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Comment by jononor | Hacker News Reader

Price for compute is still going steadily down for web services. Which I think is more relevant than individual core/CPU performance. CPUs are still getting cheaper, blades are getting more compact. Virtualization, containers and function-as-a-service are improving utilization. Modern cloud service providers have massive economies of scale.

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Yep, we are seeing computers evolve from hybrid media consumption/creation/business tools into a bifurcated model where IaaS providers rent out the majority of the world's compute power, and average consumers own a (powerful) thin client for UI/display/consumption.

There will be still sizable markets (real-time industrial/automotive/medical/etc., gaming, some business apps) where individuals will still want to own and upgrade their own beefy on-prem hardware, but in the consumer realm I can't think of many new applications that have taxed my 2012 MBP, or even my older Dell/Win7 laptop. AWS/Azure/GCP shoulder the burden for me.

That only helps for embarrassingly parallel tasks, like rendering hundreds of distinct web pages per second (which in many cases might just as well have been partially precalculated to trade space for time).

As was pointed out in the chart, we’re already hitting Amdahl’s law with half a dozen cores.

I believe what you're seeing is market competition, not reduction in hardware costs.

The total cost to offer compute has actually gone up significantly over the last year or so due to memory prices shooting up. I believe the cost of processors has gone up too, but not as drastically.

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