Question Historically when did CPUs become fast enough for the average user?

[lakedude]

Of course some people need/want all the CPU horsepower they can have but I suspect that for the average user the CPU has been fast enough for a while now. For example the i5-750 from years ago is more than fast enough for Office, surfing, Netflix etc. When do you think CPUs became fast enough for an average user?

Hardware acceleration of modern video codecs might enter into this.

The second part of the question is: Do you think a modern flagship phone is in the fast enough category?

I"m going to say that the Core-2-Duo was about the time CPUs got "fast enough" and that yes a modern phone is fast enough.

 

[Roland00Address]

3 Things.

A) 3.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo to 2nd Gen Core i3
B) 8 GBs of Ram
C) SSD

When these three things align average users were happy, it was "good enough." But understand there is no "bright line" but instead a liminal space transition (a gradient) where A+B+C was good enough and that was why I put down two answers for A for a core 2 duo e8400 (3.0 ghz) vs i3-2100 (3.1 ghz) was about 25% faster for single thread and 70% faster for multithread.

There was a 4th category D and that was using the gpu to accelerate things like high def video. A Core 2 Duo e8400 could do 1080p video just on the CPU but it would take most of the CPU, while a decent integrated or decent GPU could off load that tasks to the gpu. Sandy Bridge had a decent enough GPU on the silicon to do this, while the intel integrated on the core 2 duo was not up to the task (it would soon be up to the task the next 2 generations later but it was not there yet, it was doing some of the offloading work but not enough.) Thus with the Core 2 Duos you would want an external GPU even the most basic thing like the nvidia 8400 / 9400 in order to help. This was not necessary on the Sandy Bridge platform.

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So what I am saying is if you knew how to build a computer between 2008 to 2011 is when this magical transition time occurred. The most expensive part in the computer was the SSD but for the tasks people used the computer for it was more important to get an SSD than to shell out for a Quad Core.

 

[Jaskalas]

The target "fast enough" is always moving.

So the answer is highly subjective unless you wish to narrow down the specific tasks in question. Even just "browsing the web" worked fine on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4, back in 2001. But our OS, our browsers, and our media consumption continues to scale higher and require more resources.

 

[whm1974]

The target "fast enough" is always moving.

So the answer is highly subjective unless you wish to narrow down the specific tasks in question. Even just "browsing the web" worked fine on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4, back in 2001. But our OS, our browsers, and our media consumption continues to scale higher and require more resources.

Which is why I recommend going with both quad cores and an SSD for new systems.

 

[lakedude]

In my mind one of the driving forces has been higher and higher video resolution. Early computers used terminals instead of monitors. Then came single color monitors and eventually color monitors. Resolution has continued to climb upward with 8k on the horizon. Thing is 1080p is good enough for normal video and 4k is good enough for text IMO. I highly doubt that at a reasonable viewing distance I could tell the difference between 4k and 8k. I already can not see the pixels at 4k.

So other than VR (which needs all the resolution it can get) I don't really see the need to push higher than 4k resolution. This never happened in the past. One could always imagine a bigger monitor with higher resolution being better but this is no longer the case IMHO.

If true this will ease the need for faster computers going forward (just in time).

 

[VirtualLarry]

I felt around the K7\P3 1Ghz days the CPU has been fast enough for avg users. Now 20 years later those CPUs would struggle due to all the stuff our browsers run because of their single core nature.

Be kind of an interesting test to build a P3\K7 machine with 4GBs of ram and see how they perform today.

I had the unpleasant experience of using a Core2 Celeron 440 (I think that's the one). Single-core. No HyperThreading (on Core2 series).

It was pretty painful, and if Windows Update kicked in, good luck getting anything done. In fact, it became difficult to simply start other programs. I suppose a HDD didn't help, either. Although, at one point the machine was on an SSD. Still, moving up to a dual-core Core2 chip helped immensely.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I had the unpleasant experience of using a Core2 Celeron 440 (I think that's the one). Single-core. No HyperThreading (on Core2 series).

It was pretty painful, and if Windows Update kicked in, good luck getting anything done. In fact, it became difficult to simply start other programs. I suppose a HDD didn't help, either. Although, at one point the machine was on an SSD. Still, moving up to a dual-core Core2 chip helped immensely.

A single core, even with HT*, will bog down eventually if you have too many tasks open at once. Nobody really noticed back when single cores was normal. We were used to it, only running a single task at a time, and HDDs and small amounts of RAM back then didn't exactly help matters.

Back in the late 90's, the lucky among us had the pleasure of using a dual socket workstation (dual P3). I cannot stress how much the additional core helps matters.

If you'd told me 20 years ago I'd be sitting on a 3.2GHz 8C/16T system with 32GB of memory today, and it'd be a perfectly normal desktop system, I'd have looked at you funny.

* "Proud" Celeron G465 owner. It's actually useful as a "potato" system. If it runs there, it runs everywhere. (even rhymes...)