Are laptops headed "the same way" (stagnant) as desktop CPU's?

[throwa]

I'm writing this from my "trusty" Lenovo core i3 3110m 2012-era laptop. It's still humming along just great despite my heavy usage. It is my workhorse for everyday non-important tasks, light gaming, printing, etc and I have it on 10-13 hours every single day. It can even play Warlords of Draenor on reduced/low settings, and I do "put in my hours" regularly on that game I get about 40-60 Fps out in the world or Bg's and 17-30 Fps in heavy-action scenes.

Now that the holidays and sheeple craze have died down somewhat I was browsing/window-shopping over on both Newegg and Amazon to check for any laptop "leftovers" that would be worth upgrading to, just out of curiosity...... and honestly haven't really seen any in my price range ( <= $500 ).

Seems the "new" laptop processors are mostly same chit in terms of performance or close to it. Nothing that makes you go "OMG!! i want it!" or "leap out of your seat". The biggest improvement comes in the integrated graphics, but I don't think 20-30% slightly better graphics performance is worth $400-$500 of my hard-earned cash.

And so I'll probably still be using this same laptop next year is my prediction for 2016. I think I'll just keep driving this one until it quits or the wheels fall off. Intel seems to have hit a similar "wall" to desktop CPU market on the laptop side of things based on what I see.

Thoughts or comments?? Anyone else also opting to just keep their existing laptop and put the money towards other things instead? I'm sure I'm not alone.

As a side-note Lenovo laptops seem reliable as fukk , I even dropped it twice but it just keeps chugging along like a champ despite my sloppy handling and high hours of use.

 

[taisingera]

I have a Sandy Bridge i5 2450m Dell Vostro 3350, that I bought as a refurb in early 2012. It does all I want it to, including office-like tasks, play Netflix, 1080p video, has a 3rd party USB3.0 controller, and two bays for hard drives (removing the optical). The screen is so-so, but the keyboard is nice with backlight, fingerprint reader, and a large battery that has unfortunately worn to 50%. I paid $503 for it and have W7Pro. I tried W10 but I got some weird 1 minute long black screen on bootup. Dell didn't test the model with W10 anyways.

I flip flop on wanting to buy something also in the <=$500 price range, but can't justify it. I'll keep this laptop until the screen or mobo goes bad, or maybe the cooling fan.

 

[ninaholic37]

Thoughts or comments?? Anyone else also opting to just keep their existing laptop and put the money towards other things instead? I'm sure I'm not alone.

You are not alone

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2423785

 

[tamm]

Laptops are headed in the right direction, with the addition of thinner profiles. And with that the thinner profile needs a more efficent CPU package. Without further strides in design and development, the limiting hardware in desigin for a laptop is the cpu.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I'd say it's moving along at a faster blip than their desktop counterparts, only because of the improved efficiency (ie. get longer battery life, or increased performance for the same previous power usage), which (to some extent) means jack squat in a desktop "OC the bejesus out of it" scenario (eg. a 2013 4770K @ 4.6GHz is barely 45% faster than a 2009 i7 920 @ 4GHz in general cases).

Decent example would be my Clevo w230ss. The one gen newer CPU (Haswell) and GPU (Maxwell) made a HUGE difference over the previous Clevo 13.3" flagship model. Yes, it still does turn into a hairdryer in long gaming sessions, but it never throttles. Can't imagine what the previous flagship (IvyBridge + Kepler) would have been like in the same package / footprint

 

[holden j caufield]

Lenovo p50 and p70 have mobile xeon cpu

 

[corkyg]

It seems to me that the rapid growth of tablets and smartphones have impacted the old laptop market. But cannot tablets be considered as laptops in a more refined format?

 

[throwa]

It seems to me that the rapid growth of tablets and smartphones have impacted the old laptop market. But cannot tablets be considered as laptops in a more refined format?

I don't think laptops are going anywhere.

