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Avoid the Trash Heap: 15 Great Uses for an Old PC

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:51AM   
from the new-life dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/avoid-the-trash-heap-15-great-uses-for-an-old-pc

In 2019, after seven years of slumps, PC sales went up by the tiniest increment—0.3 percent. Demand then surged in recent weeks as people shifted to work-from-home setups due to COVID-19 quarantines. Which means some of you may be getting a new computer. But what do you do with the old PC?

You may be tempted to go the easy route and just junk it. But don't. If that laptop or desktop was created any time in the last decade, you'd be surprised by how much life you (or others) can get out of it. I'm not talking about limping along, but of ways to bring an old PC back to useful life.

[This editor can vouch for plenty of life in old boxes. For the past 4 years, a now-nearly-decade-year-old Core 2 Duo Laptop with 6 GB RAM has been my primary computer.--martyb]

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Original Submission

• Re:Not new... (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 01 2020, @01:14AM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday May 01 2020, @01:14AM (#988786) Journal

  The great stagnation of the mid-2010s is now over. Quad-core went from the premium $500 segment to the $100 landfill tier [anandtech.com]. Now 6-8 cores is emerging as a new minimum, 16 cores is "mainstream", and Zen 4 could deliver 24 cores as "mainstream" by 2022.

  The long stretch of Intel quad-cores and AMD Bulldozer garbage probably helped software and games to stagnate. With quad-cores, single-threaded performance is still king, and dual-cores needed to be accommodated. The shift to 8 cores and up makes multi-threading much more difficult to ignore.

  For gaming specifically, PC gaming is held back by the consoles as well as older systems. Now the next-gen consoles released this year will be packing 8 cores, 16 threads by default (and Zen 2, which is no slouch), as well as NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs (from HDDs, skipping SATA SSDs and NVMe PCIe 3.0 entirely). Quad-cores will begin to hold back gaming performance, and there's an argument to be made for 12-16 cores for at least game + background tasks. There have also been claims that the consoles could effectively have the performance of more than 8 cores due to dedicated hardware functions and the design:

  Microsoft: Xbox Series X Performance Is 25+ TFLOPs when Ray Tracing; I/O Rate Equal to 13 Zen 2 Cores [wccftech.com]

  DirectStorage is less latent and it saves a ton of CPU. With the best competitive solution, we found doing decompression software to match the SSD rate would have consumed three Zen 2 CPU cores. When you add in the IO CPU overhead, that's another two cores. So the resulting workload would have completely consumed five Zen 2 CPU cores when now it only takes a tenth of a CPU core. So in other words, to equal the performance of Xbox Series X at its full IO rate, you would need to build a PC with 13 Zen 2 cores. That's seven cores dedicated for the game: one for Windows and shell and five for the IO and decompression overhead.

  The claim for PS5 is more like 19 Zen 2 cores, due to even faster storage, dedicated audio chip, etc.:

  Inside PlayStation 5: the specs and the tech that deliver Sony's next-gen vision [eurogamer.net]

  The controller supports hardware decompression for the industry-standard ZLIB, but also the new Kraken format from RAD Game Tools, which offers an additional 10 per cent of compression efficiency. The bottom line? 5.5GBs of bandwidth translates into an effective eight or nine gigabytes per second fed into the system. "By the way, in terms of performance, that custom decompressor equates to nine of our Zen 2 cores, that's what it would take to decompress the Kraken stream with a conventional CPU," Cerny reveals.

  A dedicated DMA controller (equivalent to one or two Zen 2 cores in performance terms) directs data to where it needs to be, while two dedicated, custom processors handle I/O and memory mapping. On top of that, coherency engines operate as housekeepers of sorts.

  Apparently, Sony is trying to use the SSD as if it is a giant pool of DDR2 RAM.

  Understanding the PS5's SSD: A deep dive into next-gen storage tech [tweaktown.com]

  That leads into another point. The next-gen console chips are giant APUs/SoCs with the graphics performance of a high-end discrete GPU. Computing is probably going to move more towards chips like these in the near future.

  --
  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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