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I know what you're saying. An 8th gen i5 will run circles around those 5th gen i7 ones.
I have a feeling that companies like Intel are banking on the ignorance of common people. People who don't know any better will think "i7 is better than i5" without looking at the specs, so Intel gets to sell more of the old sh*t, so why not milk that i7 name.
Unscrupulous ba$tard$.
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I think that an unconditional "A is better than B" is an overly simplistic approach.
I bought a machine around the time when the first i7 arrived. It was the first x86 to have three high-performance memory channels, and I was working with tools that were shuffeling tons of data around in memory, but not very CPU intensive, so e.g. clock speed had little effect on the performance.
Later, I have been on projects with data that could almost fit in cache, but requiring a lot of CPU work, so clock speed and microarchitecture turned out to be essential; memory channels were "almost idle".
Software achitecture and peripheral software may have a great impact. The SketchUp 3D drawing system came in a new version that delegated lots of the graphic processing to your advanced Graphics card - if you had one. I bought one, and drawing times were reduced to a fraction, while CPU load dropped to a fraction. (The previous SU version made very little use of the graphics card functionality; it didn't matter much if you had a top rate or an El Cheapo card.)
Looking back at my old University: They ran a Cray-1 for a number of years. It was replaced not to get more CPU power, but to get more I/O capacity. When running e.g. wheather forecasts, even 20 DMA channels was a bottleneck.
You may have other tradeoffs. What is the cost of interrupt handling? That depends on how much you depend on interrupts. Can the CPU support a chipset that provides the I/O-standards that you need? Can the CPU support the amount of physical RAM that you need? Is the power consumption low enough to run the machine on a battery, or does it require water cooling?
Lots of such variations. For one specific application you may certainly conclude that "A is better than B", but not as a geneal unqualified statement.
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Was completely OS-reinstalled last December.
Still a beast :
xeon w-2133 @ 3.6ghz, 64gig memory, Quadro p4000.
since I cannot install games, I don't know if it can run Crysis.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Wow, there was at least one person who voted that. Dude, whoever you are, please let me buy you a sandwich.
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If their dev machine is over 25 year's old, are you sure they can bite into a sandwich still? May need to offer pudding or mashed potatoes instead.
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Must be one of those mainframes.
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Entirely possible.
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Amarnath S wrote: Must be one of those mainframes.
was going to say the same thing. my guess though is that this developer is still using a relatively new machine to access that older mainframe machine.
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Not necessarily. I've still gotten a 25+ year old Win 3.11 PC sitting in my home office, for the reason that it has a 5.25" floppy drive. Or rather, the last time I turned it on was because a friend of mine wanted me to check if his old floppies were still readable (they were!). I've got a couple other rather outdated interfaces to it as well, such as a MIDI interface card, an interface card for a tape cassette unit, and for a hand scanner. The cards are for old bus systems, so I can't move them to a newer machine. (For the MIDI, I could of course buy a brand new USB based MIDI interface, but not for the other two.)
I am not doing any development on this machine, but if you work as a consultant, you should be prepared for the strangest requests. If I was offered a six man months project on adding some new functions to a 16-bit Windows program system (that is entirely possible, even today!), I guess I would take it. Then, this Win 3.11 machine would be my development environment (it has a C++ compiler and debugger - but I have forgotten the name of the debugger!), and for a period my main development machine would have been 25+ years old.
I haven't had such a project, but about fifteen years ago a fellow came with a pile of 8" floppies (I guess most of you have never seen a real-life 8" floppy!). "I think these may contain some essential data, but I don't know the format...". He couldn't tell what kind of machine or software had created them, their age (except that they were old!), nothing. He gave us a cost limit (which turned out to be high enough to get his data out).
At that time, we had an old minim machine (not a PDP-11, but same class, from around 1980) with an 8" drive and a good selection of drivers for various track/sector formatting, and I managed to get a binary dump of the floppies. Then I could start poking around. The blocks looked like line noise, so I suspected that it could be encrypted in some way. In those days, some people were still using primitive encryption (like xoring or code shifting). Octet values were indeed unevenly distributed. By plain luck I came across an EBCDIC table, and saw that the two most common octed values were the EBCDIC codes for 'e' and 't'. The very most of the contents were plain text in EBCDIC coding. The customer confirmed that the floppies might come from an old IBM system.
For this project, we at least made use of a 20+ year old machine to dump the floppies to a hard drive. Not quite "software development", but it illustrates that some projects may call for that kind of equipment.
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I've worked with 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies, but never with an 8" one. This is new to me.
About 18 years ago, when I was with GE in India, they had a bunch of test machines, about ten of them, one of which was a Win 3.11 machine, on which they wanted the software to be tested.
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With the 8" floppies, the term "floppy" really made sense
Belive it or not: Even those stone age 8" floppies came in capacities up to a whooping 1.2 Mbytes/floppy! I don't think IBM's DSDD version was very successful (the 5.25" had already arrived), but I used a lot of 1.2 MB versions with a proprietary formatting (sectors where 180 degrees, 2 kByte to the sector) and proprietary file system, for a popular 1970-80s "(super)minicomputer" series. The (super)minis did get 5.25" drives, later, but before the 3.5" floppies (which we jokingly called "stiffies", but that could be misread by mislead people...) arrived, the (super)mini era was over.
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only count the date you purchased the initial unit.
My actual PC is 6 years old, but initial unit is way older.
Patrice
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
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Fair enough, no sandwich for you then.
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I think I have had only two full tower size cases over the years, each for a series of different mainboards. I don't think that metal skin is essential to the evaluation of my development computer.
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If you replace all of the parts one at a time, is it really still the same machine?
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Perhaps as old as its chassis?
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I bought it just earlier this year, but it's second hand as I got it from my old employer.
It was new when I got it when I started working there two years ago.
So I voted 1-3 years.
I could buy it for a very reasonable price
250 GB SSD + 500 GB HDD, 32 GB memory, Intel i7 @ 2.70 GHz... No reason to get a new one just yet
The SSD is brand new as the old one somehow didn't work after I quit my job.
Most of my other stuff, monitors, keyboard, mouse, docking station... Is about a year old.
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I'm running an old i5 powered by the souls of VB6 developers.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I know you're lying... VB6 developers don't have souls
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And just why do you think they don't?
I'll tell you why.
*slurp*
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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This is a once in a lifetime, but... I'm putting my pitchfork away
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It's the circle of life, predator and prey.
The world demands blood. I didn't make it that way. I just accept my role in the order of things.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Sander Rossel wrote: VB6 developers don't have souls
They used to have souls, until codewitch took them.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Is this considered as the "main development machine"?
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