What's with the rise of "good enough" computing? It seems a step backwards.

[VirtualLarry]

Now if I could only figure out why my Internet radio skips, when I scroll my web browser.

I have a G630 2.7Ghz dual-core SB w/3MB L3 cache (I think).
8GB DDR3-1333 in dual-channel.
A 120GB Barefoot II SATA2 SSD, running software FDE.

Downloading 4 Linux ISOs over DSL, running NFS@Home in BOINC on both cores, web browser is 64-bit Waterfox, internet radio is streaming via Flash Player plugin.

Doesn't matter if I have hardware acceleration checked off for the web browser or not, or whether or not smooth scrolling is enabled.

In fact, I noticed twice earlier tonight, that when using mouse middle-click scrolling, my BOINC said "Suspended - CPU busy".

I guess I don't understand how scrolling a web page on a PC, takes so much CPU time.

Scrolling web pages on my entry-level smartphone is smooth and fast.

Edit: I wonder if HyperThreading would help?

Edit: Wierd, may have something to do with my NV GT430 video card. I get skips, just scrolling an Explorer (files) window. I don't quite get it.

 

[JimmiG]

I don't think "good enough" computing is anything new. I remember reading a review of the Pentium II 450 MHz where they said that although it's very fast, no one is going to need that kind of power.

With computers, the hardware comes first, then the software capable of utilizing the hardware. I think the software developers are as much to blame. Intel may have slowed down, but what kind of software actually needs a 4+ GHz quad-core CPU, 16GB of RAM and a Titan?

 

[mikeymikec]

The industry wants people to upgrade as often as possible. Portables are more breakable, which leads to upgrades sooner than with desktops.

 

[JimmiG]

The industry wants people to upgrade as often as possible. Portables are more breakable, which leads to upgrades sooner than with desktops.

Not just breakable, they become obsolete faster too, especially smartphones and tablets. It's amazing to think that the Nexus One came out in 2010, just 3 years ago, and is already considered ancient.

 

[BrightCandle]

The majority of the good enough argument started around the time when clock speeds stopped increasing. The silicon transistor hit a wall of performance that it wasn't able to push through and suddenly the rules of the game changed, we could no longer look forward to a doubling of performance along with our doubling of transistors. We now have vast amounts of "dark" silicon, power controlling silicon etc all there to keep the incredibly hot and leaking transistors alive. The process broke down, Moore's law isn't dead but its not the same measure it once was, I am not sure it counts to have doubled the transistors if the extra ones have to be off in order for the chip not to burn up.

So now the problem is of course that we are trapped. Even if the performance level isn't good enough there isn't a whole lot we can do about it. Improvements in IPC come much slower than those from clock speed and even that avenue of improvement after just 5 years is already drying up. The multi core revolution stalled after just 2 iterations which got us to 4 cores with HT. All these avenues of continuing to give us additional performance for our transistors has failed.

The problem for software developers is that they can't write software that you don't have the hardware to run. They can't test software that you can't run and hence you will never see an application for sale that wont work today but should work on some theoretical future machine. Whether you realise it or not applications have come to utilise the resources of the machines they fit on to an extent. A modern web browser will use mutiple threads, really benefits from additional CPU performance for a smooth experience and is gaining vast amounts more local capabilities to make applications feel more native. It couldn't have done that if we had topped out at 450Mhz, it would have to be a much more limited experience.

Hardware leads software, always. The software then takes time to start to use the resources as they trickle on the long tail of the industry. But now if the news is to be believed everyone is happy watching movies on their smartphone and tablet and they no longer use computers to create things at all. If that is true then I predict the death of the information revolution but the impact of the message is that every hardware company is chasing the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, and to do it they need to be below 10W. So they focus on reduction of power and limiting the performance accordingly. With that as their focus the hardware doesn't get better on the higher end or on average and the software becomes stagnant which further drives people to phones and tablets. They have enough performance to just about do similar things in a much more limited way and because the PC hardware stopped expanding the gap now gets smaller rather than being maintained.

The other part of this is the rise of the web application. The more things that move onto the internet the less local hardware we actually need. Companies are moving onto the internet with their ideas for a couple of reasons. One simple one is that they can release more often that way, its a problem in Windows that still we don't have automatic updates for all applications and until its solved applications are going to prefer web deployment. The other big one is the availability of hardware. On a client machine you have 1 processor, only so much RAM etc. If your problem is bigger than some aspect of that users machine on your server side you can use a lot of boxes to solve the same problem. Quite often its about connecting lots of people and their information but sometimes its genuinely large computation problems or big storage problems. These things work better when experts are choosing the hardware and put the time into making the software user a lot of cores/RAM/drive space etc.

