For my personal computing needs I recently upgraded from the combination of an ancient i7 920 quad core desktop and a quad core Haswell laptop to a Ryzen 2700X desktop and a pile of lovely disposable X220 Thinkpads.

On the one hand, for software that's not complete garbage in terms of optimization (scientific software, video/audio software, games, my own code) the difference is staggering, I hadn't felt a change this drastic since I moved from Pentium 1 to Pentium 3. On the other hand, I now know that there is no amount of resources that will make a modern web browser or Electron app run well.

The good news is that now that I feel I deserve good performance I've made an effort to get rid of most of the crap. Apart from disabling JS etc. by default and blocking everything I possibly can I have no solution for the browsers, sadly, but everything else is gone. The Thinkpads all run minimalistic Arch Linux setups and mostly work as thin clients, so overall every system I use is snappy and responsive, for the first time in a decade. I shouldn't have needed a hardware upgrade to return to common sense in computing, but it is good to know that with some discipline and a low tolerance for garbage it is still (mostly) possible to have a reasonable computing experience. Now, if only there was a usable browser out there...

This is heavily correlated with your age (or, as you put it, "years in the business".) We old-timers clearly remember the days of Moore's Law, or more precisely, the days when Moore's Law had a direct impact on single-processor performance.

For me, every upgrade was at least a factor of two improvement to pretty much everything. It was a qualitative difference -- things that just didn't make sense to run were now reasonable to do, things that meant leaving it overnight could now be kicked off before going to lunch or whatever, things that required scheduling were now causes for slashdot breaks (age, remember?), and those minutes-long jobs were now something you could run and wait for without context switching.

I could go on for one more step -- except that's kind of where it ended, at least for reliable improvements. Stuff that was almost buttery smooth might become buttery smooth, but stuff that was buttery smooth already might start lagging some here and there.

These days upgrades are more about SSDs, RAM, decaying batteries that tip you over the edge, connectors, or maybe the collection of weird compatibility problems (eg 3 monitor support) that you've sort of worked around but the workarounds are breaking down, and you have this naive notion that the latest greatest laptop will magically be more robust. (Instead, you usually just trade over to a different set of problems.)

I'd agree that the SSD switch was the biggest boost in recent memory, and it's been about a decade since I've experienced one of those glorious upgrades of yore. And I miss them -- the heady excitement of everything being better is now replaced with a nervous inventory of everything I need to work or think might be improved, trying it all out in hopes of feeling some improvement or at least having it continue to work.

It used to be that each generation of CPU was a significant performance jump.

DOOM on a 386 was nearly unplayable. On a 486 it was perfect. Quake on a 486 was awful, was great on a Pentium, and was smooth as butter on a Pentium II.

These days, each generation is less than 20% faster in single-core performance. My desktop at home is an i7-3770k. In a couple months, it'll be 6 generations out of date, and yet it's still fast enough for everything I do, even gaming!

My CPU is 6 years old, yet doesn't feel like it. If you were running a 6 year old computer in the year 2000, you'd be running a 133 Mhz Pentium while everyone with a new system at the time would be on a 1 Ghz Pentium III. The performance difference was at least and order of magnitude and definitely noticeable.

I'd hazard to venture that modern microprocessor improvements "seem" less for two reasons.

1) A lot of the "a ha" magic really has been figured out in microprocessor arch (e.g. pipelining, superscalar, multi-level caching).

Previously, we were reaping the benefits of process shrinks AND microarch epiphanies. Now, only a slower former and less powerful versions of the latter (e.g. branch predictor tweaks).

2) We're discounting the "performance" that has instead been allocated to power. Up until the P4, we had the benefit of just saying "more power!" in pursuit of performance.

Now, not only do we have a power budget to stay within, but we're actively trying to decrease power draw for the same workload in mobile parts.

So instead of getting something twice as fast, we get something that has battery twice is long (or however the math works out).

