Meanwhile I was focusing on SMP, having built many off of P6DLS's, still have one think, and P6DGe's, very nice board and had a monster P6DLF dual slot AT with 8 slots and dual power. Freaking huge. I do stick with Supermicro. Tried some Tyans, and did like that HX chip Abit so I built one BP6. Almost went for an 815 based dual 370, but it was an off brand I didn't trust.

Anyway, back in the day, with dollars to waste, there were lots of high end dualies to build that had higher memory limits and way more performance in real use than a common single eco box. They remained useful for 4-5 years in my opinion. Os/2 could help some. NT was useful since 1995 or so and later could support DX5 with a hack. I never used 95 or 98 and thought 2000 was a godsend. I have an adopted 3.2 P4, and I'll take the side of some, it's junk. I never spent much time to figure it out but when I really load it up it stacks up, skips, starts echoing any audio, etc. All while sucking the wall socket dry and heating the room better than fireplace. Same load, that P3TDle 1.4 simply hums away, updating slow enough to see, but never skipping a beat. I type this on a C2SBC-Q with a Q6600 with Quadro video, my newest old machine. Already 5 years old. Cores finally made a single cpu usable.

I bought myself a Windows XP Core2Duo E8400 machine mid'2008. It had 4Gb of memory, Geforce 8800GTS 512, 500 Gb HDD. Mid'2011 I moved to another city and left that PC to my brother.

Mobo and HDD already died since (he bought himself new ones accordingly), and 8800GTS 512 got replaced by a 550Ti for better performance. But otherwise the PC is alive, running Windows 7 and doing it smooth enough to play modern games in Full HD, maybe not in highest quality.

I have learned after wasting thousands that if one tweaks their system right and not fill it with bloatware they really don't need anything better than a i3 at the most. For what most people do a C2D is more than enough especially when the vast majority of the their time is spent surfing the web or jacking around on facebook. To many people with ocd and way to much money focusing on superficial aspects of their systems complaining about everything when they already have much more than they really need. It like those rich kids with a new Land Rover or BMW that ends up wanting something else as soon what they have isn't cool anymore.

After working at a local shop reloading customer machines and seeing what most people were putting on their machines that made them run horrendously slow. Half a dozen instant messing apps, norton, McAfee, lots of tool bars, malware infections (LOTS), happy clicking everything, and everything that one should never do to their computer. Even the new machines that popped up that were only weeks out of the box that were the latest most fandangled thing had all the same problems. In the end more than half of the problems with any system especially performance it is the user. A little tolerance does wonders on the wallet and the rest can be made up being thrifty.

I bought a dual PII-400 BX-based Dell Workstation in late 1998. I upgraded the RAM to 1 GB and CPU's to 850 MHz in 2007. I had two graphic card and HDD upgrades from 1998 to 2007. This system was on 24/7 and used everyday as my all purpose computer until early 2013. That's a 15-year lifespan. The system did cost around $4000 in 1998 though. The system is still functional today, but is currently in retirement.