I'm the reason vendors sell gimped PC hardware.

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, because I buy it. The lowest of the low-end. So do, I figure, millions of other people. People on a budget, people that have never quite known a REALLY high-end rig, people that believe in only buying a computer as powerful as you need, people that think that by buying a lower-end, but lower-powered PC, that they are "saving the environment", etc.

Discuss. The "problem" of the existence of low-end / "just good enough" computing. The lack of catering to enthusiasts, by and large. The slowing / reversing of the practical version of Moore's Law, that used to at least mean that buying a new PC five years later, would get you a faster one, which isn't even true anymore.

 

[MrTeal]

So you're the reason I'm not running a 10GHz 5nm hexadecicore CPU?

 

[VirtualLarry]

So you're the reason I'm not running a 10GHz 5nm hexadecicore CPU?

Yeah, that... Uhm, and semi-conductor physics.

Edit: I guess I wasn't trying to suggest that the problem was that we don't have 10Ghz CPUs by now, exactly. More like, the options on the market at the time, too many of them are lower-end. Which may be down more to marketing than physics, to prop up the margins of the higher-end chips.

 

[escrow4]

The slowest desktop Celeron - the G1820 - has enough grunt to browse xvideos and youporn whilst an average spreadsheet is ticking along in the background with an email client and something else is playing music (actual music, not just grunts). For the average person, what more do they need?

In terms of OS fluidity there is a slight difference but its not worth an extra $150-$200 to drop in an i5. You could mention video encoding and other grunty stuff but the average person consumes, not creates. You don't need a "powerful" computer anymore for basic desktop usage.

I wouldn't drop below that to Bay or Cherry Trail or AM1 for an everyday system though. If you go too cheap, you do compromise too much.

---------------------------------------

EDIT: $40 currently on Newegg, no special promos or nothing:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116974

Add a cheap $50 H81 board with an onboard USB 3 header and you are ready.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yea, Larry. But at least you know what you are getting into, usually.

The main problem I have is tablet chips renamed like big cores and being sold in desktops and large notebooks. Looking at you, atom celeron and pentium, and to a lesser extent AMD cat cores being branded much like Kaveri.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yes, because I buy it. The lowest of the low-end. So do, I figure, millions of other people. People on a budget, people that have never quite known a REALLY high-end rig, people that believe in only buying a computer as powerful as you need, people that think that by buying a lower-end, but lower-powered PC, that they are "saving the environment", etc.

Discuss. The "problem" of the existence of low-end / "just good enough" computing. The lack of catering to enthusiasts, by and large. The slowing / reversing of the practical version of Moore's Law, that used to at least mean that buying a new PC five years later, would get you a faster one, which isn't even true anymore.

I don't know if it's really a "problem" or that low end PCs are the reason that CPUs aren't seeing big YoY speed gains. I just don't think the software or applications are there yet. IOW, the average consumer - even an enthusiast - doesn't really benefit from having an 18 core Xeon on their desktop.

Meanwhile, chips like that basically show us what we could have on our desk if we still stuck 130w+ CPUs in our minitowers. We are definitely seeing impressive performance gains in terms of performance per watt, (transistors per watt?) just not performance-per-core.

(And yeah, that's a $6k chip, but the price reflects development and research costs that aren't going to be amortized over a huge number of CPUs.)

As for your personal culpability? ()

You're one person out of millions of people who buy clothes at Walmart, tools at Harbor Freight, and low-end computers and cell phones to match. There's no shame in that, really. People do what they can with the resources they have. But when the math is in favor of spending a little more money for the computer that will last you twice as long? Being penny-wise and pound-foolish is a really hard habit to break. My mom broke my dad of the habit, but the contents of my grandfather's garage tell me it's hereditary.

Honestly, I'd be surprised if we didn't spend about the same money on computers every year... but my three computers can beat up your eleven.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yea, Larry. But at least you know what you are getting into, usually.

The main problem I have is tablet chips renamed like big cores and being sold in desktops and large notebooks. Looking at you, atom celeron and pentium, and to a lesser extent AMD cat cores being branded much like Kaveri.

I really hate that. It's blatantly deceptive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The main problem I have is tablet chips renamed like big cores and being sold in desktops and large notebooks. Looking at you, atom celeron and pentium, and to a lesser extent AMD cat cores being branded much like Kaveri.

That's what I'm basically talking about. The CPU makers, in conjunction with the OEMs (and I'm not sure which party is more to "blame" for this phenomenon) conspire, to "deceive" (is that too strong a word? Maybe "persuade") the customer, and get the to buy a lower-end chip than they were expecting, given at least minimal experience with desktop PCs and familiarity with the traditional branding. (Edit: To expand, the retailers are complicit with this too, often times (I'm look at you, BestBuy web site) listing ONLY "Celeron" or "Pentium" for CPU type, rather than listing the FULL model code for the CPU, and letting the customer make a truly informed decision.)