The good enough argument is Stockholm syndrome for the users of computers to accept the lack of process improvements and the subsequent chasing of low power/performance market segments by the manufacturers in order to keep justifying sales. There are 3 application ideas I have and would love to write but I think I need about 1,000 times the performance we have today to make them work, I can't test reasonable sizes of data today to even prove the ideas would work without using a massive cluster from Amazon at considerable cost, and a lot of additional complexity due to the network communication and mass of cores. Hardware leads software and the hardware stopped because the physics kicked us down. There are a lot of factors that come out of this but that is where the argument started and why lots of software started going other routes to achieve what it needed to deliver to its users, for better or worse.

 

[Wall Street]

I agree with BrightCandle. Even if Intel wants to make a faster chip, the only way seems to be more cores. A lot of people think that they are focusing too much on efficiency and not IPC, but Intel is banging their head against the wall looking for better single threaded performance but having a hard time because clock speeds don't scale past 4 Ghz and there are very few IPC gains to be had.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Sick of that crowd

 

[lopri]

Honestly though, I don't think "good enough" at this point is an accurate description. As I stated earlier I have a 2 year old 2500K (running @4.8 GHz) and a 2 year old 1045T (running @3.9 GHz).

These are not just "good enough," but still give me top-of-the-line performance even today. What would anyone suggest that's worth the hassle and the cost of "upgrades?" It's not like there is any fun left in overclocking today's locked-down CPUs.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Honestly though, I don't think "good enough" at this point is an accurate description. As I stated earlier I have a 2 year old 2500K (running @4.8 GHz) and a 2 year old 1045T (running @3.9 GHz).

These are not just "good enough," but still give me top-of-the-line performance even today. What would anyone suggest that's worth the hassle and the cost of "upgrades?" It's not like there is any fun left in overclocking today's locked-down CPUs.

Most people are I/O or UI bound these days (like what is the point of decoding four H264 streams at once when virtually everyone will only watch a video at a time), and they are going to care a whole lot more about "little" things like instant on/off standby than another millisecond faster in web page rendering with an extra 1 GHz.

 

[escrow4]

Now if I could only figure out why my Internet radio skips, when I scroll my web browser.

I have a G630 2.7Ghz dual-core SB w/3MB L3 cache (I think).
8GB DDR3-1333 in dual-channel.
A 120GB Barefoot II SATA2 SSD, running software FDE.

Downloading 4 Linux ISOs over DSL, running NFS@Home in BOINC on both cores, web browser is 64-bit Waterfox, internet radio is streaming via Flash Player plugin.

Doesn't matter if I have hardware acceleration checked off for the web browser or not, or whether or not smooth scrolling is enabled.

In fact, I noticed twice earlier tonight, that when using mouse middle-click scrolling, my BOINC said "Suspended - CPU busy".

I guess I don't understand how scrolling a web page on a PC, takes so much CPU time.

Scrolling web pages on my entry-level smartphone is smooth and fast.

Edit: I wonder if HyperThreading would help?

Edit: Wierd, may have something to do with my NV GT430 video card. I get skips, just scrolling an Explorer (files) window. I don't quite get it.

Looks like that 630 doesn't have enough puff to run all that. An i3 more than likely would.

 

[blackened23]

A lot of folks in my opinion are just aging while clinging to their desktops and are entrenched in old school ways. Performance isn't "good enough", it's increasing exponentially - the difference is, the focus is on mobility and NOT on desktop. The old guys aren't open to this change. Well, desktops are dropping in sales by double digits per quarter, while mobile sales are tripling in sales per quarter. This isn't hard to figure out. Intel is going where the money is. Let us also not forget that data centers and enterprise also value efficiency as well, and with intel fighting ARM on this front, their architectures must be efficient across all of their product lines. This is why intel's R+D is dedicated to better efficiency and not necessarily desktop IPC. To throw their focus on efficiency away would be throwing their long term business prospects away.