Laptop is still far superior to both smartphones and tablets.

Smartphones and tablets have their limitations, for example there just is no substitute for the FULL qwerty "traditional" keyboard. That's just me though, tapping on tiny letters on a screen with my fingers is no where near as fast/convenient as typing on traditional keyboard. I'm also a big guy with big hands, so it does get annoying trying to type out a message on a teeny weeny smartphone screen.

Another advantage is that laptops can be used offline, both smartphones and tablets are worthless and completely useless with no Wi-fi connection.

The main advantage of smartphones/tablets is their portability and mobility. You can carry a smartphone around in your pocket for example.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It seems to me that the rapid growth of tablets and smartphones have impacted the old laptop market.

Certainly some, but it seems to me that tablets are a new market, and not true replacement for laptops.

But cannot tablets be considered as laptops in a more refined format?

I wouldn't say so. Although 2-in-1s are kind of a tablet as laptop replacement.

I own both. I find it more comfortable to converse on the forums, and especially Skype at the same time, on my 11.6" laptop, rather than my 7" tablets.

 

[throwa]

My biggest issue with smartphones/tablets is the utter lack of multi-tasking :thumbsdown:

On my laptop I am able to have:

- a podcast playing in the background
- watching Twitch stream at the same time
- 8-11 tabs open in Chrome
- file explorer open in the background
- p0rn pics open in windows photo viewer
- downloading a game in the background
- Skype open in the background
- Microsoft excel spreadsheet open

All at the same time, with no noticeable slowdown.

The really lame thing about smartphones/tablets is the "only one thing at a time" limitation.

Want to listen to a Youtube video as background noise while browsing the web? Can't do it.

Want to download things in the background while browsing the web? Your phone/tablet slows to a crawl with the spinning "loading wheel".

Want to have 8-11 tabs open while at the same time exploring files, while at same time working in microsoft Office? Can't do it.

 

[Ketchup]

Laptops, like desktops, are still moving forward at a slower rate. The big thing now is a 2 in 1. Manufacturers are just now starting to realize that a CD/DVD drive in a laptop is a waste of space, making the laptop much larger than it needs to be. So laptops are finally starting to get down to a good size.

The only CPU-reason to upgrade a laptop within the last three years would be if you bought something that was barely adequate for what you needed at the time (a Celeron, Atom, or anything AMD), or you want a laptop that is cooler, quieter, and has significantly better battery life. And of course obvious reasons (the old one broke, etc).

Tablets, as has been stated since their inception, are in no way full replacement for a laptop. They can be more easy to use for simple things one would use a laptop for (because a phone is just too small to be practical for many of the things they are capable of doing), but I would never consider it a trade for a laptop/desktop.

 

[Charlie98]

It seems to me that the rapid growth of tablets and smartphones have impacted the old laptop market. But cannot tablets be considered as laptops in a more refined format?

I think some mainstream users are getting tablets and smartphones in lieu of a desktop PC, not necessarily a laptop. I don't really think a tablet is more refined than a laptop, perhaps more 'streamlined...' better in some ways but not as capable as the laptop.

I don't think laptops are going anywhere.

Laptop is still far superior to both smartphones and tablets.

Smartphones and tablets have their limitations, for example there just is no substitute for the FULL qwerty "traditional" keyboard. That's just me though, tapping on tiny letters on a screen with my fingers is no where near as fast/convenient as typing on traditional keyboard. I'm also a big guy with big hands, so it does get annoying trying to type out a message on a teeny weeny smartphone screen.

I agree... both with the laptop vs tablet assessment, and the big finger on the tiny keyboard!

 

[StrangerGuy]

PC laptops are stuck in deep shit. The conflict of interest between OEMs, Intel and MS have cultivated a userbase that doesn't expect much beyond a laughably low baseline so they buy the lowest priced stuff which creates a race to the bottom price war the OEMs can't escape out from. Not exactly a healthy state of things for end product quality.

