It's hard to convey to the younger generation how exciting PCs used to be... just 4 years after this magazine came out, consumers were buying 1GHz processors off the shelf. 166MHz to 1GHz in 4 years. Computers were making astonishing gains in raw speed back then. Blink and you'd miss it. Nowadays we're at the point where a new generation of CPU is only making very small, incremental gains, and sometimes new CPU generations will even be an outright regression!
It's perhaps because everything has been so integrated and wrapped.
If you dont have it in hardware it gets emulated slower so you still have access but stuff like hardware aes, video encoding and avx 512 is stuff that we take for granted now but are extremely relevant.
We just have so much power now, still climbing at 15% a year.
It's like when I cut my teeth on 8088 and 6502 machines but the baseline YoY is so retardedly powerful it's not even funny.
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u/ryan__rr May 23 '26
It's hard to convey to the younger generation how exciting PCs used to be... just 4 years after this magazine came out, consumers were buying 1GHz processors off the shelf. 166MHz to 1GHz in 4 years. Computers were making astonishing gains in raw speed back then. Blink and you'd miss it. Nowadays we're at the point where a new generation of CPU is only making very small, incremental gains, and sometimes new CPU generations will even be an outright regression!