Like I said, performance isn't stagnating. It is focused on mobile. I feel that the aging "old school" dinosaurs are reluctant to embrace this change, but make no mistake - the performance increases in mobile are exponential every year with efficiency increasing at an even faster pace. Desktop sales aren't going upwards anytime soon, so don't expect this to change - expect minor IPC increases here and there with the major focus on mobility, graphics performance, and efficiency. Speaking of mobility, I actually use my rMBP quite a bit now and grown quite fond of it; being able to do so many things on the go is just much more convenient - so much so that I actually find myself enjoying the MBP more for all but the most demanding tasks and gaming. I'd say, I use the MBP 75% of the time and the desktop, 25% of the time - As well, i'm looking forward to the Haswell macbook refresh which will have much better performance with double the battery life. Maybe that doesn't excite you, but having that much more battery life with better performance is certainly enticing to me.

Additionally, a lot of desktop users have a reality distortion field and fool themselves into believing that desktop is still the best seller - I assure you, desktop sales are in the dump right now and Q1 2013 was the worst quarter in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, as I mentioned, mobile sales are going quite literally through the roof. As I've stated a million times, get OUT of your reality distortion field and realize what is happening - intel is going where the sales and money are, and efficiency is a pre-requisite for this area. Thus, this is where their efforts are focused. Mobility and efficiency. I also strongly disagree with the assertion that performance is stagnating - performance and efficiency are both increasing at a rapid pace for mobile products, this is a fact. With silvermont and Haswell, intel is in a good position to lead in this respect, as well. The desktop user in me certainly is not pleased by this, but I completely understand what intel is doing - they're doing what it takes to stay in business 10, 20 years from now. If they focused completely on desktop, they would throw their long term business viability away.

 

[Hulk]

The problem for software developers is that they can't write software that you don't have the hardware to run. They can't test software that you can't run and hence you will never see an application for sale that wont work today but should work on some theoretical future machine.

I disagree with this sentiment. We've had lots of applications over the years that pushed the hardware to the limit and beyond. Later, the hardware caught up and made the software usable.

Examples?

Voice recognition software.
Video editing software.
Audio editing software, mulitrack
Vector imaging
Raster imaging.

In the earliest days of all of the examples above using these types of software was painful. Coreldraw 3 on a Pentium 60, brutal. Editing MPEG-2 on a pentium II, equally painful. Photoshop with advanced effects on a PII, again brutal.

Lots of software pushed beyond the bounds of what the hardware was actually up to. Programmers were coding for the hardware coming out in 2 years time.

Things are different now and compute has for the most part raced ahead of software.

 

[Torn Mind]

"Good enough" exists since there is a tradeoff between performance and another variable that people want, such as price or power draw. Naturally, if there were no tradeoff, extra performance would certainly be taken with no scruples.

Corporate customers welcome lower power consumption since it means less heat and electricity used. Both of these result in benefits that help the bottom line. Less parts breaking and less $$$ being shelled out on the electricity bill.

For mobile products, battery life is paramount, and if Intel wants to take on ARM-based machines and keep their profits up, they must fight on those grounds too or die trying. Otherwise, they can just sit back and watch as the market that fed them lose its fertility.

 

[Topweasel]

I don't think "good enough" computing is anything new. I remember reading a review of the Pentium II 450 MHz where they said that although it's very fast, no one is going to need that kind of power.

With computers, the hardware comes first, then the software capable of utilizing the hardware. I think the software developers are as much to blame. Intel may have slowed down, but what kind of software actually needs a 4+ GHz quad-core CPU, 16GB of RAM and a Titan?

I call Schens on this. Nobody said that with the PII 450. People were desperate back then for more performance. Just because for the most part people where happy to get out of the Pentium MMX world doesn't mean that no one thought they did need more. Heck it wasn't even enough for Trespasser.

CPU choice no longer affects responsiveness. Differences in CPU's in the last 5 years no longer has an impact on productivity like it once did. The differences between the slowest and fastest general purpose CPU in an encoding job is measured in single digit minutes not hours. In photo work the differences are in seconds not minutes/hours. CPU choice no longer has a tangible affect on hour daily lives. Even in games benchmarks and reviews have gotten to the point where they are running exotic monitor and GPU choices that can be up to 8x the price of the CPU, just to give people a relate-able value on the CPU.