And people who can spend more on them are so niche that there isn't much money to be made, outside of Apple.

Also, I'm not buying the "Skylake is going to boost demand because of better battery life" argument. If the iPad has indicated, most people who buy laptops aren't using them as mobile devices but rather movable desktop computers where battery life is irrelevant.

 

[gdansk]

No. We're about to see the utmost effort of Intel in the mobile space. ARM chips are becoming competitive to low-end Intel chips. Intel works hard to boost performance on the low power parts. Example: The performance jump from the 5y10 to the equivalent low-end 6y30 is fairly big (about 25% despite only a 10% clock boost). On the other end (the 35-45W parts) they really don't see any competition from ARM so do not expect much improvement there.

Finally, your 3110m is perfectly fast for most tasks, sure, but it'll get beat by one of those 'chit' 15W 6500U parts. There is, however, very little incentive when the performance is so close. But that 35W part you use could get beat by a ~5W 6y75 in some workloads. 1/7th the dissipation in 3 years? Not bad, in my opinion. High-end performance isn't Intel's concern anymore. They'll wait for AMD to do anything there. In the mean time they'll roll in the mud with ARM.

 

[Commodus]

I don't think they're stuck yet. There's still room for battery life improvements, since most laptops still don't last long enough that you never have to worry about plugging in on a given day. Most laptops still don't ship with extra-sharp screens (this is in part to blame on Windows' poor library of high-DPI apps); there are still lots of heavy and chunky systems that don't have performance as a good excuse.

With that said, there are diminishing returns. A lot of older laptops are "good enough," and Intel isn't having the best time improving speed outside of graphics. SSDs have also taken a lot of the perceived slowness out of the equation -- a 2012 MacBook Air may still feel fast simply because there's no spinning hard drive struggling to keep up.

And I don't think laptops are objectively better than phones. They're typically more powerful and have the advantages of extra headroom, of course, but pocketability is still huge. You're not going to run around taking photos with your laptop, and phones are far more likely to have always-on internet connections. In some ways, they're merely different, not better. And phones are widely considered to be the main reason why PCs are in so much trouble. Why buy a low-end $400 PC every two years when you can shell out less than that for a high-end smartphone on an instalment plan? You need a laptop if you're writing school reports or working from home, but you don't if you're just checking Facebook or responding to email.

 

[Dufus]

Leave the thin and light to the smart phones and tablets, move back to thick and heavy for the laptops to bring some real performance back.

 

[sm625]

Headed? A 3+ year old i5-2450m scores only 15% less (MT and only 7% less ST) than a brand spankin new i5-6200U. Sure, it only uses half the power, but this doesnt mean anything to the average user. OEMs generally like to reduce the size of the battery along with the TDP of the processor, so you end up with about the same user experience. You just pay more and get less. If your typical $600 best buy i5 notebook had a 12 hour DOTA 2 battery life, then we'd be getting somewhere.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Leave the thin and light to the smart phones and tablets, move back to thick and heavy for the laptops to bring some real performance back.

Those never went away.

http://rog.asus.com/371412014/g-ser...-gaming-laptop-with-gtx-900m-series-graphics/

 

[Commodus]

Headed? A 3+ year old i5-2450m scores only 15% less (MT and only 7% less ST) than a brand spankin new i5-6200U. Sure, it only uses half the power, but this doesnt mean anything to the average user. OEMs generally like to reduce the size of the battery along with the TDP of the processor, so you end up with about the same user experience. You just pay more and get less. If your typical $600 best buy i5 notebook had a 12 hour DOTA 2 battery life, then we'd be getting somewhere.

There are reasonably powerful laptops that can get 9-10 hours of real-world use (mostly web browsing, but still) where that was just a pipe dream even a few years ago.

Also, "12-hour DOTA 2 battery life" isn't going to happen any time soon, because that would require efficiency several times better than what we have now. You can argue for faster processors and better battery life, but remember that tech firms are still bound by scientific discoveries and the laws of physics!

