Most "pro" workloads will never be "near-instant" because workloads will keep getting more complex (photos get more pixels to edit, programs get more lines of code to compile...)
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Mac Pro in trouble?
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Many tasks that used to be time consuming thirty years ago — booting the machine, opening a large file, applying a stroke in a brush application, updating a spreadsheet, recognising letters in an image — are no longer time consuming today. Compute intensive is a sliding scale, and machines get ever faster.
Some time ago we crossed the threshold where the vast majority of consumer tasks are near instant, it is of course never truly instant but it takes about 0.2 seconds for the human brain to react so anything faster is as good as. As more server-level and HPC features trickle into the desktop of tomorrow we will see more Pro tasks becoming instant.
And as for pictures getting more pixels, there are practical limits there too. 4K TVs are slowly taking over, but will 8K ever become a necessity? Its like Retina screens, finer details make no sense because the eye cannot take in more.
I agree, when near instant, then performance doesn't matter, but I don't think most users would switch to efficiency, they'd just be happy and not worry about anything. Anyway, we're nowhere near instant, especially on the low end.
This is not really true. Yes, more mundane tasks have become faster/instant. But hardware and software are always a catch 22 situation and always will be. As hardware becomes faster and more powerful there will inevitably be more complex tasks to be done that will push said hardware. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint) we will never get to a stage where performance will be 'enough' (given the correct context).
I’m afraid thats incorrect. The majority of tasks that consumers do today are the same as those being done twenty years ago, see the enduring popularity of MS Office (of which most people use only a fraction of the features) and the increasing popularity of Chromebooks.
You can also see it in the number of people (non-gamers) who hold onto older computer hardware for longer. I see it in my immediate surrounds that a lot of non-corporate users hold onto their computers until they break, getting a new faster model isn’t usually a consideration.
In corporate and pro environments there is more diversity, that is true, and there is a segment of computer users for whom power will never be enough. People compiling large codebases (and even there a full rebuild that used to take half an hour now take five minutes), people who work with 3D, movie editors, stuff that runs in the cloud.
Fear not, for every increase in hardware performance, our brilliant software writers are hard at work making it slower to compensate.
Yes, but those are not the use cases that are being discussed when you talk about 'performance'. Things like code compilation, video exports, 3d rendering, training AI models and other complex compute intensive tasks are, which will never be instant. The faster hardware gets, the more complex tasks like these will also get.
If you are talking about stuff like MS office, checking emails and watching youtube, you would obviously not care about performance that much.
now you say this like YouTube, and the internet as a whole isn’t performance intensive.
Is it though? I mean for the most part with the correct browser you can watch youtube mostly problem free on a $50 rasberry pi 4b.
Regardless, that is the whole point I am trying to make. Hardware gets faster and more powerful -> software running on it gets more complex and compute intensive. Hardware gets fast enough to stream 4k HDR -> 8k start becoming the norm and so on. 'Good performance' is a moving target.
YouTube seems to struggle sometimes on my 5,1 when tabbing between windows or when loading a new video. And chewed through battery on my mbp. Who knows.
And I agree it’s a moving target. I’m not even complaining about it , it’s just the way of things.
But the Mac Pro won't be able to compete with the 6080 at 16k gaming!!!!
I agree, we don't know enough. Is it expected to be 4 times faster in just gaming? Sorry, there are more uses to computers than just gaming. Sorry to break it to folks, but gaming performance isn't the be all end all.
That being said, my M1 Mac mini beats my RTX setup in terms of video editing due to me utilizing the ProRes codecs on the Mac side with Final Cut Pro. It greatly speeds up my editing and rendering times vs dealing with other types on the Windows side with Premiere Pro. So while my RTX is faster on paper, my Mac (which was about the price of the RTX alone due to the current prices) is faster in reality.
Mostly, yeah. At least in obvious troll threads like this one (of which they've started a few)
God. Clickbait.
I'll take my chances on it.
Are you the audience for the device? I asked a month ago and you are Radio Silent.
Yeah, I hurry up (usually automate) to relax sometimes too, but that's well defined tasks.
All problems expand to fill the available hardware. It's a truism.
There are limits to these things as well though. Nobody has an interest in moving video footage beyond 8K, and many are happy to stick with 4K or even Full HD. Single codebases rarely go beyond a couple million lines of code, architecture and team size starts imposing diminishing returns, making it much more efficient to write several interdependent programs.