 

[tential]

Like tons have said before Intel is going where the money is. You guys are the minority of users. My core 2 duo still is used primarily. Why do I need a 10% increase in processing performance to freaking Web browse and listen to music? Sorry, like said before, desktop sales are declining like hell.
What the average consumer needs, and I'm pretty much almost an average consumer at this point sadly, only fast desktop I'm making is so I can replicate the console experience, is faster mobile processing. I want a fast tablet, a fast ultra book for cheap, and look, that's where the market is moving.
Intel couldn't care less about enthusiasts at this point. They don't drive the market and are well informed and therefore much less likely go purchase something they don't need(exceptions of course are on here of people who purchase stuff just to do it). Tell me I can cram Mt current experience with my laptop into a 5 lbs. Instead of 9 lb and im happy.
When enthusiasts drive desktop sales to an actual game quarter by quarter maybe Intel will make processors with you in mind. For now, expect good enough, computing, with faster processor consuming less power crammed into smaller devices.

 

[Torn Mind]

With computers, the hardware comes first, then the software capable of utilizing the hardware. I think the software developers are as much to blame. Intel may have slowed down, but what kind of software actually needs a 4+ GHz quad-core CPU, 16GB of RAM and a Titan?

I doubt it. Vista and Crysis are examples. The former's min requirements resulted in an awful experience in the days when 512 MB of RAM was deemed "premium" and 1 GB of RAM was ridiculously high end. The latter was far too tough on the hardware of its day. Software can very well drive hardware up.

 

[StrangerGuy]

I call Schens on this. Nobody said that with the PII 450. People were desperate back then for more performance. Just because for the most part people where happy to get out of the Pentium MMX world doesn't mean that no one thought they did need more. Heck it wasn't even enough for Trespasser.

CPU choice no longer affects responsiveness. Differences in CPU's in the last 5 years no longer has an impact on productivity like it once did. The differences between the slowest and fastest general purpose CPU in an encoding job is measured in single digit minutes not hours. In photo work the differences are in seconds not minutes/hours. CPU choice no longer has a tangible affect on hour daily lives. Even in games benchmarks and reviews have gotten to the point where they are running exotic monitor and GPU choices that can be up to 8x the price of the CPU, just to give people a relate-able value on the CPU.

Frankly I think the performance angle is just simply overemphasized. If anyone want to do any sort of computing until 2010 the only option was a PC, and that was by far the most important thing that kept Wintel + AMD going till then. One can even argue all those performance improvements all the years was only there to counter the sheer amount of bloat that software got for the average consumer.

We enthusiasts were only just riding the wave until it collapsed on the tablet shore.

 

[mikeymikec]

I doubt it. Vista and Crysis are examples. The former's min requirements resulted in an awful experience in the days when 512 MB of RAM was deemed "premium" and 1 GB of RAM was ridiculously high end. The latter was far too tough on the hardware of its day. Software can very well drive hardware up.

512MB wasn't deemed high-end in 2006 (DDR2 was mainstream by then). 2GB however was, and for 32-bit Vista your point still applies though your numbers were wrong.

By the time Win7 was coming out, average hardware was running Vista a heck of a lot better, but by then the damage had already been done to its reputation.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Look at this way. Does the average office worker really need some pc with 8 gigs of ram and a high spec i5 when a low spec i3 with 4 gigs of ram has the same real world performance?

My work still actually buys i5's and 8 gigs of ram but it's totally wasted on 95% of the staff who only do Word/Excel/Powerpoint and internet browsing. They could easily save money and drop to an i3 and 4 gigs of ram which will last for years.

The QA (quality assurance) and Packager in my company has friggen i7s, Radeon 6650's, and 8 gigs of RAM apice, the rest of the machines rolling high spec i5s. The core 2 machine right next to them does the job equally fast. Makes me wonder if my company contracts out rendering PCs on the side.

However, when it comes to my personal needs (gaming, video rendering, CG, etc), good enough isn't good enough.

 

[grkM3]

I was at bestbuy the other day and noticed the google chrome book for 249 and said what the heck let me see what its all about.

After 5 min of using it I came to the conclusion that this laptop will do 99% of all the things I have used a laptop/desktop/cell phone for the last 3 years.Im done with gaming and all I really do now is just read websites and use youtube and social media sites and read a bunch of crap on barstool etc.

I was blown away on how fast and smooth that thing ran and it does everything I do on a day to day basis without any hickups.I then went home and looked up the specs!!!

how the heck are they giving people a arm a15 exynos 5 soc for 249?its amaxing how much horse power this little sucker has and it will really give MS and netbook a huge bang for buck battle and I highly recommend people to check it out!

 

[tential]

I was at bestbuy the other day and noticed the google chrome book for 249 and said what the heck let me see what its all about.