 

[Maxima1]

Those never went away.

http://rog.asus.com/371412014/g-ser...-gaming-laptop-with-gtx-900m-series-graphics/

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=793967

Without the stylized gaming crap.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=793967

Without the stylized gaming crap.

Nice. :thumbsup:

 

[Commodus]

I never quite got the mentality behind most gaming PCs' designs: oh, you like to play games? Here's a machine that looks like it was built by a 17-year-old buzzed on Red Bull.

I'd like to see high-performance Windows laptops that exude taste. You can get nice-looking ultraportables, but the high-end market still tends to be divided between tacky gaming rigs and utilitarian workstations.

 

[malabo]

I'm writing this from my "trusty" Lenovo core i3 3110m 2012-era laptop. It's still humming along just great despite my heavy usage. It is my workhorse for everyday non-important tasks, light gaming, printing, etc and I have it on 10-13 hours every single day. It can even play Warlords of Draenor on reduced/low settings, and I do "put in my hours" regularly on that game I get about 40-60 Fps out in the world or Bg's and 17-30 Fps in heavy-action scenes.

Now that the holidays and sheeple craze have died down somewhat I was browsing/window-shopping over on both Newegg and Amazon to check for any laptop "leftovers" that would be worth upgrading to, just out of curiosity...... and honestly haven't really seen any in my price range ( <= $500 ).

Seems the "new" laptop processors are mostly same chit in terms of performance or close to it. Nothing that makes you go "OMG!! i want it!" or "leap out of your seat". The biggest improvement comes in the integrated graphics, but I don't think 20-30% slightly better graphics performance is worth $400-$500 of my hard-earned cash.

And so I'll probably still be using this same laptop next year is my prediction for 2016. I think I'll just keep driving this one until it quits or the wheels fall off. Intel seems to have hit a similar "wall" to desktop CPU market on the laptop side of things based on what I see.

Thoughts or comments?? Anyone else also opting to just keep their existing laptop and put the money towards other things instead? I'm sure I'm not alone.

As a side-note Lenovo laptops seem reliable as fukk , I even dropped it twice but it just keeps chugging along like a champ despite my sloppy handling and high hours of use.

You're supposed to"upgrade" to an atom or a slower luv or m series

 

[IntelUser2000]

Also, "12-hour DOTA 2 battery life" isn't going to happen any time soon, because that would require efficiency several times better than what we have now. You can argue for faster processors and better battery life, but remember that tech firms are still bound by scientific discoveries and the laws of physics!

Exactly. We are bound by such laws and we had such huge gains because chips were that complex and it took all the engineers so long to eke out the most gains.

Now we seem to be going really far into the diminishing returns curve.

In regards to Skylake. I can't see many examples where Skylake laptop has better battery life than Broadwell one. If anything it seems you can have good battery life Broadwell one more consistently than Skylake ones. I am thinking that may have to do with taking out the FiVR. Having it that much closer to the CPU core means you can ramp up/down frequencies that much quicker. There's no way around it.

 

[Kaido]

As far as desktops go, I think the combination of the following reached the "good enough" stage where it boots quick & goes fast enough that you don't really need to go beyond it until you're into gaming or DCC or something:

1. Quad-core CPU
2. 8 gigs of RAM
3. SSD boot drive

My last PC (Hackintosh) was built back around 2011, so going on five years now. Still super zippy (i5, 10 gigs of RAM, 500gb SSD). I haven't needed to upgrade it in all that time. I think laptops are getting to that point too...they're fast, they're starting to have really great battery life, non-crappy screens, etc. I mean, you can buy a new Toshiba laptop with a 4K screen for a grand, or add on touchscreen & flip for another four hundred bucks. The new laptop chips are allow for ultra-thin & lightweight designs too. So..definitely heading in that direction, yeah.