Two points to make:

1) per-byte accessing doesn't matter for secondary storage, because your filesystem is still going to want to write things in blocks. You'll still want to have logical chunks of data to have checksums for and such.

2) Modern SSDs already do the whole hybrid approach, mixing SLC and MLC/TLC. And I'm not talking enterprise drives, I'm talking the cheapest budget drives. Samsung, for example, calls this "TurboWrite", and they include it in their "EVO" drives, which are some of the lowest cost-per-gig drives on the market. They allocate a small portion of each TLC drive as SLC, and all the writes hit the SLC first. This provides both a nice speed boost (since SLC erases so much faster), and a nice reduction in write amplification (since SLC has an effectively unlimited lifespan from a practical standpoint).

So, replacing that SLC with RRAM would certainly provide a performance improvement, but it wouldn't be a huge difference.

10 years ago? Sure, that's in the ballpark of when consumer SSDs started to become a thing. Intel getting into the game 7 years ago blew it open, but they weren't the first. So ten years ago, you wouldn't have been crazy for following Moore's Law and making a prediction that flash-based storage arrays would eventually make sense.

In terms of legacy disks being as dead in 10 years as tape is today, there are a few problems with that. First is that tape isn't dead, it's still in widespread use in enterprise (it's still the best medium for corporate backups), and second is that there are enough new developments in the works for keep magnetic discs competitive with flash for years.

I'm not saying that it'll be the case forever, but saying that legacy HDDs will be dead in 10 years sounds like a radical prediction.

His original point is kind of solid, though. There was about the same amount of time, give or take a few months, between Windows XP and 8.1 as there was between Windows 2.1 and XP. Yes, windows TWO point one.

That's kind of my point, though. If people are skeptical that Tesla can hit $35k, then why would Chevy's $30k claims for the same range be any more believable?

The Tesla Model 3 is scheduled for release in 2017. The Chevrolet Bolt is scheduled for release in 2017. I'm not seeing the problem here, I'm comparing the projected costs of two 2017 models.

Tesla would seemingly need the battery cost reductions from their "GigaFactory" to get the cost of their 200-mile electric car down to $35,000, and Chevy is going to sell a 200-mile EV for $30,000 without those cost reductions?

Something's gotta give to pull that off.

Sure, but those are in higher end notebooks, and the market for those is probably smaller. I'd imagine the vast majority of notebooks sold are going to be cheaper ones that have a medium power chip of some kind, likely an i3. Then you'd have a bunch of utlrabooks and a bunch of high power ones, but not in remotely the same sort of quantity. Since the XPS 13 is an ultrabook, it's going to be strictly limited to the ultrabook (U-series) processors, for thermal reasons if nothing else, which is why your "call me when they have i7" comment doesn't really make sense in context.

The U-series processors come in 15W or 28W, and the XPS 13's i5-5200U is a 15W part. So it's *VERY* far away from being able to handle the TDP of a quad-core i7. The lowest power quad core chip is the fourth gen 37W i7 chips, so more than double the power and thermal requirements.

Only the U chips are out for 5th gen, so if we want to compare the fastest i5 (dual-core) with the lowest power quad-core i7, we need to look at those fourth gen 37W parts. In that case, we can see the i7-4712HQ is the fastest 37W i7, and the i5-4340M is the fastest 37W i5. The primary difference is the doubled number of cores (and cache), but the clockspeed suffers somewhat.

The i7 is looking at 2.3 to 3.3GHz, while the i5 is looking at 2.9 to 3.6GHz. The i5 also has a slightly faster GPU, 1.15GHz versus 1.25GHz. The i5 also has a few extra features, namely vPro and trusted execution. Most people won't care about those.

I'd argue that in most common scenarios, the i5 is going to be faster, because most things that the average user does is going to be limited by single-threaded performance... but some people do use applications that could take advantage of more than two cores. It'll be up to the use case.

Personally, I'm happy with an 11.5W or 15W chip in my system, because I'll take 15 hours of battery life in a system that's fast enough, versus the extra processing power that would be useless to me in a notebook. For me, the notebook is primarily for running a browser and remote desktop, and anything heavier than that is going to happen on my desktop. Perhaps even remotely, modern remote desktop provides a very close to native experience, even over LTE. For example, even full-screen video works fine over a cellular link, although I've noticed the audio is a tad delayed. It's a huge improvement over remote desktop even a few years ago.

I don't get it, wouldn't lower oil prices reduce demand for renewable energy, thus reducing investment?

Because I read the post too quickly and missed "used Dell Latitude", so my working assumption was a new laptop with a 2011 CPU, which was what confused me. Re-reading it now, I see that the laptop was stated to be used.

Intel's modern iGPUs are pretty good. Their high-end GPUs tend to compete in the x40 class of nVidia chips (meaning faster than the 830M), but their new generation of iGPUs may push that out the the x45 class.

The "discrete" versus "integrated" divide stopped making sense years ago. There's a lot of overlap between the mid to high range of iGPUs and the low to mid range of dGPUs.

Really, they're all just GPUs, and where the transistors are located in the notebook isn't relevant. Only the performance is. And Intel has made serious advancements with their iGPUs. For a while they were doubling in performance each generation, although that hasn't happened for a few years now.

Intel's i5-5200U is roughly the same performance as the AMD Radeon 7570M discrete GPU, which isn't bad for an iGPU, even if the 7570M is a tad out of date. The i5-5250U (same TDP) should have roughly double that performance.

Their GPUs are fine for what ultrabooks are intended for, and they offer massively better CPU performance and power consumption than AMD's APUs. About the only place that AMD's APUs make sense is if you have some scenario that benefits from a faster GPU but won't be bottlenecked by poor CPU performance.

Errm, was it used? The i5-2500 series is three generations out of date: they're four years old, from early 2011. It's surprising that you'd find that for sale a month ago.

Huh? The U-series i7 is a dual-core part, it has the same number of threads as the i5. That's always been the case, prior generations never had a quad-core U-series i7 either.

It's a regulatory requirement, not something the providers chose. Or even want. All of the IPTV providers but Bell are small companies who use Bell or Videotron's last mile at usurious costs, and they'd all much rather that you used their IPTV service with some other ISP, so that they could avoid those enormous costs. But they're not allowed to sell their IPTV service to anybody but their own Internet customers, hence the forced bundle. Their costs and motivations are radically different from incumbent providers, and opening up their television service to customers of other ISPs would also make it enormously easier for them to attract customers.

The cable company isn't really a monopoly when it comes to television service. Options are currently:

Videotron digital cable
Bell satellite TV
Bell IPTV
Vmedia IPTV
Zazeen IPTV
Colbanet IPTV

The IPTV providers are carrying traditional television broadcasts, although part of their broadcast license is the requirement to serve the content over a closed network, so in order to get their IPTV service you have to use them as your ISP. Still, lots of choice.