Then again, I bought the Lenovo IdeaPad 100s, with the full knowledge that it came with an Atom Z3735F, and I was actually impressed with it. It's not noticeably "laggy", with forum web browsing, and it seems to only sip battery life. (10 hours on a charge!)

 

[Edgemeal]

So you're the reason I'm not running a 10GHz 5nm hexadecicore CPU?

Na, Intel!
Chips By admin Jul. 26, 2000 1:22 pm
Intel is predicting that its microprocessors will hit 10GHz by the year 2011. In addition, it is currently working on a system bus that is 10 times faster than its upcoming 400 MHz (4*100MHz) Pentium 4 system bus, working at effective speeds of around 4 GHz.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The slowest desktop Celeron - the G1820 - has enough grunt to browse xvideos and youporn whilst an average spreadsheet is ticking along in the background with an email client and something else is playing music (actual music, not just grunts). For the average person, what more do they need?

In terms of OS fluidity there is a slight difference but its not worth an extra $150-$200 to drop in an i5. You could mention video encoding and other grunty stuff but the average person consumes, not creates. You don't need a "powerful" computer anymore for basic desktop usage.

I wouldn't drop below that to Bay or Cherry Trail or AM1 for an everyday system though. If you go too cheap, you do compromise too much.

Add a cheap $50 H81 board with an onboard USB 3 header and you are ready.

I guess, that's part of my point too. Why aren't the lowest-end retail systems, using Core CPUs instead of Atom? Why isn't the lowest-end CPU you can buy in a retail OEM rig, a G1820 Haswell. I agree that that CPU is plenty perky for most desktop users' tasks.

Why is it that they are all Atom instead? Is it due to the OEMs? They wouldn't do it if they weren't selling. Why are they selling? Because millions of customers are being actively deceived? Because they are just on a budget, and the OEMs don't offer Core-based rigs that cheaply? Or is it due to Intel, pulling strings with the OEMs, offering "rebates" to promote Atom at the low end? I think I recall reading on these forums some blurb about Intel trying to expand the use of Atom Celerons and Pentiums, by branding them as such, rather than just "Atom", where they IMO belong.

Edit: Why aren't customers outright rejecting Atom? I mean, my personal culpability - I bought one knowingly. For the right (read: "limited") tasks, they're not too bad.

But there's a difference between being stuck with a very low-end / entry-level laptop (with correspondingly GREAT battery life) with Atom, and something with the expectation of a little more "grunt", like a 20-24" All-in-One PC. Far too many of them were made with Atom or Kabini, which is pretty-much unacceptable. Battery life, in that case, doesn't matter, because there is no battery, it's plugged into the wall AC jack.

I sold an E1-2500 Kabini 1.4Ghz dual-core 20" AIO rig to someone, and they brought it back to me, unhappy with it. (I started a thread about it a while ago in General Hardware, if someone wants to look that up.) (I used it for like six months, it wasn't horrible, but it had a 5400RPM laptop HDD in it, which was kind of pokey. I only just recently upgraded it with a 500GB Samsung SSD. Hoping to sell it and at least cover the cost of the SSD.)

 

[Boze]

I had a girlfriend who used to play WOW on a shitty eMachines-type budget computer, back in 2009. It was painfully slow, apparently. I lived in a better apartment than her, she didn't own her own car, so I would pick her up, drive her around, and she'd stay at my house most of the time.

For the hell of it, she got on my machine one day to play WOW and was blown away. 1920 x 1200 27" monitor at over 100 FPS with all graphics options maxed, while running a 1600 x 1200 20.1" monitor as my "document" monitor.

It got to be really funny because she'd come over to my house to raid with her guild and I'd watch a movie or two on the HTPC or play Xbox 360 downstairs on the big screen...

Once you expose someone to the beauty of an ultra-high end computer, they never want to go back.

 

[cbn]

I guess, that's part of my point too. Why aren't the lowest-end retail systems, using Core CPUs instead of Atom? Why isn't the lowest-end CPU you can buy in a retail OEM rig, a G1820 Haswell. I agree that that CPU is plenty perky for most desktop users' tasks.

Why is it that they are all Atom instead? Is it due to the OEMs? They wouldn't do it if they weren't selling. Why are they selling? Because millions of customers are being actively deceived? Because they are just on a budget, and the OEMs don't offer Core-based rigs that cheaply? Or is it due to Intel, pulling strings with the OEMs, offering "rebates" to promote Atom at the low end? I think I recall reading on these forums some blurb about Intel trying to expand the use of Atom Celerons and Pentiums, by branding them as such, rather than just "Atom", where they IMO belong.

