>He’s forgetting that software keeps getting slower.
It depends on the software usage. If you're not using cpu-demanding tasks like rendering videos in Adobe Premiere, Blender 3D, etc, then very old pcs will continue to work fine.
The desktop computer I'm typing this comment on is a 10-year old Intel i7-5820K 3.3GHz pc. Back in 2014, I maxed it out at 64 GB RAM but I took half out and reduced it to 32GB RAM. I use it daily for VS2022, VSCode, VMware, MS Excel.
I also help maintain a desktop for my 80-year old friend. Her computer is a 15-year old i7-950 3.06GHz. That computer from 2009 runs Windows 10 and she uses it daily for Chrome browsing, Youtube videos (including 4k), Amazon shopping, and Mozilla Thunderbird email.
It's possible that Windows 11 with its TPM requirement may finally force a hardware upgrade of those dinosaurs but I read there are hacks to get around that.
I could definitely see how buying a new high-end pc today will last ~15 more years for typical consumers. On the other hand, the power users who want to run the latest LLM locally with 600-watt graphics cards that will be obsolete in a year will be a different story. Today's NVIDIA 5090 with 32GB RAM may be too small to run the next latest & greatest LLMs for those who want to stay on the bleeding edge.
EDIT REPLY: >Why did you take half the RAM out?
It was a long story that I left out. The motherboard was unstable with all 64GB of RAM in it. It would lock up with RAM corruption after a few hours. Finding the root cause of this this took several days of trial & error with swapping the 8 RAM sticks and running MEMCHECK on multi-hour scans. After testing and going the process of elimination, it turns out that none of the RAM sticks had defects. The defect was the motherboard itself. Take any of the 4 out of 8 RAM sticks so it's 32GB RAM and everything is super stable.
I was just mentioning the 32 GB RAM without all that backstory to emphasize that I've gone 10 years without being at the more "future-proof" 64 GB.
>It's possible that Windows 11 with its TPM requirement may finally force a hardware upgrade of those dinosaurs but I read there are hacks to get around that.
This is what killed a lot of computers in my company's laboratories.
It depends on the software usage. If you're not using cpu-demanding tasks like rendering videos in Adobe Premiere, Blender 3D, etc, then very old pcs will continue to work fine.
The desktop computer I'm typing this comment on is a 10-year old Intel i7-5820K 3.3GHz pc. Back in 2014, I maxed it out at 64 GB RAM but I took half out and reduced it to 32GB RAM. I use it daily for VS2022, VSCode, VMware, MS Excel.
I also help maintain a desktop for my 80-year old friend. Her computer is a 15-year old i7-950 3.06GHz. That computer from 2009 runs Windows 10 and she uses it daily for Chrome browsing, Youtube videos (including 4k), Amazon shopping, and Mozilla Thunderbird email.
It's possible that Windows 11 with its TPM requirement may finally force a hardware upgrade of those dinosaurs but I read there are hacks to get around that.
I could definitely see how buying a new high-end pc today will last ~15 more years for typical consumers. On the other hand, the power users who want to run the latest LLM locally with 600-watt graphics cards that will be obsolete in a year will be a different story. Today's NVIDIA 5090 with 32GB RAM may be too small to run the next latest & greatest LLMs for those who want to stay on the bleeding edge.
EDIT REPLY: >Why did you take half the RAM out?
It was a long story that I left out. The motherboard was unstable with all 64GB of RAM in it. It would lock up with RAM corruption after a few hours. Finding the root cause of this this took several days of trial & error with swapping the 8 RAM sticks and running MEMCHECK on multi-hour scans. After testing and going the process of elimination, it turns out that none of the RAM sticks had defects. The defect was the motherboard itself. Take any of the 4 out of 8 RAM sticks so it's 32GB RAM and everything is super stable.
I was just mentioning the 32 GB RAM without all that backstory to emphasize that I've gone 10 years without being at the more "future-proof" 64 GB.