I'm the reason vendors sell gimped PC hardware.

[dave_the_nerd]

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

The laptops, yeah. Also some SFF PCs that use laptop CPUs.

 

[VirtualLarry]

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

I think only the laptops. And that's due to Intel's branding "issues", and not BestBuy, at least not specifically. Intel doesn't make any dual-core i5 desktop CPUs, but pretty-much all of their laptop i5 CPUs ARE only dual-core. (I think Skylake changed that, I think that there's a non-hyperthreaded, quad-mobile i5.)

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Before M$ got into the console market more people probably played on PCs than consoles (guessing). So while M$ has done wonders to stir up the waters in the video gaming console arena they inadvertently sold most of those PC gamers into console gaming. No need to the top of the line CPU/GPU anymore.

 

[escrow4]

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.)

That isn't it. If a G1820 is $40 off Newegg right now, I'd bet money that big box OEMs can get it for $20 or less in volume and slap it with a half decent H81 board and the actual difference to a cheap Atom would be minimal or non-existent. And Celerons don't even get a sticker no more, its all "Intel inside". Consumers with no clue would be way better off with that.

And Intel has always had Celerons even recently - G530, G1610, G1820, upcoming Skylake Celerons - so they obviously sell (and pretty well most like) - I can't see why they are not way more popular with OEMs. It certainly isn't cost. The CPU and mobo are not that expensive.

 

[HeXen]

The opposite happened to me.

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

I never spend less than $2000 for laptops. I like the new high end experience
Even if I was poor, I would save, get a loan or whatever but I don't anything used in regards to tech.

 

[skipsneeky2]

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.

Max typical usage so far has been when i played CSGO or WOT on it.70%+ usage on both cores in both games.

A couple Chrome tabs may be open when it isn't gaming,its more then sufficient.It's honestly a temporary cpu till i drop in a i3 4170 but i was pretty much expecting much less then it actually delivers. Runs good enough it may just stay.

 

[jhu]

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...

 

[C2bcool]

IMHO no modern/new computer should be sold without an SSD. To me its like watching non HD TV, its just not necessary any more and painful. Even budget sub $500 builds that I did for my parents and sister (only internet and word processing) have an SSD in them and i3 CPU.

And I say this while typing on a work PC that is a dual-core E6600 w/8gb or ram that is painfully slow and starts lagging if I have word and to many IE or Chrome tabs open. I hate this PC...lol. It actually causes me to waste time in waiting for it to catch up at the loss of my productivity.

 

[happy medium]

Intel is predicting that its microprocessors will hit 10GHz by the year 2011

A i5 2500K with 4 cores @ 4.8ghz is way more than 10ghz..........

 

[MrTeal]

I think only the laptops. And that's due to Intel's branding "issues", and not BestBuy, at least not specifically. Intel doesn't make any dual-core i5 desktop CPUs, but pretty-much all of their laptop i5 CPUs ARE only dual-core. (I think Skylake changed that, I think that there's a non-hyperthreaded, quad-mobile i5.)

It's worse than that, there's a wide selection of mobile i7s through all generations that are dual core. The only real indication of getting a quad is to have a Q in the model number.

IMHO no modern/new computer should be sold without an SSD. To me its like watching no HD TV, its just not necessary any more and painful. Even budget sub $500 builds that I did for my parents and sister (only interent and word processing) have an SSD in them and i3 CPU.

And I say this while typing on a work PC that is a dual-core E6600 w/8gb or ram that is painfully slow and starts lagging if I have word and to may IE or Chrome tabs open. I hate this PC...lol. It actually causes me to waste time in waiting for it to catch up at the loss of my productivity.

Those boxes they sell with 4790's and a 5400RPM hard drive an abomination. They're worse than not having HD, it's like having a 65" curved 4k OLED TV and then watching VHS movies through a composite video cable.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I would have thought that OEMs would have mass-purchased NVidia GTX750/750ti cards en-mass, and pre-installed them.

The 750/750Ti cards wouldn't be so cheap if anyone cleared them out of the channel like that, not to speak of discrepancies in volume.

ahahaha that poor wall wart.

Returning to the main topic at hand: Larry, I don't blame you for cheap crappy OEM systems. I blame ninjas. Because . . . ninjas. That is all.

 

[C2bcool]

Those boxes they sell with 4790's and a 5400RPM hard drive an abomination. They're worse than not having HD, it's like having a 65" curved 4k OLED TV and then watching VHS movies through a composite video cable.

LOL....so true.

 

[ShintaiDK]

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?

The phone isn't code bloat. Its direct sabotage.

Codecs are so rapid now so Apple, Intel, AMD and NVidia cant even keep up. And why do we need 2 codecs for the same thing, HEVC and VP9 with delayed announcement? More sales.

OEMs and retail outlets is the winner and its those in control. Same when you wonder why AMD or NVidia rebrands graphics cards for no reason. 8000 and 800 series for example. Its not because AMD or NVidia wants to. Its because they are told to by OEMs.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Wonder how well a single-core 3-3.5 GHz HT Skylake would fare against quad Atoms?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wonder how well a single-core 3-3.5 GHz HT Skylake would fare against quad Atoms?

