Ask HN: Can a 5 year old i7 laptop compete with one made today?
Moore's Law is mostly dead, so current i7s aren't much faster than the ones made many years ago. I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Am I right? Is it worth saving the money? I mostly use spreadsheets and web apps.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadNot sure Windows 11 would run fine on either device, but NixOS sure does.
The more pressing matter is the amount of RAM the laptop has, especially given that many laptops have soldered RAM. I have a Surface 7 Pro (released in late 2019) with a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM that performs quite fine for Web browsing, Microsoft Office, and some programming. I don't do anything heavy-duty on my Surface Pro, though; I have more powerful machines with much more RAM for that.
And even if the numbers are great on a sunny day (or rather a cool day, to fix this I would have to sit with it in an open window), this is a real performance sink.
What you described sounds fine also.
I've been using a third-hand T480 for many (5? 7? Can't even remember anymore) years now, and it's probably the best Linux experience anyone can hope for. Performance vs. efficiency is crazy - easily hitting 20 hours, screen-on battery life after all this time and many full discharges.
Claims of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
>mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Am I right? Is it worth saving the money? I mostly use spreadsheets and web apps.
Any CPU from the last 10 years can handle Excel perfectly and JavaShit mostly fine. However, RAM could become the chief issue because there's only so much bloated Chrome and JavaShit you can fit in there.
If you can find a laptop with at least 16GB of RAM you will likely be fine.
The biggest issues I have with my system is that even with a brand new battery, battery life on 45W Skylake portables isn't ideal (this system is nearly 10 years old now), yielding about 2.5 hours with light browsing or terminal work. The 4k IPS screen is also dim-ish, but I remember it being pretty nice for the era in late 2015/2016. Compared to an M3 macbook pro is like the moon compared to the sun. This isn't inherently an issue with the CPU though.
If you leave the laptop plugged in, it's fine compared to a modern machine. Connected to an external display to avoid the dim screen and I'm able to do my programming/administration work just fine. I don't need a ton of cores to run GNOME powering Chrome and Kitty + tmux + ssh.
The only real upgrades I did was bump it to a 16GB stick of RAM and add bump the WiFi to an Intel 6E 210. I'm contemplating getting a new or secondary NVMe for it. The only real complaint I have is it doesn't charge by USB-C.
Thank you for the new word :). TIL JavaShit
It depends on WHAT you are using them for. Generally the public has reached a point where we don't need more processing power. Unless you're into gaming, streaming, editing, or a specific CPU intense use case we have enough computing power. The only thing left to do is make them more energy effecient.
Heck, no. Moore's law applies to the doubling of transistors. But efficiency gains are still being had every year.
An i7 mobile chip released 5 years ago would likely be the i7-8750H (high performance). An intel chip released recently would be the 'Raptor Lake' generation - let's say i7-13650HX (also high performance).
The i7-13650HX is at least 50-80% faster (single-core) and over 100% faster in multi-core.
While it is true that an i7 from 5 years ago is probably sufficient for basic tasks, RAM+SSD is perhaps more important than raw CPU performance than anything else these days. If you have at least 8 cores, you'll probably have a good time.
However, given most mobile platforms will heavily throttle the CPU on battery, than the answer may be more complicated.
CPU choices became good enough for most use-cases years ago, and only the GPU and installed RAM bumps the capability these days.
For example: A slower 24 core i7 CPU with 64GB ddr4 and rtx4070 on laptops will perform a little better than an older platform. =)
It's true that performance was already good enough in many apps, so better than good enough might not be noticeable.
That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.
I noticed much higher callback rate after upgrading. This is admittedly a small sample size.
Any webcam does the job as long as you can recognize the person. Anyway most people use this blurry background thingy, I really don't believe that the video quality matters.
If it makes you feel any better, this machine replaced my previous daily driver because I realized that the machine I'd been thinking was "surely just like 5 years old right?" was 11 years old.
Replaced in quotes because for the covid years I used a desktop and didn't have to be able to function outside often enough to bother with a laptop.
Considering that 5 years ago is 2019, I figure that efficiency gains are probably also not as dramatic as I'm imagining.
You can just buy batteries that will do USB-C PD.
Then you get a versatile external battery solution for charging multiple devices!
The 16GB of RAM and the SSD I put in here are what're keeping it usable. That, and I'm not trying to use it for heavy gaming or any giant programming projects.
The data shows that the average laptop CPU in 2024 has 56% better thread performance, and 123% better total performance, compared to the average laptop in 2019.
Laptop thread 2019: 1689 avg. score
Laptop total 2019: 6396 avg. score
Laptop thread 2024: 2643 avg. score
Laptop total 2024: 14288 avg. score
For the specific case, just look up the benchmarks for the CPUs you are comparing.
Once a company stops being cool it dies.
Macs are fast, cool, and quiet; are there other ARM machines that are fast and not super expensive servers?
(Edit: To be clear, I'm skeptical but also if you know of one I'd be very interested)
When on the road, I meet with clients, partners and vendors. I don't sit in coffee shops debugging complex apps. That is what my office with desktop computers and servers are for. Whilst traveling I try to address my sleep deficit.
https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra
It's an arm64 Linux workstation.
The GPU and other I/O makes a noticeable difference to quality of life IMHO.
Lenovo ThinkCentre's and Dell Optiplex types.
I'll probably upgrade to 9- or 10-series in a year or two, depending on what's available for low low prices.
I suggest >9000 passmark score like the 10th gen i7-10710U [2] or newer, or earlier if it is a higher power chip.
[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2630U...
[1]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-14700...
[2]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i...
Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me).
[edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.
And then Moore Law might be close to dead but the performance increase of newer cpus isn't, the new Ryzen are pure magic and a big leap forward.
So it works fine for everything I need to do. I sometimes look at new laptop models, but there is nothing much they have that would make any difference to me.
I think if you want to run Windows it might be more painful as the upgrade treadmill might force you to a place where drivers are no longer available.
Battery life is poor compared to a Mac but about average for a PC (I've replaced the battery once so far though).
I think lately we have been seen a surge of efficiency cores because of this, turning on all that silicon to do just a little bit of computation and sitting idle is wasteful.
My impression is that this applies to a lot of server infra as well.