2011 desktop CPUs will perform about half as well as a modern laptop one.
I don’t even think Sandybridge (Intel 2011) CPUs support h264 decode- a pretty common requirement these days for zoom, slack, teams and video streaming sites such as YouTube.
>2011 desktop CPUs will perform about half as well as a modern laptop one.
Maybe, but the fat client-thin client pendulum has swung back in favor of thin clients to the point that CPU performance is generally irrelevant (it kind of has to be, since most people browse the Web with their phones). As for games, provided you throw enough GPU at the problem acceptable performance is still absolutely achievable, but that's not new either.
>a pretty common requirement these days for zoom, slack, teams and video streaming sites such as YouTube
It really isn't: from experience the hard line for acceptable performance is "anything first-gen Core iX (Nehalem) or later"- Core 2 systems are legitimately too old for things like 4K video playback, however. The limiting factor on older machines like that is ultimately RAM (because Electron), but provided you've maxed out a system with 16GB+ and an SSD there's no real performance difference between a first-gen Core system and an 11th-gen Core system for all thin client (read: web) applications.
That said, it's also worth noting that the average laptop really took a dive in speed with Haswell and didn't start getting the 10% year-over-year improvements again until Skylake because ultra-low-voltage processors became the norm after that time and set the average laptop about 4 years back in speed compared to their standard-voltage counterparts: those laptops genuinely might not be fast enough now, but the standard-voltage ones absolutely are.
Yes… only half as well as modern laptop. Back on the era of Moore’s law, a new machine would be 32x as fast as a ten year old model.
That was a real difference.
But in 2021, people still buy laptops 1/2 as slow as other models to do the same work. Heck people go out of their way to buy iPad pros which are half as slow as comparable laptops.
Considering that, I think a ten year old machine is pretty competitive as an existing choice.
IPad Pro 2021: 1118 on geekbench[1] priced at @ 2,199.00 fully specced at the 12.9 inch model with keyboard.
Macbook Air 2020: 1733 on geekbench[2]. Priced @ about 1,849.00 fully speced for 13-inch model.
That's what I mean by comparable tablets are more expensive than laptops. You have to pay a lot more because it has a dual form factor (like the Microsoft Surfacebooks).
Sandy Bridges actually do have hardware decoding, but this isn't really a CPU feature, since it's a separate accelerator more akin to an integrated GPU. FWIW sites like Youtube seem to prefer the most bandwidth-efficient codec regardless of whether hardware decoding is available.
Exactly, no 100x, no 10x, just half. That is very noticeable but "extreme" sounds like much more.
> I don’t even think Sandybridge (Intel 2011) CPUs support h264 decode-
Correct, but unrelated to CPU speed and instead an additional hardware component. That is a fair argument, just like missing suitable HDMI standards, usb c, etc.. However, again that is not about speed but features.
I don’t even think Sandybridge (Intel 2011) CPUs support h264 decode- a pretty common requirement these days for zoom, slack, teams and video streaming sites such as YouTube.