@gemlog @albertcardona @danielgibert
I have no idea what the computing power of modern CPUs is used for. Sure, there are those who work with video or with professional audio in real time (these loads are often also well parallelized), there are those who often build huge projects (although there are few which might indeed benefit from more than a dozen threads), there are those who use many VMs and there are server loads — also well-parallelized.
@thatguyoverthere @albertcardona @gemlog
There is not a single computer I own that is less than a decade old and at least some of these computers still fit the bill. Well, in it's time all of them were top of the line hardware — that, at least in part, explains the longevity. I think if I get one of the more beefy System'76 laptops or Framework, hell, even the already old HP Dev One — I'd be easily set for another decade.
My old HP is first gen ProBook 430 — yes, its CPU is very dated, being fourth gen i5, but I've upgraded it with 16 gigs of RAM and a terabyte SSD, I've replaced old wireless adapter in it with a newer Intel one and now it's a great machine! As your can see, I've replaced almost everything in it but the motherboard — it's upgradable as very few modern laptops are: remove two screws and the bottom lid comes off — that gives you access to a wireless card, RAM and there is an NGFF slot even — that is currently unoccupied, but I can use it for a 4G modem or second SSD drive. Undo two more screws and you can remove the keyboard and get access to SATA port and internal drive — as you can see, you can take it almost completely apart having a single screwdriver. And with its tiny battery that is the size of three AA batteries I can easily squeeze four hours of battery life out of it — that is a decade old system, nowhere close to modern ones in terms of power efficiency.
And it's as sturdy as my original ThinkPads are — I got it used, it was a company laptop and office workers are usually not tender with their equipment to say the least, except for two rubber plugs missing covering the screws, it came in one piece and with very few noticeable scratches.
Sure, compared to modern laptops it might seem that it's severely lacking in terms of performance, and I might want to get a new laptop sooner or later — at least to have hardware support for H265 video encoding and decoding, but in most everyday tasks I don't feel it. I've even cross-built the whole Void Linux system for another piece of old equipment — an ARM netbook that didn't support prebuilt binary packages because it doesn't support a certain subset of instructions. And it didn't take me a week — several hours and I was done, which is more than acceptable in my book, besides — I can always offload this sort of tasks to a more powerful machine.
And the best part — if it falls apart, I can always get a new one just like it for literal pennies 😂 It's HP so they were fairly common — for part, or I can just put everything I have in this into another one, migrate my system over, and use it.
@albertcardona @gemlog
@m0xee
@thatguyoverthere @albertcardona @gemlog
My computing power needs seem to be only diminishing over time — I'm typing this reply now on a ThinkPad that is nearly two decades old 🤪 Sure, its age shows, but I can still find uses even for this machine.