The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time

For me it sounds more like cheap ChromeBooks because that is enough for most people's need.

Very little in education needs more computing power than that.

We've just told ourselves that computing power will always grow and that we will always need that growth.

That might not be be true and computers might be like cars: we don't need (want) faster cars, we want cheaper and safer cars. Top speed no longer sells.

Apparently Windows XP is the dominant desktop OS in Armenia. They were savvy enough not to go to Vista I guess. (Not that the country is anywhere near large enough to skew global benchmarks.)

It has to be something like this. I could believe slower machines growing in market share during high inflation, but nobody's making new laptops or monitors with 1366 x 768 panels.

It seems like a similar challenge as looking at the steam hardware survey stats, it's probably the best public source of information but it's too much of an overview to make anything but the most general conclusions from it. Within that data there's going to be millions of different stories if you could divide it up a bit - what are common combinations of hardware, what are common combinations in different age ranges, what is used for playing games of different ages, what's common in different locations in the world. Valve could possibly tie hardware to software purchasing activity as well what is played.

> Most of those people probably aren't learning from professors who spend their whole day teaching and doing research, and that kind of activity can only be supported by a relatively wealthy society.

Nope, as your next sentence says, they're learning off forums, Stack Overflow, YouTube and ChatGPT like the rest of us. :P

"12th-gen i3" is longer then "i3-1215U" or "1215U", but removes all important Information[1]. Why do you (and people in general) do this? I dont get it.

[1] a search engine will give you the intel ark page if you search for "1215U" which tells you thats a 2P+4E 15W Alder Lake CPU, however "12th-gen i3" could be a 4P+0E, but also a 2P+8E or a 4P+4E, and anything between 9W and 60W Basepower.

http://web.archive.org/web/20240221001449/https://www.cpuben...

They have more than twice as many samples on their Feb 10 update this year (47810) as they did last year on Feb 14 (22761). They have shown some growth year on year in sample size, but nowhere near doubling.

That suggests this month has been an outlier in having a strangely large number of samples already, which could all be related—maybe their software started being bundled with a specific OEM or was featured on a popular content creator or whatever.

As a sibling notes, less accurate just means less accurate, not necessarily skewed upward. There simply is less data to draw conclusions on than there will be later, so any medium-sized effect that adds 20k extra samples will have a larger effect now than later.

This is just still a sample size of three for a data period that is stated to be less accurate" not "has lower values"

Just because the error isn't presented the same here doesn't mean it's error free...

Or just have the last data point include everything from the full 12 month period before (as the title "year on year" would suggest) and maybe even put it in the correct place on the x-axis (e.g. for today, Feb 12, 2025, about 11.8% of the full year gap width from the (Dec 31) 2024 point).

variance. Have you noticed that the mainstream public-level discussion of almost any topic never progresses farther than a point estimate? Variance implies nuance, and nuance is annoying to those who'd just rather paint a story. Variance isn't even that much nuance, because it is also just a point estimate for the variability of a distribution, not even its shape. Public discourse is stuck at the mean point estimate, and as such, is constantly misled. This is all an analogy, but feels very true.

We still know the current data point has about three times the standard error of the previous point, but I agree it's hard to say anything useful without knowledge of the within-point variance.

That is WILD that Windows 11 runs faster than the machine's native OS...

Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it, MORE resource efficient than modern macOS?! That feels like a ludicrous statement to type, but the results seem to suggest as much.

I have a 2016 MBP-15 (sticky keyboard). I suspect Apple changed something so the fans no longer go into turbo vortex mode. Normally it isn't sluggish at all, but when it overheats, everything grinds to a halt.[1] (Presumably this is to keep the defective keyboard from melting again.[0]) Perhaps old OS/bootcamp still has the original fan profiles.

[0]Apple had a unpublicized extended warrantee on these, and rebuilt the entire thing twice.

[1] kernel_task suddenly goes to 400%, Hot.app reports 24%. Very little leeway between low energy and almost dead.

> The only performance that actually matters is single thread performance. I think users realized this and with manufacturing technology getting more expensive, companies are no longer keen on selling 16 core machines (of which the end user will likely never use more than 2-3 cores) just so they can win benchmark bragging rights.

How can you state something like this in all seriousness? One of the most used software application has to be the browser, and right now firefox runs 107 threads on my machine with 3 tabs open. gnome-shell runs 22 threads, and all I'm doing is reading HN. It's 2025 and multicore matters.