After 5 min of using it I came to the conclusion that this laptop will do 99% of all the things I have used a laptop/desktop/cell phone for the last 3 years.Im done with gaming and all I really do now is just read websites and use youtube and social media sites and read a bunch of crap on barstool etc.

I was blown away on how fast and smooth that thing ran and it does everything I do on a day to day basis without any hickups.I then went home and looked up the specs!!!

how the heck are they giving people a arm a15 exynos 5 soc for 249?its amaxing how much horse power this little sucker has and it will really give MS and netbook a huge bang for buck battle and I highly recommend people to check it out!

My laptop cost $1600 5 years ago. I was about to purchase another for the same price, same performance level.

I'm using my brothers $400 laptop. If I'm doing what you say, which is what I use my computer for when it's not hooked up to my TV, it does it all PERFECTLY. Why do I want a faster CPU? To load facebook 30% faster? Give me more battery life, give me better integrated graphics so I don't need a GPU to be sure that my favorite television show is watchable. Hulu barely works on my kitchen PC. it's a KITCHEN PC, I Don't want to have to get a Dgpu for it. The direction intel is moving is what the majority of consumers need.

I won't lie, 6 years ago, as an avid gamer, this upgrade path with disappoint me. As a person more in tune with the average consumer, I understand intel is doing what is in it's best interests.

All of intel's focus will improve my experience as a consumer MUCH more than if I could hit 5.5 Ghz on Haswell right now. What would I use that processing power for even? Give me entry level notebook performance, in a tablet for under $400 with decent battery life and I'll be happy because quite frankly, 95% of the time I'm on a PC I'm web browsing. Do I seriously need a 5.5 Ghz Haswell with 32 GB of DDR4 or DDR5 ram or whatever is the latest thing out, with SSDs running in raid just to browse the internet?

In the past, the average consumer noticed an upgrade. We're at the point though where YES, my new haswell machine will be faster than my laptop by MULTITUDES. Will I notice it in anything but gaming though? No.

 

[beginner99]

In general I agree. This good-enough thing is stupid because ARM, Atom and Kabini are just not good enough. And it doesn't help such devices usually ship with ultra slow storage.

On the other hand I would take a dual-core pentium laptop with ssd any day over a quad-core one with HDD. Generally speaking Ivy bridge class CPUs are mostly good-enough in laptops and office desktops.

My current work laptops biggest limitation by far is the fact that it must run 32-bit windows and 3 GB usable RAM is just crappy. Your IT is pretty incompetent..."It takes too much work to have 32 and 64 bit installs." Yeah sure...you know you are employed to work?

 

[OBLAMA2009]

the average user, doing what an average user does cant tell the difference between a pentium, an i3 and a quad core i5; innovation is pretty much over at the high end as far as performance is concerned. so they "innovated" at the low end and invented crap like desktop atom, e1, etc...sheet that was so bad it would make you want to buy something faster after a few months. the problem now is that that isnt working anymore because everyone know that stuff is crap. so now theyre rebranding dat sheet as "atom pentium" hoping to fool us yet again

 

[escrow4]

Good enough isn't here; I got tired of my slow ass mac mini and built myself a new office box. I could have bought a Celeron, but pffft, I dropped in an i5 3570, 16GB RAM, 128GB 840 Pro, and a GTX 650 (despite no 11.1, I prefer Nvidia), all to give a big fat boost to 8.

Stupid overkill, but I know this build will easily last in an office capacity. :thumbsup:

 

[Gryz]

Now if I could only figure out why my Internet radio skips, when I scroll my web browser.

There are 2 things that come to mind.

1) The Windows scheduler. Long time ago, doing schedulers was hard. Even if your scheduler assigns cpu-time between processes in a fair way, that doesn't mean it can schedule other resources properly. Bandwidth over the bus. Access to the network interface. Etc. I used to write software that ran on a proprietary real-time OS (over a decade ago). And problems around contention between processes always came back, in some form or another. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft hadn't found the perfect solution yet either.

2) Mice come with drivers. Some drivers are unbelievably bad and inefficient. The Logitech drivers used to be so bad, I refused to install them. (I have them installed now, because I like remapping my buttons). Maybe it's the mouse driver that does something insane, freezing your browser. Note, there are also browser-plugins for mice, that come with the driver. (No idea what they do). You might want to disable the browser-plugin and see if that helps. Or even disable the mouse-driver itself.