On 22nm, atom was definitely cheaper than Core going by dies sizes. This might change though for 14nm. See below for numbers.

Bay Trail-D : 102mm2 (this includes PCH)
Core 2C/4T with GT2: 133mm, but needs separate PCH

And here is the 14nm generation:

Braswell: 87mm2 (this includes PCH)
Broadwell 2C/4T with GT2: 82mm, but needs separate PCH.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Edit: And again, I DO blame the OEMs for some of their higher-end (CPU-wise) rigs, that are otherwise totally UNBALANCED. So called "gaming rigs" at BestBuy, with a 4790, 12GB of RAM (why not 8 or 16? What about dual-channel), and like a 4GB GT730 DDR3 video card. And of course, no SSD.

The OEMs are either ruthlessly ignoring the needs of most people, in terms of selling them a reasonably-configured PC, or they're just clueless about configurations, and instead prefer to sell "checkbox systems", with higher numbers, but without the balanced performance that most people would prefer.

And the above system with a 300W PSU, with only enough power connectors for the SATA DVD-RW and HDD, and nothing else, no video card connectors, etc.

Edit: This bothers me personally, because I build custom rigs, and I've seen friends / acquaintances get more-or-less "burned" by buying a PC at BestBuy, and instead of getting an OEM rig for basic desktop computing dirt-cheap using a coupon or buying clearance or both at Staples, they bought an overpriced i5 rig for "gaming", and it didn't even come with a GPU! For the same money, I could have built them something a lot more balanced.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yea, but its *4GB*, those 2gb cards are so 2 years ago.!! Just read the VC&G forums, everybody should have 4GB video ram.

Seriously though, I know what you mean about the "gaming" PCs too. The strange part is that the integrated video on an intel quad is getting close to being as powerful as those low end discrete cards. Even Dell XPS (used to mean something) is doing it now, and charging a pretty penny for the name as well. At least the XPS has a decent PSU so you can add a more powerful card later. I guess they think having "nVidia inside" will be an excuse to jack up the price.


Edit: and yes, I hate the way best buy gives the specs of their computers. It is totally impossible to tell what processor, and sometimes even gpu you are getting.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I get your situation Larry, and I can understand why you are pulled into these devices.

Its based around the use and throw away mentality. Smartphones and tablets is the same. Clothes and what else. And the buyer as such is more or less chanceless. And you are just a sucker for it. I assume in the hope of the next device will be good.

The industry is trying all they can to sabotage and keep you buying. And by them I mean OEMs, not the chip makers.

We already know the huge part of smartphone sabotage, I got a feeling on it first hand. by updating one of the 2 S3 Mini here, nothing special. Just via the Google Play store. It went from a normal fine smartphone to close to unbearable. Google does it, Apple does and I am sure MS would do it too with increased share.

I have the same feeling with my NUC. Not because of the NUC. But due to the rapid codec changes. 264, HEVC, VP9, HEVC 10bit. There is no difference. The only thing is you save some storage/bandwidth with HEVC/VP9. But it makes close to everything obsolete for what is really no reason. While I would get a NUC anyway compared to my old HTPC. The only reason my old HTPC got obsolete was from the forcing of new codecs that doesn't matter. In other words, you need to replace perfectly fine devices again.

However time is changing, and all the OEMs will have to focus more on quality than quantity to survive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yea, but its *4GB*, those 2gb cards are so 2 years ago.!! Just read the VC&G forums, everybody should have 4GB video ram.

Seriously though, I know what you mean about the "gaming" PCs too. The strange part is that the integrated video on an intel quad is getting close to being as powerful as those low end discrete cards. Even Dell XPS (used to mean something) is doing it now, and charging a pretty penny for the name as well. At least the XPS has a decent PSU so you can add a more powerful card later.

I would have thought that OEMs would have mass-purchased NVidia GTX750/750ti cards en-mass, and pre-installed them. At the very least, that would be better, at least still / currently, than Intel's higher-end desktop iGPUs.

(Maybe give them a 800- or 900-series number, strictly for OEMs. Maybe that's what the OEM GTX745 card is?)

 

[III-V]

Its based around the use and throw away mentality.

It's here to stay. It's a product of the industrial revolution, being compounded with the computing revolution. Things are inexpensive to make these days, and that'll only become even more true over time.

It will probably get to the point that we are so surrounded by cheap computers that they become an inhalation hazard.

 

[ninaholic37]

Once you expose someone to the beauty of an ultra-high end computer, they never want to go back.

The opposite happened to me.

Why pay $1000 for a new laptop when those can do everything I want?

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yea, I agree. I also remember, Best Buy, and probably other OEMs used to do some really shady stuff with their GPU nomenclature. I think it was best buy, they would not even change the name of the card, but gimp it with slower memory or a narrower memory bus.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I get your situation Larry, and I can understand why you are pulled into these devices.