>multithreaded performance is worthless and has been worthless forever.

I have a very opposite opinion; single threaded performance only matters to a point where any given task it's doing isn't unusable. Multithreaded performance is crucial from keeping the system from grinding to a halt because users always have multiple applications open at the same time. Five browser windows with 4-12 tabs on each, on three different browsers, 2-4 Word instances, some electron(equivalent) comms app, is much less unusual than I'd like it to be. I have used laptops with only two cores and it gave a new meaning to slow when you tried doing absolutely anything other than waiting for your one application to do something. Only having one application open at a time was somewhat useable.

> The only performance that actually matters is single thread performance.

Strong disagree, particularly on laptops.

Having some firefox thread compile/interpret/run some javascript 500 microseconds faster is not going to change my life very much.

Having four extra cores definitely will: it means i can keep more stuff open at the same time.

The pain is real, particularly on laptops: i've been searching for laptops with a high-end many-core cpu but without a dedicated gpu for years, and still haven't found anything decent.

I do run many virtual machines, containers, databases and stuff. The most "graphic-intensive" thing i run is the browser. Otherwise i spend most of my time in terminals and emacs.

The fact that multithreaded performance is worthless for you does not prove that this is true for most computer users.

During the last 20 years, i.e. during the time interval when my computers have been multi-core, their multithreaded performance has been much more important for professional uses than the single-threaded performance.

The performance with few active threads is mainly important for gamers and for the professional users who are forced by incompetent managers to use expensive proprietary applications that are licensed to be run only on a small number of cores (because the incompetent managers simultaneously avoid cheaper alternatives while not being willing to pay the license for using more CPU cores).

A decent single-threaded performance is necessary, because otherwise opening Web pages bloated by JS can feel too slow.

However, if the single-threaded performance varies by +/- 50% I do not care much. For most things where single-threaded performance matters, any reasonably recent CPU is able to do instantaneously what I am interested in.

On the other hand, where the execution time is determined strictly by the multithreaded performance, i.e. at compiling software projects or at running various engineering EDA/CAD applications, every percent of extra multithreaded performance may shorten the time until the results are ready, saving from minutes to hours or even days.

Lots of problems can be nicely parallelized, but the cost of doing so usually isn't worth it, simply because the entity writing the software isn't the entity running it, so the software vendor can just say "get a better PC, I don't care". There was a period when having high requirements was a badge of honor for video games. When a company needs to pay for the computational power, suddenly all the code becomes multithreaded.

Yes but look at the chart in the article. Both multi-threaded and single-threaded performance is getting slower on laptops. With desktops, multi-threaded is getting slower and single-threaded is staying the same.

Superscalarity is largely pointless yes, given that memory access between threads is almost always a pain, so two of them rarely process the same data and can't take advantage of using a single core's cache at the same time. It doesn't even make much sense in concept.

But multicore performance does matter significantly unless you're on a microcontroller running only one process on your entire machine. Just Chrome launches a quarter million processes by itself.

Please open your task manager and see how much stuff is running.

The times where you saw one core pegged and the rest idle are a decade ago.

Can't force upgrade with money you don't have. For a non-enthusiast, even the lowest specs are more than good enough for light media consumption and the economy would affect what they invest in.

I very much doubt that is the cause.

I don't buy this really. COVID to now is less than 1 laptop replacement cycle for non-techie users who will usually use a laptop until it stops functioning, and I don't think the techie users would upgrade at all if their only option is worse.

I bought into the N100 hype train because of Reddit. Sure its an amazing value, but I hope anyone reading this isn't convinced it's remotely fast. I ended up going with a minisforum ryzen for about 2x the price and 4x the performance.

I was a bit bummed since I wanted to use it as a kind of streaming box, and while it can do it, it is definitely slow.

I had the same instinct as you, but this comment changed my mind:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030614

New GPUs are quite a bit better than previous ones but perf oer dollar has been flat for a while now.

Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years. Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech

1TB NVMe and 4060 GPU

One thing I notice is that Google Drive was using 15% of ARC GPU (laptop also has nVidia 4060). When I shut down that process, it cooled down a bit after a while, but system is still sluggish and fans work all the time, even if I switched it to "Silent" mode.

The discrete GPU is barely used, so it shouldn't be getting hot.