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Nvidia won, we all lost

(blog.sebin-nyshkim.net)
977 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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mcdeltat ◴[] No.44470051[source]
Anyone else getting a bit disillusioned with the whole tech hardware improvements thing? Seems like every year we get less improvement for higher cost and the use cases become less useful. Like the whole industry is becoming a rent seeking exercise with diminishing returns. I used to follow hardware improvements and now largely don't because I realised I (and probably most of us) don't need it.

It's staggering that we are throwing so many resources at marginal improvements for things like gaming, and I say that as someone whose main hobby used to be gaming. Ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS, etc at a price point of $3000 just for the GPU - who cares when a 2010 cell shaded game running on an upmarket toaster gave me the utmost joy? And the AI use cases don't impress me either - seems like all we do each generation is burn more power to shove more data through and pray for an improvement (collecting sweet $$$ in the meantime).

Another commenter here said it well, there's just so much more you can do with your life than follow along with this drama.

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1. philistine ◴[] No.44470127[source]
Your disillusionment is warranted, but I'll say that on the Mac side the grass has never been greener. The M chips are screamers year after year, the GPUs are getting ok, the ML cores are incredible and actually useful.
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2. mcdeltat ◴[] No.44471707[source]
Good point, we should commend genuinely novel efforts towards making baseline computation more efficient, like Apple has done as you say. Particularly in light of recent x86 development which seems to be "shove as many cores as possible on a die and heat your apartment while your power supply combusts" (meanwhile the software gets less efficient by the day, but that's another thing altogether...). ANY DAY of the week I will take a compute platform that's no-bs no-bells-and-whistles simply more efficient without the manufacturer trying to blow smoke up our asses.
3. hot_gril ◴[] No.44478351[source]
Yeah, going from Intel to M1 was a huge improvement, but not in every way. So now they're closing all the other gaps, and it's getting even better.