Its based around the use and throw away mentality. Smartphones and tablets is the same. Clothes and what else. And the buyer as such is more or less chanceless. And you are just a sucker for it. I assume in the hope of the next device will be good.

The industry is trying all they can to sabotage and keep you buying. And by them I mean OEMs, not the chip makers.

We already know the huge part of smartphone sabotage, I got a feeling on it first hand. by updating one of the 2 S3 Mini here, nothing special. Just via the Google Play store. It went from a normal fine smartphone to close to unbearable. Google does it, Apple does and I am sure MS would do it too with increased share.

I have the same feeling with my NUC. Not because of the NUC. But due to the rapid codec changes. 264, HEVC, VP9, HEVC 10bit. There is no difference. The only thing is you save some storage/bandwidth with HEVC/VP9. But it makes close to everything obsolete for what is really no reason. While I would get a NUC anyway compared to my old HTPC. The only reason my old HTPC got obsolete was from the forcing of new codecs that doesn't matter. In other words, you need to replace perfectly fine devices again.

However time is changing, and all the OEMs will have to focus more on quality than quantity to survive.

So, is this less about product labeling deception and reversing Moore's Law with alternative low-power (but slow) APUs / CPUs, and more an issue of both code bloat (as your smartphone example), and forced obsolescence (as in your NUC HW codec support example)? Or both, as the tech industry gets smarter at manipulating their customers for financial gain?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The opposite happened to me.

Why pay $1000 for a new laptop when those can do everything I want?

Those laptops were originally pretty expensive, and have already lasted well past VLarry's "toss the busted up 1-year-old-laptop and buy another $200 laptop" timeframe.

Just think - if you'd bought one of those new in 2010 or so, you'd still be using it happily and not even thinking about an upgrade.

 

[skipsneeky2]

For basic usage,i honestly can't tell the difference between my i5 2500 or my wifes G1820.When i launch games,that's only when i know the difference.

$45 for this little cpu,if your not playing recent games it simply works for browsing,netflix and with a dedicated gpu it can play some games.

I don't see much appeal of going any lower then this cpu for basic usage,its cheap already as it is and it performs quite well for the money.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

For basic usage,i honestly can't tell the difference between my i5 2500 or my wifes G1820.When i launch games,that's only when i know the difference.

$45 for this little cpu,if your not playing recent games it simply works for browsing,netflix and with a dedicated gpu it can play some games.

I don't see much appeal of going any lower then this cpu for basic usage,its cheap already as it is and it performs quite well for the money.

The thing about the low end big-core Celerons is that they still have very good single-threaded performance. If you only ask them to do one or two things at a time, they're great.

The 4-core Atom-based CPUs have much lower single threaded and overall performance - the only time they can even come close to the big-core dualies is either when they're doing something incredibly multithreaded, or when the big-core CPU is clocked to about half of its normal speed (those 1.5-1.8GHz -U CPUs.)

 

[Azuma Hazuki]

For some of us it's not "use and throw away," it's "I need a computer, I have $200, and that's IT." People like me, the ones who know a lot but don't have money. Our type tends to raid Craigslist and get something used, for preference...but when the chips are down (hardy har har), we also know how to make the best of low-end hardware.

A lot of it is getting the hell off Windows and OS X. Linux is perfect for the low-end machines; I briefly had a Thinkpad x120e (AMD E-350) and it flew with Arch and a light setup. Windows 7 was painful to use on that thing.

Low-end hardware does not exist because of people like VirtualLarry. It exists because of people who can't tell a USB port from their own asshole and will buy whatever Best Buy or Staples or OfficeDepot/Max/whateverthehell are pushing. And precisely because most people don't know the first thing about what's in their machines, Intel and AMD are deceptively branding their utter trash with the same series numbers as the actually usable stuff.

But what can we do? Ignorance is one thing but what we're dealing with here is stupidity, i.e., refusal to remedy ignorance. Stugeon's Law seems to apply to the human race...

 

[malabo]

Yea, but its *4GB*, those 2gb cards are so 2 years ago.!! Just read the VC&G forums, everybody should have 4GB video ram.

Seriously though, I know what you mean about the "gaming" PCs too. The strange part is that the integrated video on an intel quad is getting close to being as powerful as those low end discrete cards. Even Dell XPS (used to mean something) is doing it now, and charging a pretty penny for the name as well. At least the XPS has a decent PSU so you can add a more powerful card later. I guess they think having "nVidia inside" will be an excuse to jack up the price.


Edit: and yes, I hate the way best buy gives the specs of their computers. It is totally impossible to tell what processor, and sometimes even gpu you are getting.

Aren't allot of the i5 s in best buy actually dual core, that's another retail scam, at least they used to be