I think the point is that an i7, even from ~15 years ago, is probably sufficient for most gaming needs, especially if the game is primarily GPU-bound.
As long as you give the older CPU enough RAM, an SSD, and a good GPU, it probably is sufficient unless your doing sim-heavy games where you want the simulation speed to be maxed out (e.g. HoI4 later years max speed simulation)
Meh - our dev machines are over-provisioned cloud pc's from MS, that run as fast a laptop from 2005. And I'm sure they are paying a premium for the privledge.
My 10 year old desktop sitting next to me is a lot faster, but alas, I can't BYOD.
Massive immigration would cause the system to completely collapse as imported people will not respect the local economy, culture, etc. in the same as natural citizens that originally built the nation. That's not xenophobic, just reality. Importing people means importing their culture, which might be incompatible with the state.
It's a reason they began to be called nation-states - states without a nation backing it tended to flop, and nation's without a state tended to slowly (or quickly) be absorbed into the dominant culture.
If I'm picking a stock to buy (in the "retail" market, it's primarily based on a balance of EPS, P/E ratio, and a low(er) amount of debt.
My P/E filter filters out the likes of Nvidia, Amazon, etc, whereas my debt filter ensures the smaller cap companies won't be swallowed by their debt like many businesses are.
The obvious brain-child of this concept is HP and their consumer inkjet printers. Originally, they sold their printers for "cheap" and then sold ink for a premium. However, as consumers realized any old printer ink works just as well as "HP"'s ink, they created DRM for ink-cartridges.
Now, you have to basically use their "Instant Ink" monthly service in order to print anything, based on my understanding. $6 for 50 pages a month: https://www.hp.com/us-en/print
(If you try using non-official cartridges, the printer may refuse to print entirely. If you cancel the sub, the printer will refuse to print until you renew or find DRM ink).
I don't see a price for the subscription yet, but it seems they are targeting 2030 for a subscription fee lock-in.
Intel did "Intel Upgrade Service", which locked already fabricated features on a CPU behind what is equivalent to today's same-day DLC - you paid more money, got a code, and it unlocked more cache and/or hyperthreading capabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service
The backlash in 2010 on Intel was probably severe enough to delay it significantly, but with many industries trying it out (Cameras, TV's, fridges, cars, etc.), consumers probably won't have many options left.
Which is probably a backwards anti-pattern companies have built.
Your most expensive engineer's time is most valuable, so if you give them standard issue which is half the speed, you are throttling the value you can get from your engineer. Not to mention the mental drain of your cursor barely being able to move due to all the bloated virtual networking systemization.
It would seem to make sense to give more valuable employees faster equipment, so that their time isn't spent toiling with the slow machine, but rather actually producing value.
Luckily we're not, because then your tip to a waiter/waitress would be dependent on their student loans remaining, especially considering how many expensive liberal arts majors struggle to find a sufficient career.
I see this said a lot, but Amazon products I buy actually work (even if the quality of obviously laughable - it actually performs the function and won't break any time soon to justify a 100x price increase for something more...artisan.
The only order I did for temu, everything arrived completely DOA
They'll do local LLMs you have to pay for. Best of both worlds: your LLM processing power will be locked behind a subscription.
You'll be coerced into a subscription to unlock the processing power you already have, and it'll only be usable by official Microsoft, etc implementations.
They get your money, get to control you, and best of all, they don't have to run it themselves in their data centers
I'll give 27B-MTP a try. I think I can tolerate 45 tps if the results are technically better. 35B is pretty good, but definitely shows it's inabilities at times (probably either due to the heavy caching quantization I'm doing, or the heavy model quantization vs what 2 GPUs could run).
My biggest gripe is that both pi and opencode seem to have trouble parsing the thinking blocks at times, and the model sometimes cuts-off mid-thinking or prints out weird character tokens at times. I don't know if that's because of llamacpp, pi/opencode, or qwen3.6, or some weird combination of them all, as I haven't investigated that problem fully yet.
Agreed. I have a single 9700 and I'm able to fit Q6 27B at 30tps or Q5 35B at 100tps very easily via llamacpp running vulkan.
The results are impressive considering the amount of people trashing AMD and still trying to recommend 3090s. I hope to buy a 2nd one at some point, but I also hate the version hell of vLLM, the R9700, the ROCM version, and Qwen3.6 all not agreeing with each other. I haven't gotten vLLM to run properly for Qwen3.6, since the version that runs on a 9700 doesn't support 3.6 yet.
I'm trying to quickly hack out a optimized path for just Qwen3.6 to run against rocm natively (e.g. my own inference server for 9700s basically) and see if it can perform better than llamacpp vulkan's results.
Word of caution - the last llamacpp with good performance was b9209 from a month ago. After that, for some reason, vulkan performance dropped by 10x, which has made me lose confidence in llamacpp in the long run.
Having said all that, 3x is 96GB for 4k and peak 900 watts. A 96GB Blackwell is $12k and peak 600 watss. And they will have a similar memory throughput (minor negative to the AMD cards for split processing). It's crazy how price efficient the r9700 is compared to the Nvidia cards.
The cheapest 3090s I could find with any sort of guarantee were pushing $1500.
An AMD AI Pro R9700 32GB brand new is $1350 right now.
After some tweaking, I had it running faster than the models the 3090 could run, and it could obviously run with higher context limits and bigger models due to the extra vram.
There will always be a competitor that can undercut the inference market. There is no "moat" given that you can self host decently capable LLM agents like Qwen3.6 on not super expensive hardware, like an AMD R9700, and still get competitive speeds to most cloud interfaces.
If you can self host it that easily, any Joe can scale it out much like shared web hosting, and shared web hosting or even dedicated rented boxes has always been cheaper than the big cloud providers.
I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic can reasonable compete in the long term if they can't achieve "AGI", and they won't, no matter what shareholders desire.
An R9700 is $1350 and can get 100 TPS running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Q5 with 130k context window (with room to spare) with a bit of fine tuning llamacpp-vulkan, but llamacpp's repository instability and lack of real versioning frustrates me.
In terms of electricity, if you aren't using it, even with all the vram loaded, at most your wasting about 30 watts or so.
Prompt processing a large uncached context is annoying, which is why I forced a lower context window, but I don't know if it's any worse in performance than the cloud models I've used.
There's a niceness, to me, knowing I don't have to rent it anymore. If you rent it, the terms can change regularly.
Eating out is there. Power Tools are there. Land is beyond that and Housing has been there for 6 years now.
I'm not surprised. The March of inflation has been a wreckening this decade.