I would imagine, probably pretty-well. I wouldn't mind seeing a single-core with HT Skylake Celeron chip, that might be pretty neat. If Intel sold it cheap enough, then we might see that in low-end OEM boxes instead of Atom. That would be the day!

 

[dark zero]

I would imagine, probably pretty-well. I wouldn't mind seeing a single-core with HT Skylake Celeron chip, that might be pretty neat. If Intel sold it cheap enough, then we might see that in low-end OEM boxes instead of Atom. That would be the day!

The Skylake would assasinate it.... on the Athlon 5350 at 2.7 Ghz.... it could be an epic battle to watch.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Codecs are so rapid now so Apple, Intel, AMD and NVidia cant even keep up. And why do we need 2 codecs for the same thing, HEVC and VP9 with delayed announcement? More sales.

There are major differences between HEVC and VP9, though. HEVC requires patent royalties, VP9 is free software and also royalty free.

 

[superstition]

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.)

Not exactly a gimped ultra low end part.

 

[Blue_Max]

"saving the environment" is where I have a problem...

Some of this low-end crap is only contributing to pollution, not preventing it. People buy low-end video cards and get frustrated with the experience, ditching them and buying something else. Or use them for a couple years and replace it later - but since then, newer technologies have come out (like Intel's own IGP) that are so much better the old Radeon 6450 card is rendered unneccessary and useless.

The only way "saving the environment" comes into play, is if you use components as long as physically possible, which is much easier to do with middle-of-the-road components that are many times faster than the same generation's bottom-of-the-barrel pickings.

In short, low-end crap is literally scrap in a much shorter time. That's bad.

Of course, I can totally appreciate limited budgets... I was there for many years. I wish more people were ethical when it came to reselling hardware... of my many purchases over the years, I'd say I had a 25% rate of buying a dead or dying item. 75% success though, and some great deals... I'd say I've won overall - AND kept stuff out of the landfill while we have fun with it!

 

[UaVaj]

for what we all NEED on a TYPICAL everyday basis. the slowest celeron with igpu is more than plenty.

so unless you are GAMING heavy or APPLICATION heavy. do not kid yourself.

 

[Rakehellion]

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.

Hmmm, I wonder why enthusiasts don't drive the market.

 

[Rakehellion]

^^Well, I effed that up. "All people" should encompass everything. But you get the picture.

 

[VirtualLarry]

^^Well, I effed that up. "All people" should encompass everything. But you get the picture.

Except, mass-market PC sales, and CPU R&D and fab costs, all are designed for volume sales. Which means, joe sixpack. Not the limited number of enthusiasts.

It used to be, before Intel and AMD bifuricated their CPU lines into both "big cores" and "small cores", that joe sixpack would buy PCs, and subsidize the R&D costs used to develop the higher-end CPU cores (big cores, I'm talking about). But now that they have the separate "small core" CPUs for The Masses, they are no longer subsidizing the R&D on the Big Core CPUs, and their advancement has, at least in part, stagnated. And because the overall R&D pool is smaller on the Small Core CPUs, those too have largely stagnated.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Except, mass-market PC sales, and CPU R&D and fab costs, all are designed for volume sales. Which means, joe sixpack. Not the limited number of enthusiasts.

It used to be, before Intel and AMD bifuricated their CPU lines into both "big cores" and "small cores", that joe sixpack would buy PCs, and subsidize the R&D costs used to develop the higher-end CPU cores (big cores, I'm talking about). But now that they have the separate "small core" CPUs for The Masses, they are no longer subsidizing the R&D on the Big Core CPUs, and their advancement has, at least in part, stagnated. And because the overall R&D pool is smaller on the Small Core CPUs, those too have largely stagnated.

Um, no. Starving the big core would be supremely dumb of Intel to do given that it's at the heart of its server chips.

 

[coercitiv]

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 wouldn't put Google and Apple in the same category with Samsung. While I appreciate the hardware quality of some Samsung products, their mobile software support is atrocious.

My Nexus devices became faster, not slower, as updates came in, and iOS devices get one of the best update coverage in the mobile world. Apple devices may have been a bit sabotaged on the hardware side though (low RAM amount on previous models) and Google can be criticized for their rather short 2 year update coverage but this doesn't even begin to compare with the downright "execution" I noticed on a Samsung Galaxy S3: as updates came in over time, the phone became unusable. Meanwhile the older and weaker Galaxy Nexus is working just fine, considerably faster than on launch day.

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.

At least the codec change happens once in a decade, it's a gradual process, and likely offers options of continued usage for the older machine. For example, even though HEVC decoding is a must for a new HTPC machine, one can still enjoy Netflix on older machines and will likely do so for quite a while with 1080p streams.

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

Some OEMs are starting to get it.

• Motorola finally saw the light and started to offer excellent value for money in their products, with just enough software addons to call them added value, not bloat. Their phone offering is getting better each year.
• Lenovo and Asus finally solved the 1+1=x equation and managed to make cheap small portables with quality components (SSD, FHD IPS, i3 CPU).

Times are indeed changing though, which is great because I'm getting tired to research even a toothpick buy.