I only partially agree. I recently got nostalgic and bought a 2nd-gen Core-i7 ThinkPad X220 from ebay (similar to what i had back in my university days).

It's generally very usable util you open firefox and browse a modern website. Chrome/chromium aren't any better.

The issue with old hardware is web browser and web pages, particularly web pages. Modern websites are incredible resource drains, it's unbelievable.

I can easily read documentation from old-school cool websites like https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ but anything fancier than that gets the fan wheels spinning...

I disagree. I would submit that the average consumer utilizes a lot of computing power and that you might actually be using less than that as a more technical power user with more discerning tastes in applications and a viewpoint that sees the computer as more of a tool than an entertainment and lifestyle device.

I would also sumbit that the person who is still using a computer from 2011 would never have bought an i7 in the first place. They’re not going to follow an upgrade path where they say “I had a core i3 in 2011 that is too slow now so I’ll replace it with something that had a 2011 i7 that I couldn’t justify purchasing at the time.” Instead they’re more likely to say “I bought this laptop 15 years ago and I’ve battered the hell out of it and I’ve been frugal and it’s time for a new one,” and when they buy that new one it will also be a very modest configuration.

So the fact that a top of the line processor from 15 years ago is still serviceable is not really all that relevant. It’s going to not even be worth it on power consumption alone if you’re running it 24/7.

In other words, there’s more to a chip than raw performance.

idk about that. I had an i5 2019 macbook and that thing was so incredibly slow and hot. When the M1 came out it felt like jumping 10 years foward.

People say that, but money talks and the people don't buy those.

Isn’t the Apple M series basically the best of both worlds? Extremely high performance, and extremely low power use when not making use of it.

5W for a laptop is raspberry pi territory, and we're adding a screen to it. I hope we ever get there for a 14" fully usable laptop, but that sounds bleeding edge territory at this point.

The CPU alone can operate below 5W:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/lunar-lake-profiles/6

Honestly, that's not a CPU problem.

A laptop running below 5W needs to turn down its storage, RAM, GPU, LAN, WiFi, USB controllers, etc. The OS needs to act more like a smartphone, put everything to sleep, and use consolidated polling and interrupts for async behaviors.

I think this is the real advantage Apple has with their vertical integration. They can play a lot of complementary games between hardware and OS.

You should look into chinese laptops using the intel n150/n250 cpus. Those have a 6W TDP.

The issue with those cpus is that they're pretty much never used in laptops meant to do anything serious. They usually are employed into cheap plastic laptops using ridiculous batteries.

I would really like the form factor of 2011-2013 thinkpads, with the chonky 90WHr battery on the back and the 12" form factor.

With a modern cpu (low tdp and low power draw) that would be unbeatable everyday carry.

The steam deck's chip runs at 15w maximum and has I believe a 4, 6, and 8w mode. Maybe not 5w but pretty close. The linux desktop on it is a perfectly unimpressive but usable daily driver kind of thing. The problem is consumers dont want this. The failure of the netbook era proved it. People dont want to deal with slow speeds so this kind of thing wont be a mainstream mass produced item.

ARM faking x86 is probably the way to go for this case.

This could finally force the developers of cross-platform GUI and webview libraries, drunk on Moore’s Law, to sober up.

decent chunk of RAM maybe but my parents are happily browsing away on decade+ old chrome books. Ordinary web browsing you can do on a potato machine from 2008.

Even if you're a gamer performance on the desktop has eclipsed demand so much that you can play anything on a few years old machine. It used to be way worse in the "olden" days when only 10% of people had a system that was able to play Crysis.

Hasn't been true for about a decade. Modern browsers suspend most processor activity of background tabs, so it's mostly just memory pressure.

Except for me. I am single handedly holding off all of these people from building a fab.

Great idea. Can you lend me $10 billion?

Absolutely everything in the modern economy stops him from forming a competing company, this naive stupid market is the solution idea needs to stop being regurgitated, it's toxic to society.

Entering a multi billion risky market is no easy task even if you have investira and teams with deep knowledge. That's the reason monopolise should be avoided.

Yeah I'll get a loan off Dad for my first EUV machine and we'll snowball from there

Chip making has very has barrier of entry. Between fab cost and access to talent you are really not looking at an enticing business opportunity.

Free market is not as free as the name would imply.

Judging by the response to the parent come back, evidently TSMC deserves the high prices it will be charging. Why?

It's unrealistic to expect just anyone to start up a new fab. But if not one person among billions will start up a new fab it points to intrinsic difficulty or unpleasantness or lack of prestige in the task. A correctively high price has all kinds of advantages for the society.

I haven't seen any argument that difficult tasks shouldn't be priced high. Only name calling.

I'm rooting for Rapidus. A lot of people will look foolish if they succeed.

Maybe Malta is just too small of a world for that magic toggle, since entrenched interests can basically just prevent the government from approving certain strategies, like building more large buildings with apartments like the Mercury Tower. But on the global stage, not even the biggest player(US) can dictate what China, India, the EU does, so if the US self-limits because of entrenched interests, that's just more juice for the squeeze for other players not aligned with the US.

> Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality.

Creativity has been unlocked but it's not the magic kind, it's the rather mundane Robber Barron kind, where the robbers occupy the sources and hoard a bunch of goods to resell or rent at higher profits. It's true for housing, GPUs, RAM, etc. [1]

[1] Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

> I suspect it's going to be the same here. More expensive CPUs and GPUs are just going to mean more expensive CPUs and GPUs with no real silver lining.

Presumably, higher profits will incentivize other players to enter the market and increase supply, and/or the company earning high profits plows at least some back into R&D to at least create better chips, which can result in eventually lower prices for the previous generation of chips.

This isn’t a possibility with land and land rights, however, so I wouldn’t expect the same dynamics to play out.