> So instead of getting something twice as fast, we get something that has battery twice is long (or however the math works out).

We've essentially changed the metric of performance from "calculations per second" to "calculations per watt", which can be useful for mobile (battery life) and data centers (reducing heat and the need for massive air conditioners, plus the electric bill), but less useful for gamers that often need more single-core performance.

UI and user-facing elements are largely dependent on perception and I/O (human and computer), and the band of improvement there is narrow.

Also, I/O is often the bottleneck, which is why most people perceive a speed increase moving from spinning platters to SSDs. If you move stuff to RAM, I bet you'd see another perceptible speed increase. (I've recently started using the RAM-backed /dev/shm on Linux for transient, throwaway data generated by my programs, and boy it is fast.)

I have a Linux machine running on a Core 2 Duo machine (2005) at home and an Core i7 (2017) at work. An "ls -la" feels about the same on both. But when I try to train an ML model, the difference is stark and perceptible.

When I finally was able to upgrade from 4MB to 16MB of RAM on my Linux box in ~95-96, I went from constant swapping to FAST COMPUTER. Seriously, I had no idea compiling a kernel could be fast. It was taking something like 7-8 hours and I just thought it was a lot of work (though it is, of course).

The next time I compiled a kernel took something like 8 minutes. I couldn't believe my eyes as the steps flew by on the console.

Other than "adequate RAM" I'll go for "SSD" like everyone else. Now adequate RAM doesn't even matter all that much because swapping is so fast (relatively speaking).

I actually feel a big difference when I upgrade, usually on the same 3-4 year cadence.

Admittedly, the most recent cycle felt somewhat the same, but generally I see a boost in quality of life. Not things like how fast a script runs on a large dataset, but like how responsive my machine is _while_ that script is running, or _while_ I'm doing some intensive task.

I got an SSD in 2012, and was miraculous, like everyone who's done it can say.

Aside from that, 2008 was probably the biggest jump. Going from a mediocre laptop to a custom built ~$2500 desktop with a Core 2 Quad and (especially) 24" monitor was astounding. I'm never going to make a laptop my main machine ever again.

It is rare to notice small improvements differences when they are delivered incrementally. You would notice if you went back to that machine from 7 years ago and tried to use it today.

There is also the idle nature of most computer usage. That next gen i7 will not load Facebook appreciably faster. CPU limited tasks could be only 5% of normal use. So a 20% improvement for 5% of the time.

Yeah, but if you back up a decade, the improvements were anything but incremental. Even a 2 year upgrade was a massively noticeable improvement.

For desktops, i would say it was the 2nd gen of the core i series(2xxx, like the 2500k). For laptops, definitely the original retina macbook pro in 2012.

I'm still using that machine, i try out new stuff every few months. I still don't see the point. I load it down pretty heavily all the time and it still kicks right through it just like it did when i took it out of the box.

If it breaks, i'll just buy another similar one. They're not much over $500 now and it's an amazing amount of computer for that price even in 2018(19?). My only regret is not maxing out the ram and storage really, but that's on me.

I've never felt this way until now, i used to wish i could justify a new machine every year or two and often would. I think i didn't keep a laptop for over a year and a half until i got this one... But now i just don't care. I don't own a single machine with a newer cpu than this one, and my desktop still does great too with a 3770 and a couple SSDs.

> when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade?

Earlier this year. I upgraded (my personal computer) from a 2010 dual-core i5 (Arrandale) laptop to a 12-core Threadripper. My old laptop was still usable for single-thread tasks - I upped the memory to it's limit (8GB) and upgraded to SSD, and this contributed to my long upgrade cycle.

My workflow has changed since I bought the laptop in 2010 - I now tend to run multiple VMs and docker in parallel, and there I noticed a BIG uptick in performance. I could only run 2 VMs (slowly, with swapping) at most before the upgrade, post-upgrade, I'm now able to run 6 VMs with no signs of slow-down - I haven't tried to find the upper limit to number of VMs, but there's plenty of room for growth for additional RAM and SATA disks.

Given:

- gigabit ethernet LAN and a speedy Internet connection

- doing "desktop" work -- browser, SSH, office docs, media consumption

All my machines feel snappy, ranging from the $250 NUC through the MBP2011 (with 16GB RAM and an SSD) through the midrange Intel desktop (also 16GB RAM and an SSD).

I don't play any significant games and major computation happens on servers, not on anything I'm typing directly on.

It's been snappy for a decade, and I don't expect a noticeable improvement the next time I get something new. I might be pushing more pixels to a screen, but it will respond at about the same speed.

Since everyone mentioned SSDs, I'll second getting a gigabit local network connection. Now I store everything on the server in another room, and my laptop, desktop, and consoles can load and share files almost like the hard drive was connected to each directly.

Great point. I went from 25Mbps DSL to symmetric gigabit fiber last year, and that'll change your life.

When I fitted my laptop with 118GB Optane drive (intel 800p). My builds run twice as fast now. I wouldn't achieve this by swapping CPU.

What kind of builds are you doing? Some of my colleagues are running tests at work and are looking into what benefits the most.

+1 on the SSD. I've declined my companys managed PC upgrade twice now because performance increases are negligible and build quality got worse (at least on the models we were offered).

I agree that laptops/batteries have gotten smaller at the same price/performance point, though. Very good for my company.

+1 for experiencing a noticeable improvement with SSDs.

One more I would submit is the transition from DDR2 to DDR3. I do not yet have a DDR4 machine, but I am anticipating some kind of "aha! so this is what I have been missing out on" moment when the time comes.

I was reading about DDR3 vs DDR4 the other week, and apparently it's not so clear cut - DDR4 can be slower in some cases.

2014 I replaced my MBA 11" with a maxed out MBP 15", and the performance difference was crazy.

Buuuut, my next laptop (if I stick with Apple) will probably be a MB 12" with medium to low specs, with most of my demanding dev stuff moved to a Linux server.

For me too it was swapping my HDDs for SSDs. Also, getting 64GB RAM (I do lots of video and stuff).

Everything else, moving from CPU generations to newer generations, _felt_ like it barely made a dent.

GPU rendering via CUDA also meant a massive jump.

>But in terms of how long it takes to boot

I notice a huge improvement in boot times with every (windows) OS upgrade I've gotten.

Recently overclocked L5639 from 2.13Ghz to 3Ghz and saw a noticeable difference but not sure how pronounced that is for a i7-3xxx at 3.5Ghz to an i7-8xxx at 5Ghz

There's definitely a difference between the L5639 at 3Ghz and a i7-6700HQ (2.6Ghz base) in my laptop

Oh, but booting is faster because systemd, remember? /s

This is literally the one thing "the systemd people" -- which is to say, Red Hat -- fell back on when their backs were to the wall after having their short list of sales pitch lies refuted. If none of the other supposed benefits were benefits or actually true, at least systemd would make our systems boot faster. Red Hat leaned on this hard throughout the process which culminated in the exclusively political decision (i.e. not based on merit) by the Debian TC chairman to completely replace existing init in "the rock-solid stability distro" with such unstable, buggy, immature software.

Here's a fun project idea: Plot the boot times of machines running systemd (and some control) over time, and I'm willing to bet you'll see a substantial increase in boot time immediately subsequent to the systemd decision by the Debian TC.

But what are boot times like now compared to an init-based system after years of development?

Worse. Do you think somehow cramming more wishlist kitchen sinks into systemd made it faster?

It's not the hardware per se, it's the software. On my various sysadmin forums I've never seen so many "I went full gnu/linux and am never looking back!" Posts. Windows has been shitting the bed for a long time now and 7 was just the outlier in the trend. Hardware, especially m2 and data ssd do make a difference, but it's mostly bad software people are Stockholm syndromed into using that is the problem.